Bodalla Heritage Area

Bodalla Heritage Area on the Eurobodalla South Coast is home to two significant churches designed by two of the most prominent architects in 19th-century colonial Australia, and a village shaped by one of the country's great pioneers, Thomas Sutcliffe Mort.

A leading Sydney businessman, Mort established the Bodalla Estate in 1860 as his country retreat. He had already revolutionised the wool industry, pioneering specialised wool auctions and pastoral finance, developing Mort's Dock and pioneering the export of frozen meat. At Bodalla, he became known as the father of Australian dairying. In 1864 he introduced a factory system that replaced cottage cheesemaking, combining milk from different sources into a consistent-quality cheese able to compete with English imports, a model dairy farmers across the country adopted.

After floods in the 1860s and 1870s, Mort moved the village from the river flats to higher ground. The estate stayed in the Mort family for more than a century.

Today, visit All Saints Anglican Church, built between 1883 and 1902 as a memorial to Mort and his first wife, Theresa, and the shingled Catholic Church from 1886. The Bodalla Dairy Shed offers a fascinating insight into the town's history, and a stroll through the village takes in the Bodalla Arms Hotel (1910 - now the Bodalla Pub), the former bakery (mid-1880s) and the Post Office (1899).