By Tamara Hynd, Curator, Shellharbour City Museum
The Ocean Beach Hotel is a landmark in Shellharbour. Beer has been served there for 95 years, and there aren’t many people alive today who remember a time before the hotel's existence.
The hotel’s construction in 1929 must have made quite a change to the sleepy appearance of the seaside village that had been scattered with timber and stone cottages since the 1840s. Who would have thought to build such a grand two-story hotel in a small town like Shellharbour in those days?
The site on which the hotel was later built was, from the earliest days of European settlement here in the 1830s-1840s, home of the local harbour master. Presumably built by the first Harbour Master William Wilson, the slab cottage faced the harbour providing a full view of all goings-on. Captain Bursill and his family later lived here, operating a two-story guesthouse, ‘Seaside’ , on the same block. Lamps were kept lit on the breakwater at night, to guide ships entering the harbour. With the coming of the railway in 1895, shipping operations slowed and major businesses in the municipality moved to Albion Park.
Shellharbour was always a popular tourist spot, even since the late 1800s when travellers and holiday-makers camped on the foreshore, fished, swam and enjoyed the natural beauty of the coastal town. Rock baths were constructed in 1895, with strict regulations allowing women to bath for two hours in the morning and afternoon, and men before 7am and after 5pm. The hours in between were regulated by a system of flags showing which sex could bathe at the time.
Some 20 years later a visionary, Henrietta Bush, cashed in on this tourist trade.
She was born Henrietta Lewis in Kendal, England in 1878. In 1885, when she was seven years old, she arrived in Sydney aboard the Bombay with her parents, Henry and Marianne, and her two brothers, William and Archer. Henry was a builder and joiner, responsible for building the Kensington Racecourse. He was foreman of works during the construction of the Bank of Australia in Sydney. The Lewis family lived at Walcha and Murwillumbah.
Henrietta studied nursing and travelled to Fiji in that capacity when she was about 18. She married Captain Edward Puttman around the same time. He captained the Minnie Hare around the Fijian Islands and was well known and respected throughout all the ports. In 1898, just three weeks after their daughter Alice was born, Edward suffered a heart attack and died.
Henrietta and Alice returned to Australia where she continued nursing and midwifery. In 1906, Henrietta married Sydney hotelier, Walter Bush. Five years later they had a son, Harry. The Bush family operated hotels in Sydney before moving to Kiama where they managed and lived at the famous and recently restored Grand Hotel in Manning Street. In 1916, when their son Harry was just five years old, Walter had a stroke and died.
So here was Henrietta once more, alone, in a relatively strange place, and with a young child. She continued to operate The Grand. Her parents moved to Kiama and no doubt assisted.
In 1929, the Kiama Reporter wrote that Mrs Bush had purchased the Seaside Flats at Shellharbour. and intended building a first-class hotel on the site. Who better to ask to perform that task than her skilled builder and joiner brother?
Henry Lewis Jnr obliged, and in 1929-1930 the hotel was constructed at a cost of 8500 pounds. It had 26 bedrooms, attractive gardens and grounds and was described in the Kiama Independent as "an ornament to Shellharbour and the South Coast".
The beautiful new building put Shellharbour on the tourist map. The hotel could accommodate 60 guests. Rooms were artistic and modern, with marbled bathrooms, hot and cold water and the latest of shower fittings. The best bedrooms opened onto balconies that looked out over the majestic ancient fig trees, and the ocean. Furniture and staircases were crafted from maple. The dining room and its stained-glass windows opened onto a tiled verandah complete with afternoon tea tables decorated in gold and black. The height of sophistication! Quite a change from the accommodations and drinking establishments the locals had been used to for the previous 100 years, and no doubt intended to attract more that the usual hoi polloi.
Henrietta successfully managed the hotel with her daughter Alice, Alice’s husband Clinton Cullen, her son Harry, and his wife Hazel. It somehow survived the Depression years of the 1930s, and the family continued to operate the business for the next 20 years.
This remarkable forward-thinking woman saw the tourist potential of her hotel and the little village of Shellharbour from those very early days in the 1920s. She not only built a hotel, she built a landmark that brought people together for a meal, a drink and good conversation, and one that has continued to do so for more than 90 years.
Cheers, Henrietta.
To find about more about the history of Shellharbour City, visit Shellharbour City Museum’s online platform, Discover Shellharbour.
