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People

South Sea Islanders on the Tweed

The agricultural history of the Tweed, particularly sugar cane, is entwined with the story of the South Sea Islander community who found a home in the Tweed Shire.

Family stories

European settlement of the Tweed Valley commenced in the 1840s with the arrival of the cedar getters. Read some of the family stories.

Billy Moore

Billy Moore was a full-blood Aboriginal man of the Tul-gi-gin clan, a Tweed sub-group of the greater regional Bundjalung/Yugambeh people.

Cedric Popkin and the Red Baron

The most famous flying ace of World War One, Cavalry Captain Baron Manfred von Richthofen (The Red Baron), was shot down and killed on 21 April 1918.

Faith Mussing was born at Tumbulgum in 1919, one of eight children. Her father, Peter, had been kidnapped from Ambryn, an island in what was known as the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and brought to Queensland to work on sugar plantations.

Margaret Kay

Margaret Kay was born in the Northern Rivers but sent to a welfare home around 1915. She joined local history groups in the Tweed. She became known as a keeper of Aboriginal artifacts and eventually opened her own museum in the front of her home.

Neville Bonner

Neville Bonner was born on Ukerebagh Island in the Tweed River in 1922. His early life was hard, with no opportunity for formal education. In 1971 he became Australia’s first Aboriginal senator and was re-elected in 1972, 1974, 1975 and 1980.

Photographers of the Tweed

Some renowned photographers of the Tweed from the early 1900s included Angus McNeil, W J Hannah, Frederick Hobbs and Douglas Solomons.