Bega Valley

Distinguished and Famous people from Bega Valley

The Bega Valley's notable connections include writing shaped by country-town life and Aboriginal leaders whose work reached national audiences. Wallaga Lake and Cobargo are important places in these stories, with different kinds of childhood and community ties.

📚 Olga Masters

Olga Masters was born in Pambula in 1919 and grew up partly around Cobargo, where she attended school and began working for the Cobargo Chronicle. Her fiction came much later, drawing on rural life, family relationships and the constraints experienced by women and children. Her first collection, The Home Girls, won a National Book Council award. A Long Time Dying returned to the world of Cobargo in the 1930s. Early observations of a small community became material for a distinctive literary career.

🤝 Guboo Ted Thomas

Yuin Elder Guboo Ted Thomas grew up at Wallaga Lake and worked for much of his life as a commercial fisherman. He also toured with the Wallaga Lake Gumleaf Band. In later decades he campaigned for land rights and protection of culturally important places, including Mumbulla Mountain, and worked to document significant sites. His public role drew on knowledge passed down through family and Elders, linking the care of particular places with a wider movement for recognition and protection.

🤝 Burnum Burnum

Burnum Burnum, a Woiworung/Yorta Yorta activist, actor and author, was born at Wallaga Lake and removed from his family when he was three months old. He later campaigned for Aboriginal rights and helped seek the return of Truganini's remains. During Australia's 1988 bicentenary he raised the Aboriginal flag at Dover and laid a symbolic claim to England. The gesture used a reversal of colonial claims to make its point. His Wallaga Lake association is his birthplace, not a continuous local upbringing.

🤝 Percy Mumbler

Percy Mumbler was born at Wallaga Lake in 1907 and maintained a deep connection with its people and country. At a parliamentary committee meeting on the reserve in 1979, he spoke about the community’s land claim and the threat logging posed to sacred sites on Mumbulla Mountain. Land ownership, he argued, was inseparable from spiritual and cultural well-being. Wallaga Lake received title to remaining traditional lands in 1984, when land at Mumbulla Mountain was also gazetted as Biamanga Aboriginal Place. Mumbler passed on knowledge through story, language and song, alongside his campaigning for better living conditions.