These sound like wonderful years and the best thing is that Narooma hasn’t changed that much for our kids growing up here these days.

Sadly Geoff tells us he has only been back to Narooma twice since 1959, having lived in northern NSW and Queensland until six years ago when he retired from a successful architectural practice on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland to live permanently in south Thailand.

He also included an image of his childhood home taken from Google Earth about four years ago - the house is still pretty much as his parents built it.

“I guess we really lived in Field Street but that was just a dirt track then, and Riverside Drive sounded much more romantic!”

Now here are his memories from those wonderful and special years:

MEMORIES OF NAROOMA 1949-1959

I spent my first 10 years in Narooma, from 1949 till 1959, living in a house that my parents built with a War Service loan, in Riverside Drive.

This house probably still exists in more or less its original form. We had a milko and a dunny collector and a big mulberry tree in the chook yard.

Dinner was often blackfish or leather jacket caught by us kids fresh off the jetties in Forsters Bay, or flathead caught along the sand flats.

King tides were very exciting because water lapped into our front yard. Mystery Bay yielded pippies, which as soup became a staple part of our diet, along with field blackberries and quince jelly made by my mum from fruit gathered from an old tree in Tilba.

Almost all of our food came from the river or the garden. Montague Island was like a foreign country.

An old guy called Toby had the oyster leases opposite our house. Fosters Bay was a huge part of our daily life, especially chasing small toad fish hiding under a thin layer of sand.

My father Ern Young, the town’s amateur sign writer, painted the first official town map, which was displayed next to what is now the Narooma Kinema, known then as the Soldiers Memorial School of Arts Hall. This building was the venue for Narooma Public School shows and school kid vaccinations.

We walked to school every day, across the showgrounds and up the Montague Street hill. School work was written in ink mixed from powder by students.

We learned to swim in the original public baths located in a fenced off area near the mouth of the Narooma River inlet.

Later Mr Ted Street of ice cream fame donated money to help build a proper public pool to the town, but only after our family left Narooma to improve education prospects for us children. My older brother did not like having to board at Bega High School, far from home.

The nearest hospital was in Bega, the nearest dentist in Moruya. There was one motel, The Tree, which I believe still exists. 

It was a wonderful place to grow up in, and I thank my parents for having the initiative to provide a home for us in such a wonderful spot. My love of living near the water endures to this day because of Riverside Drive and Narooma.