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Kate McIlwain

She was 15 when she made the news during the Queen's first visit to the city

Vale Margaret Tougher, Wollongong schoolgirl with the blow-away hat

UOW researcher Kiarn Roughley is this year's Cancer Council Relay For Life Illawara ambassador. Picture by Sylvia Liber

'I borrowed a textbook from one of my oncologists, and that opened the doors.'

The young Illawarra researcher hoping to inspire others who have cancer

Nadine Morton

The Illawarra Police Charity Ball returned after three years. Picture by Anna Warr

1687B2F4-D71C5A091CC5.jpg

NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb's connection to the Illawarra.

Glitz and glamour as Illawarra Police Charity Ball returns to region

Joel Ehsman

Top: One Facebook user was driven "crazy" by Poppy the Parrot. Bottom Left: Poppy with saviour Mark and his son. Bottom Right: Poppy in all her glory. Pictures supplied

Poppy the parrot was missing for nearly two whole days.

'Driving me crazy': Weird noise that helped track down missing Warilla parrot

Two men are accused of involvement in a drug supply racket run from Villawood Detention Centre. Photo: HANDOUT/NSW POLICE

Police allege an immigration detainee used an encrypted messaging service to deal drugs and co-ordinate a network of runners outside the facility.

Immigration detainee charged over alleged drug ring

It may no longer be king but experts say cash is still in the royal family of payments. Photo: Alan Porritt/AAP PHOTOS

The CrowdStrike outage exposed vulnerabilities in digital payment systems and shows Australia is decades away from a completely cashless society, experts say.

Has the latest IT outage quietly slowed the cash crash?

Xavier and Macey Guevara are getting into the Olympic spirit. Picture by Sylvia Liber

It's hard to miss the Mount Pleasant house adorned with flags.

The Mount Pleasant siblings repping the Olympics - 17,000km away from Paris

A global nickel glut and stubbornly low prices have forced BHP to suspend plans and operations. Photo: Marion Rae/AAP PHOTOS

An off-grid plan to transform one of the world's most energy-intensive industries is a casualty of BHP's decision to mothball its Australian nickel operations.

World's biggest renewable energy micro-grid suspended

Dr Hessom Razavi is keenly attuned to how the eye health of refugees can fall by the wayside. Photo: HANDOUT/LIONS EYE INSTITUTE

Newly arrived refugees have higher rates of eye problems than most Australians but a free service is restoring vision for those losing it.

Seeing clearly: 20/20 vision restored for refugees

Greyhounds as Pets' 2024 the Winter Adoption Day will be at Gough Whitlam Park in Earlwood on August 18. Picture supplied

Winter the perfect time for a new family member

Greyhound racing news from around the NSW regions | July 27

News

FLICK THROUGH THE GALLERY ABOVE for a look back at the strange and grisly finds along the Illawarra coast over the years. 15 times Armageddon came to Wollongong: photos 39 times we spotted celebrities on the South Coast: photos South Coast like you’ve never seen it before: photos

Arlena Mackenzie watches a phosphorous algae glow blue in the waves off Thirroul Beach in 2014.

A couple watches a phosphorous algae glow blue in the waves off Thirroul Beach. 

A man watches a phosphorous algae glow blue in the waves off Thirroul Beach in 2014.

East coast low: An animal skull washed up at McCauleys Beach in early June as high tides combined with large seas to batter the coast.

An Army bomb disposal unit was called to Kiama in 2009 after a piece of unexploded ordnance was found on Easts Beach. The marine marker, which was filled with phosphorous, had washed up on the north end of the beach the day before.


A drone also appeared on McCauleys Beach in the days after the monster storm hit the Illawarra in early June.

