Urunga

Postcode: 2455

Urunga is a small town on in the Mid North Coast region of New South Wales, Australia, in Bellingen Shire Council. At the 2006 census, Urunga had a population of 1,919. The town is south of Coffs Harbour and Sawtell and north of Nambucca Heads.

In this quaint seaside suburb there are two main streets, and both a bowlingclub and a golf club. A weekly 6-a-side soccer competition is held on Thursdays at the Oval.

One of Urunga's advantages is that it is by passed by the Pacific Highway. To get to the town the visitor has to leave the Pacific Highway, cross the railway line, and wind down into a town which doesn't seem to have an obvious centre.

There's lots of evidence that in the 1950s it was a fibro town of holiday homes and fishermen's houses. Slowly those fibro dwellings have been turned into brick veneer project homes so that the town has a new, clean, rather well­heeled feel about it.

In spite of its consciously low profile, Urunga is the largest town in the Bellingen Shire.

Before European settlement the Urunga area was inhabited by the Kumbangerie (sometimes written 'Gumbaynggir) Aborigines who moved around an area which was bounded by Woolgoolga in the north, Dorrigo to the west and Nambucca Heads to the south. There is considerable evidence of massacres and maltreatment of the local Aborigines during the 19th century. The last known full blood, named Black Jimmy by the settlers, died at Bellingen in 1922.

In 1841 William Miles, a stockman from Kempsey, was the first European to enter the Bellinger Valley. He recognised the rich potential of the cedar which abounded in the area. The following year the Northumberland crossed the bar at the site of modern day Urunga. It heralded a 'tree rush' with cedar cutters moving into the area, cutting the trees and waiting for the floods to move the trunks down to the river mouth. The cutters were followed by farmers who, recognising the rich potential of the river valley's alluvial soils, grew maize and grazed dairy cattle.

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