Qualla: Bellingen, New South Wales

Bellingen, New South Wales: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vanbasten 23, CC BY-SA 3.0. The town and its river do not quite agree on how to spell themselves, and the reason is a single careless stroke of a draughtsman's pen. The Gumbaynggirr people called the waterway Billingen. When the surveyor Clement Hodgkinson wrote the name down in the 1840s, it became Bellingen, and that is the name the town still wears. But somewhere in a colonial drawing office, a clerk copying the map mistook Hodgkinson's final "n" for an "r," and so the river became, and remains, the Bellinger. One valley, two spellings, divided forever by a slip of the hand.

Image: Vanbasten 23 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bellingen, New South Wales: Country and Cedar

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vanbasten 23, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before any of that, the Bellinger Valley was Gumbaynggirr country, lived in and cared for across countless generations. The first European through was the stockman William Myles in 1840, hunting new pasture north of the Macleay; he returned the next year with Hodgkinson, who...

Image: Vanbasten 23 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bellingen, New South Wales: Heritage on Hyde Street

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cgoodwin, CC BY-SA 3.0. What the cedar money built still gives Bellingen its grace. The main street is a parade of timber and brick from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, deep verandahs throwing shade over the footpath, a working country town that somehow kept its good bones. The settin...

Image: Cgoodwin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bellingen, New South Wales: The Alternative Valley

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vanbasten 23, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sometime after the timber ran down, Bellingen became something else entirely: a haven for artists, musicians and seekers, a byword for the alternative life on the Mid North Coast. The Bellingen Community Market has run monthly for more than forty years, drawing over two hundred s...

Image: Vanbasten 23 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bellingen, New South Wales: A Town on the Page and Screen

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cgoodwin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bellingen has a way of catching the imagination of writers and filmmakers. Peter Carey set his Booker Prize-winning novel Oscar and Lucinda notionally here. The 2003 comedy Danny Deckchair was shot in the town. Most poignantly, it was chosen to stand in for the world of Murray Ba...

Image: Cgoodwin | CC BY-SA 3.0