Two highly venomous sea snakes found washed up on Congo Beach, south of Moruya, in January were returned to the ocean by a brave passerby. It is believed turbulent weather conditions along the South Coast caused the pair of yellow-bellied sea snakes to become stranded. The tropical ocean serpents breed in warm waters and are helpless on land. Photo: Wandiyali Images

Brock Goroch holds the body of a weedy sea dragon - a relative of the seahorse - found by his grandmother Marie Northey while walking along Warilla Beach in 2012. Director of the Shoalhaven Marine and Freshwater Centre at the University of Wollongong Dr Pia Winberg said the weedy sea dragon was a spectacular part of Illawarra marine life.

One of the beautiful but deadly blue dragon sea slugs found on Narooma Surf Beach. It is thought to be Glaucus marginatus, which has a shorter and stubbier tail than its relative Glaucus atlanticus.

A rotting whale carcass drifted onto the rocky shoreline at Sandon Point in September 2010. Wendy McFarlane from whale rescue and conservation group ORCCA said the male whale appeared to have been hit by a ship then had its tail bitten off by sharks.

Believed to weigh 30 to 40 tonnes, it washed onto a rock platform, and thousands of Illawarra residents flocked to Sandon Point to cast an awestruck eye over the young adult male humpback.

ORCCA volunteers were stationed around the animal's body to guide onlookers away from piles of entrails disguised amid rocks. Some couldn't help getting up close and personal, disobeying orders not to touch the decaying beast.

Bulli woman Gina Holland stood well back from the animal when she inspected the 10m creature, but admitted it was her third venture down to the beach to see it. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing," she said. "It's good that the ORCCA people are here to answer questions and educate people."

The 10m animal was buried at a Wollongong council landfill site, but not before an arduous mission to drag the animal off a rock platform and carve it into two 15 tonne chunks. It was a less than dignified end for a graceful ocean giant, but the council's environmental projects co-ordinator Mike McKeon said there were no alternatives. "It couldn't have found a worse spot to beach itself," he said.

A rare turtle, a native of the tropics, was a long way from home when it was found struggling in the surf at a Port Kembla Beach in 2009.

Lifeguard Michael Scerri said he spotted the 80cm-long turtle, nicknamed PK after Port Kembla, about 10am. "At first I thought it was a little whale, it was just getting rolled around by the surf," he said. He went to inspect with the intention of guiding the creature back out to sea, but discovered it was an injured sea turtle with a large cut on its front left flipper.

He called Australian Seabird Rescue co-ordinator Rhonda Sikk who advised him to keep the turtle wet until she and husband Bill arrived. "So I put him on the back of the quad bike with the help of another dude and placed him in a pool of salt water created by the high tide," Mr Scerri said.


Deciding PK needed urgent veterinary attention, the Sikks loaded it onto the back seat of their Ford sedan and delivered it to Warrawong vet Colin Pinney. Mr Pinney said PK's injured flipper was an old injury that had mended and, aside from possible dehydration, it was healthy enough to make the journey to the National Parks and Wildlife depot at Mt Keira.

Upon arrival NPWS officers swung into action, lining the back of a ute with a geotextile fabric that would cushion PK's journey to Sydney's Taronga Park Zoo. Covered in barnacles and longhorn pipis, and occasionally lifting its head to check out the fuss, PK hit the road about 1.30pm.

Outdated maps and a navigational error led a Melbourne man to run aground at Stanwell Park Beach in 2014. 

The two-tonne vessel was dragged 300 metres up Stanwell Park Beach by an excavator, before being loaded onto the truck by a crane for transport to a Port Kembla yard.

Thirty hours after his 22-foot yacht ran aground on Stanwell Park Beach, it began the second leg of its fateful voyage on the back of a truck.

The operation, co-ordinated by NSW Maritime, was expected to cost the yacht owner between $8000 and $10,000.

Daniel Roach and Matthew Hobson, of Helensburgh, inspect their grisly find, a large stingray which appears to have been killed by a shark. The men found the stingray 50m out from Bulli's rock pool in 2009 and said they had never found anything like it before.  

