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Malabar

Long Bay is reputed to have been the local Indigenous community’s principal camping/healing place between Sydney and Botany Bay. Malabar Headland is the site of a number of Aboriginal engravings. Historian Obed West claimed in 1882 that Aboriginal people referred to Long Bay as ‘Boora’ and that a rock overhang on the south side of Long Bay had been used as a shelter by Aboriginals suffering from a smallpox epidemic in the late 1700s.

In 1866 an attempt was made to create a village on Church and School Land at Long Bay when the surveyor general called for tenders for clearing timber and erecting posts for street names. This was followed by a sale of allotments in 1869. The suburb was proclaimed as the Village of Brand in 1899, though most people continued to refer to it as Long Bay. People were slow to take up residence in the area and it was not until the tram line was built to the Coast Hospital in 1901 that the suburb started to grow. By the early 1900s the village had two community halls; Anderson’s Hall and Picnic Grounds on the corner of Victoria and Napier Streets and Dudley’s Hall which provided a home for the school until Long Bay Public School opened in 1909.

During 1910-1920 a number of entrepreneurs bought cheap land at Long Bay and erected tents and huts as accommodation for visitors who flocked to the beach there at weekends. Residents complained about unsanitary conditions and the effect of these holiday camps on land values. During this period there were also a number of more permanent residents living in shacks in the sand dunes behind Long Bay, forced into these living conditions by a housing shortage in inner city Sydney.

Construction of the State Reformatory for Women began in 1902 on a 70 acre site south of the village. This was officially opened in August 1909, followed by the opening of the State Penitentiary for Men in 1914.

The Long Bay Life Saving and Amateur Swimming Club was formed at the end of World War I, meeting at the ambulance building on Bay Parade before a clubhouse was built in 1922. In 1916 the Ocean Outfall was constructed on Malabar Headland and by 1959 increasing sewage discharge had severely affected water quality at Long Bay. A number of club members left to found a new club at South Maroubra and by 1973 the Malabar club had to be disbanded. The commencement of the Deep Water Sewer Outfall in the 1990s saw some improvement in water quality, but the clubhouse was demolished in the same decade after suffering severe water damage.

On 2 April 1931 the MV Malabar was wrecked in thick fog on rocks at Miranda Point on the northern headland of Long Bay. The village of Long Bay was renamed Malabar, after the wreck, in 1933. Another shipwreck occurred on 29 May, 1955, when the fishing trawler Goolgwai ran aground in thick fog and heavy seas at North Point. During World War One, land at Malabar Headland was used for musketry practice. In World War Two, the headland became the site of the Malabar Battery, in operation from 1942-45. This comprised of two gun emplacements, tunnels, a railway line and a command post. These structures are still in existence, though are in poor condition.

In 1950 golfers formed the Civic Golf Club and laid out the first stage of an 18 hole golf course on the cliff top between Long Bay and Little Bay. This became the Randwick Golf Club in 1960.