Qualla: Manly, New South Wales

Manly, New South Wales: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit compiled by Percy W. Gledhill, Public domain. It got its name from a compliment. In January 1788, Governor Arthur Phillip rowed into a cove on the northern side of the harbour and met members of the Kay-ye-my clan, Dharug-speaking Gayemaygal people who had lived along these shores for thousands of years. Something in their bearing struck him. Their "confidence and manly behaviour," he wrote, made him call the place Manly Cove. The name stuck to the whole peninsula that grew up around it: a strip of land with the open Pacific on one side and the sheltered harbour on the other, seventeen kilometres from the city centre and, by the reckoning of a long-ago ferry advertisement, a thousand miles from care.

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Image: compiled by Percy W. Gledhill | Public domain

Manly, New South Wales: A Spear and a Restraint

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sardaka, CC BY-SA 4.0. The friendly naming was not the whole story of contact here. The harbour mouth was the scene of some of the earliest and most fraught meetings between the Gayemaygal and the British. In 1790, on a beach near Manly, Phillip himself was speared through the shoulder by a man named W...

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Image: Sardaka | CC BY-SA 4.0

Manly, New South Wales: A Thousand Miles from Care

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adam.J.W.C., CC BY-SA 3.0. Manly became a resort almost by design. In the 1850s an Englishman named Henry Gilbert Smith bought up land and set about turning the peninsula into a seaside escape, building a wharf in 1855 and running steamers to carry day-trippers across the harbour. The ferries became the li...

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Image: Adam.J.W.C. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Manly, New South Wales: The Man Who Swam at Noon

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vrweare, CC BY-SA 4.0. Manly helped overturn one of colonial Australia's odder laws. In the early 1900s, swimming at the beach in daylight was forbidden as indecent. In October 1902, a local newspaperman named William Gocher decided to test it. He announced in print that he would bathe at midday, then ...

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Image: Vrweare | CC BY-SA 4.0

Manly, New South Wales: First Films and Famous Faces

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hpeterswald, CC BY-SA 3.0. For a small suburb, Manly has left an outsized mark on the screen. In 1896, the very first film made in Australia was shot at the Manly wharf: Marius Sestier's short of passengers stepping off the ferry Brighton, which premiered later that year at Australia's first cinema. No cop...

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Image: Hpeterswald | CC BY-SA 3.0

Manly, New South Wales: Surf Town

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Ling from NSW, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Above all, Manly is about water. The ocean beach runs in a long unbroken stretch from Queenscliff through North Steyne to South Steyne, giving way to the rock pools of Fairy Bower and the calm of Shelly Beach, while a string of quieter harbour beaches hides along the peninsula's ...

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Image: Richard Ling from NSW, Australia | CC BY-SA 2.0