French sailor Jean Luc van den Heede ran aground near Wollongong, just 50 nautical miles from the Sydney finish, in the second leg of the round-the-world yacht race in 1994. His future in the race hung in the balance last night after his damaged 20-metre yawl Vendee Entreprises was towed off Port Kembla beach two hours later. He had been stuck on a sand bank about 300 metres from the shore.


It was the boat named Hammer’n that certainly copped a hammering, as it broke free from its moorings and was washed out of Wollongong Harbour onto Brighton Beach in the weekend’s storms in June this year. Photo: Carolyn Hitchcock


Salvage efforts for the 14-tonne vessel closed Cliff Road for hours, as contractors – led by Southern Commercial Divers – worked to lift it off the beach with a 350 tonne crane and load it onto a semi-trailer.

Illawarra beaches were forced to close in October 2009 as dangerously sharp debris from the Toothbrush Island yachting disaster washed up on shore, posing a threat to swimmers. Much of the splintered, carbon fibre hull from the ill-fated racing yacht Shockwave V was swept onto beaches, fanned by a strong southerly swell. 

Wreckage had been found washed ashore since the yacht collided with the northern tip of Toothbrush Island in the early hours of October 10, 2009. The yacht's skipper Andrew Short and navigator Sally Gordon died and 16 crew members had to be rescued after their multimillion-dollar maxi yacht ran aground.

As pieces of Shockwave V continued to wash up on Illawarra beaches in 2010, insurer ClubMarine announced the vessel would not be salvaged. Dive expert Bernard Connolly said little remained of the wreck that made headlines throughout the world, much of it having been broken up in rough seas and dispersed by the tide. The bow was found on MM Beach at Port Kembla after storms and heavy surf. 

In 1968, six Wombarra lads landed an eight-foot fish at Scarborough Beach, not even using a line. Jim Oliver, Gary Brooks, James Thomas, Gary Taylor, Jack Forbes and Mick Burns found the eel-like fish tangled in seaweed on the beach.

Scarborough catch: Reunited with another species of the deep in 2003 were Jim Oliver, Tom Brooks, James Thomas, Gary Taylor, and Jack Forbes, missing from the original was Mick Burns.  

In 2014 the wild seas shed light on a strange animal - and its bizarre group mating habits. It was a free-living, free-loving, colourful swinger called the sea hare. A Mercury reader photographed these molluscs, believed to be sea hares, on Little Austinmer Beach. She said there were at least 200 of them there, ranging in size from 2cm to about 15cm.

University of Wollongong marine biology lecturer Marian Wong said the sea hare was similar to other gastropods such as land snails and slugs. But in evolutionary changes over the years they had shed their shells, developed bright colours which warn off predators, and found a remarkable way to breed - the underwater love chain.

"They're quite unique amongst the molluscs as they've actually lost the shell . . . and they've adopted this more free-living lifestyle," Dr Wong said. They can have both male and female sex organs, and use both at the same time with multiple partners. So they form chains of simultaneous sex, which can produce thousands of eggs. "They can reproduce as either males or females. There are no restrictions on who they can mate with," Dr Wong said.

A black marlin measuring nearly 2.5m washed up on North Wollongong Beach in 2004. Julie Boskovska and Nick Marsden were among walkers who stumbled across the whopping fish. As black marlin are usually found in tropical waters, the fish could have been washed down in the current from breeding grounds near Cairns, or picked up on a trawler in the mid-Pacific. 

Susie Crick, branch president for the South Coast surfriders, was up in arms about hard mystery blue plastic stick-like debris that was regularly washing up on Coledale Beach in 2014.

Holiday-makers gathered to get a rare look at a humpback whale found dead at Shoalhaven Heads in October 2003. The 12m long male probably suffered massive injuries when hit by a ship's propeller.

Even inanimate the young humpback was a sight to behold - its glossy black skin was covered in living barnacles and its distinctively long pectoral fins were splayed gracefully across the sand.

