If you’ve ever wondered how people once travelled to and from the South Coast - long before buses, highways or a reliable rail line - historian Kevin Setter has spent years uncovering the answers.

The Moruya-based researcher has traced the early transport and mail contracts that linked the railhead at Campbelltown with communities across the Illawarra and South Coast.

His new book Stagecoaches and Royal Mail Illawarra Region follows routes through Appin, Bulli, Waterfall and Milton, as well as the connections from Moss Vale through Kangaroo Valley to Nowra and Braidwood. 

Covering 1837 to 1914, Setter documents everything from passenger conditions to railway delays, coach accidents and shifting mail schedules.

Setter said the book “gives account of the conditions the coach drivers and passengers had to endure, placed upon them by the postal authorities and courts in relation to numbers they were permitted to carry in the various coaches; accidents, holdups, disputes between the various drivers”.

The 244-page, fully indexed book draws heavily on historical newspapers and original court and rail records. 

“I use much of the local newspapers to gather all this information,” he said.

Setter also used Trove, which he has done for his previous publications. 

“Even on Trove, there’s gaps in information.” he said.

“There’s lots of papers that were destroyed accidentally or maybe through fires and things like that, the old copies were lost.

“A lot of records have been lost. They’re just gone unless you can find it in another paper, a lot of the time you’ll get quotes from other areas of things that have happened.”

His passion for transport history and drive to learn dates back to his studies in the 1990s. 

“When I was doing an associate's diploma in local and applied history at New England back in the '90s, I was going through court records and I’d seen where the stagecoaches were registered by the courts.” 

Those early notes eventually formed the basis for his later work.

Setter’s interest also runs through his family - his great grandfather, Jamed Edwards drove coaches in Victoria.

He hopes the book will prove useful to anyone researching their own ancestry. 

“It would be a great book for people doing family history to be able to check what their ancestors were up to.”

Through his extensive research, Setter’s work launches you back in time by capturing what early travel really felt like, shaped entirely by mail timetables and the arrival of trains. 

“People don’t know what others before us had to endure to get around without any means of communication,” Setter said.

“They relied on the mail so much to communicate with the city, relied on mail to arrive so they had time to answer it before the outgoing mail went again – especially businesspeople.”

The book also includes major incidents from the era.

“There’s lots of holdups, lots of accidents – there’s a big fatal accident on Bulli pass at one stage, plus other accidents have occurred that are documented.”

Its cover, something Setter created himself years ago, features a tapestry version of a Tom Roberts painting.

This is his third transport history title, and he’s already working on the next.

“It’s kept me going for the last couple years – I’ve done the three – I got another one in progress of prisoners in the shipwrecks of the Eurobodalla coast – over 30 of them.”

He is also preparing a history of the Catholic Church in Moruya.

 “It’s the sort of thing I’ve had an interest in, doing local history and trying to preserve some of it before it’s lost completely. It gives me a greater appreciation of what people had to endure in the past. I like local history – I’m very, very keen on it.”

Setter was the 2023 recipient of the Fergus Thomson OAM Heritage Award for his previous publication Stage Coaches and Royal Mail Southern Eastern NSW 1841–1913.

Copies of his new book are available by emailing [email protected] for $40 plus $15.25 postage.