The koala has been known to the first peoples of Australia for millennia. It appears in the Dreaming and art. It is a sacred animal to the Dharawal, featuring in creation stories. 

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One of these, the Billen Billen story, tells of how Dharawal people came to the Illawarra long ago. In order to get the people from a distant land that was running out of food, Goon na ghun the starfish and Kurrilwa the koala tricked Wondangar the whale to steal his canoe. When he discovered their treachery, he became enraged and beat Goon na ghun giving the starfish the jaggered edges we see today. During the fight Goon na ghun stabbed Wondangar in the back, the hole he made is now whale's spout. Kurrilwa rowed as fast as he could with his strong arms towards land, but Wondangar caught up and smashed the canoe forming Windgang Island. Kurrilwa reached land and quickly ran up a tree and hid. Every year Wondangar swims up and down the coast looking for starfish and koala.(See IllawarraAboriginalResourceUseEstuarine.pdf page 39)

 

Europeans however it seems were slow to discover the koala, it's grey rump is easily camouflaged within the tree tops. The first written mention of the koala comes a decade into the occupation of the Sydney region in January 1798. Nineteen year old John Price was sent to explore the Nepean River region, and noted:

"There is another animal which the natives call a cullawine, which much resembles the sloths in America." (Price 1895 cited in Organ 2006)

 

It wasn't until 1803, however, that two koalas were captured at Hat Hill (Mt Kembla) by Robert Brown with the help of Aboriginal guides and illustrated by Ferdinand Bauer. The adult female and two joeys were the first specimens ever collected by Europeans for scientific description. However, Brown's notes were written in Latin, and remained untranslated for almost two hundred years until researches Alwyne Wheeler and D.T. Moore unearthed them in 1994 at the Museum of Natural History in London. The news it seems did not make many ripples in Australia. It wasn't until 1997 when an exhibition of Bauer's original koala drawings arrived in Sydney that Michael Organ noted on the catalogue "Shot at Hat Hill". Organ, an Illawarra local and historian recognised the old name "Hat Hill" as meaning Mt Kembla and so began his meticulous search for the koala's scientific discovery and connection to Mt Kembla, a fact that had been lost to time. Michael Organ wrote and published the authoritative paper 'The Discovery of the Koala: Hat Hill (Mount Kembla), New South Wales 1803' in 2006. Yet the uptake of this significant fact for the Illawarra was again very slow. There were no searches by local authorities to connect this historical fact with present population studies nor commercialising by the local tourism industry. 

 

Intrigued two friends, Jodie and Georgina, who had come across Michael Organ's 2006 paper in 2008 buried deep in Google searches on Mt Kembla, decided to make a short documentary. His paper sparked their interest and begged the questions:

• If the koala had been in Mt Kembla historically, was it possible it was still here?

• If so, why was this not a commonly known fact?  

So began a search for the Illawarra koala that resulted in interviews, a Facebook page, media releases and a short documentary.