Lindsay Smith with Tilly the loggerhead sea turtle, who washed up on Corrimal Beach in June 2008.

A dead seal was discovered washed up on Werri Beach in February 2011, for the second time in a week. Kiama council officers were called to the scene and arranged for the burial of the animal. Mr Adcock said it was highly unusual for one, let alone two seals, to be washed up on local beaches, but they provided no cause for concern among residents.

Jellyfish land on Austinmer Beach in January.

Participants in January's jellyfish invasion were captured for a spot of poking at Austinmer Beach.

A resident and her dog walk past a dead shark on Port Kembla Beach in January 2009.

A television set washes up amid the debris in Fairy Creek, carried by swollen floodwaters  in 2010.

Lake Illawarra's blocked entrance was blamed for the death of about a dozen adult long-finned and short-finned eels in 2003. Save the Lake Action Group chairman Bob Parsons said he thought the eels might have sensed the ocean and tried to get across the sand. 


Gerroa's Forrest Ladkin inspects the carcass of a whale washed to shore at Gerringong after becoming entangled in rope in 2011.

Seaweed blankets Little Austinmer Beach in August 2014. 

Bluebottles cover the shore at Shellharbour South Beach in September 2014.

Ashton Moran was playing on the water's edge at The Farm beach at Killalea in February while his brother Riley (right) had a surf lesson, when he unknowingly scooped up a blue-ringed octopus. 


Steven the stingray makes his presence known at Coledale Beach in 2000.

Unexplained: Alan Edwards of Woonona and his dog, Pip, with some of the dead leatherjackets.  2010

A rare and endangered hawksbill turtle was rescued south of Narooma after wild weather in August last year. Stewart Bayley from Mystery Bay was taking his dog for a walk along the beach after three days of torrential rain and wild seas.

Lachlan Pritchard from Australian Seabird Rescue observe an injured leopard seal that came ashore by Bellambi boat ramp in 2010. The seal had a circular wound to its head thought to be from an attack by a cookiecutter shark. Rescue volunteers hoped the seal would regain its strength by resting on the beach overnight.  

Residents were warned to avoid contact with canisters, containing toxic substances harmful to humans, which washed up in Jervis Bay last year. The canisters contain a rat poison known as ‘aluminium phosphide’.

A pumpkin finds its way to shore near Puckeys after heavy rain in the Illawarra in 2004.

Rescue volunteer Fernando Ordonez's VW Caravelle became something of a tourist attraction after it was washed down Fairy Creek from Montague St to the beach at North Wollongong. Phil Power and Dicko Thomas took it for a ride.Fernando Ordonez's VW van attracted the attention of Phil Power and Dick Thomas when it was on North Beach after the August 17 floods.  


Residents pick their way through the mountains of rubbish at North Beach washed down by the floodwaters in 1998.

Heavy downpour turned North Beach into a fossicker's feast in 2004.

Beachgoers noticed a preponderance of pumice on the Far South Coast in 2014. From Narooma to Bermagui to Tathra, locals and visitors were wondering where all the very light, volcanic rock had come from. Queensland University of Technology researcher Scott Bryan narrowed down the source to the Havre Seamount that erupted, spewing out a huge volume amount of lava, creating a raft of porous volcanic rock estimated to be more than 20,000sq km in size.   

Dr Scott Brown with the monster found dead off the South Coast in 1999.

<b>FLICK THROUGH THE GALLERY ABOVE</b> for a look back at the strange and grisly finds along the Illawarra coast over the years.

<a href="http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/3962154/15-times-armageddon-came-to-wollongong-photos/">15 times Armageddon came to Wollongong: photos</a>

<a href="http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/3732769/39-times-we-spotted-celebrities-on-the-south-coast-photos/">39 times we spotted celebrities on the South Coast: photos</a>

<a href="http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/3855850/south-coast-like-youve-never-seen-it-before/">South Coast like you’ve never seen it before: photos</a>