Captain James Cook would have been the first white man to overlook Wollongong in favour of Sydney.
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In April 1770 Cook was in the Endeavour, cruising up the coast looking for a place to make land so he could "discover" Australia. On the afternoon of April 28 the Endeavour anchored off the Wollongong coast near a place now known as Woonona.
A small boat was dispatched to the shore to suss things out. But the surf was too rough, so Cook thought "bugger this, let's go up the coast for a bit". And the very next day he landed in Sydney's Botany Bay.
And so began the habit of people overlooking Wollongong for the big smoke around 80 kilometres up the road.
Over time that would be accompanied by negative images of the city of Wollongong. If you're not from here, for a long time it was likely the only thing you heard about Wollongong was something bad.
For years it wore the tag of an industrial steel town. Then, when the steelworks slashed the workforce in the early 1980s, it became the depressed steel town.
Or maybe it's the story of the corrupt council, where a town planner slept with developers and approved their buildings, where some people sat outside a kebab shop on plastic seating they dubbed the Table of Knowledge and felt like kings of the city.
It's an attitude that is slowly shifting as Sydney becomes more crowded and people look to find a cheaper place to live.
And so they look to Wollongong and all that it has to offer - including entertainment and lifestyle.
The Illawarra's northern suburbs has long been a draw for the artistic type. Dancing was a big part of life in the northern suburbs just after World War I.
A beachside facility dubiously dubbed the Thirroul Pleasure Grounds included what was tagged as an open-air dancing arena.
The grand opening of the venue saw a range of activities that causes one to consider people back then had a curious idea of pleasure.
Among the attractions that night was a performing baboon ("the only one of its kind in Australia"), an "educated donkey", a talking parrot and a dog that could do tricks.
Even after the baboon left, the dancing arena was very popular with the locals through to the mid-1920s. From there attendances tapered off until in 1926 it was destroyed by fire.
In May 1922 English author DH Lawrence, just before he made his name with Sons and Lovers, and wife Frieda stepped off the Sydney train at Thirroul station.
Lawrence was there to work. In six weeks at a Craig Street house overlooking the ocean he cranked out the novel Kangaroo, in which Thirroul features, albeit under the guise of a town called Mullumbimby.
Painters too have found inspiration up north, including Brett Whiteley. The artist, who used the northern suburbs coastline in his paintings - though rarely indicated in the works' names - would stay at the local motel in Thirroul to both work and detox from heroin. In 1992, the motel owner entered Room 4 and found Whiteley dead of a coronary embolism, likely brought on by the detox cocktail of methadone, whisky and juice.
More recently the north has been home to musicians like Rob Younger from Radio Birdman, Jodi Phillis of The Clouds and Midnight Oil songwriter Jim Moginie.
While Wollongong's southern suburbs lack such celebrity residents, the area does have its own notable musical past. Lake Illawarra has contributed a few footnotes to the musical history of the Illawarra.
In the 1920s and 1930s, dressed-up locals and people from the northern suburbs boarded boats and sailed to Gooseberry Island, just over 400 metres offshore, where someone had constructed a dance hall.
Dancers would take a keg of beer over and the party would often not end until the sun rose the following day.
More recently, starting in 1987, the lake was home to the "floating restaurant" known as the Merinda. It plied its trade along Lake Illawarra, booking local musicians for the night-time dinner cruises.
From the time of the 1950s, Wollongong began growing a music scene, and the book Lull City is a story of that growth, focusing on four golden ages.
The most recent of those - which we're still enjoying - was sparked by a combination of people from the northern and southern ends of Wollongong.
It's also a story of the changing face of the city, which undeniably played its own part in this golden period.
It's a period where bands went from hiding their Wollongong roots to proudly staying put and letting the world know where they were.
The first golden age kicked off at the tail end of the 1950s, when teens were inspired by this glorious sound known as rock and roll to start their own bands.
The second era took hold in Wollongong as the calendars turned to 1980 and some sections of the city embraced the DIY attitude of punk - and not just the music. It sparked art, movies and a well-organised protest movement designed to help the young unemployed in a city that sometimes felt hollowed out.
The third is of course the Oxford era, the period in the city's musical history that has received the most attention. Its heyday was from 1989 to the turn of the century.
The Oxford - along with the opening of the city's first independent music store in Redback Records - sparked a growth in bands and led to others being inspired to create all-ages venues and street press.
By the 2000s, the Oxford had begun to slide, as did the music scene. Other venues that had been there in the 1990s - like The North Gong and Sunami - either closed or ditched the idea of local bands. A city council crackdown on gig posters wrapped around light poles didn't help.
That just left the Oxford, which had an impact on the music scene, as bands no longer needed to compete for crowds. The Oxford was the only gig in town.
As an arbitrary starting point for this latest golden age, well, 2014 works. That was the year Jeb Taylor from Music Farmers and Yours and Owls' Ben Tillman - both from the far north - joined forces to create the Farmer and the Owl label, releasing Hockey Dad's first recording, the Dreamin' EP.
Of course, all three had been around for a while - Taylor had been working in the music industry since at least 1999. Tillman was one-third of Yours and Owls, which started as a café in 2010, but he had been booking shows for a year or two before that.
As for Hockey Dad - who proudly called Windang home - well they'd been around for a whole year by that point but Zach Stephenson and Billy Fleming had spent a few years in the band Abstract Classic.
That label would sign up Wollongong artists, including Bec Sandridge, Totally Unicorn and The Pinheads, as well as re-releasing old albums from the likes of local acts Tumbleweed and Mother and Son.
In time it branched out to sign bands from out of Wollongong - both within Australia and internationally.
Lull City is available at Music Farmers and online via www.lastdayofschool.net
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