Crescent Head Stories: 
Local History and Hidden Places

A white stone in the scrub

On the track down to Back Beach, a white marble obelisk stands in the coastal scrub. It sits behind a low iron fence, rusted now and tangled with vines. Most walkers pass it on the way to the sand. If you stop and read it, you find one of Crescent Head's oldest stories.

The memorial has been there for more than a century. It marks the death of a young man who went fishing off the rocks and never came home.

Herbert Arnold O'Dell

The inscription reads:

Sacred to the Memory of Herbert Arnold O'Dell, who was accidentally drowned while fishing off the rocks at "Cresent Head". 1st Sept. 1917. Aged 26 years & 5 months.

Those few lines tell us a lot. Herbert was born in the autumn of 1891. He died on the first day of spring 1917, a young man with most of his life ahead of him. The stonemason spelt Crescent as "Cresent", and the name sits in quotation marks, as if the place was still new enough to need them.

A marble obelisk was a costly thing to make, cart and set up in 1917. Someone who loved him paid for it and brought it out to this lonely stretch of coast. They chose to put it here, close to the rocks where he was lost, rather than in a town cemetery.

We don't yet know who Herbert's family were, where he lived, or whether his body was ever recovered. If you know more, we would love to hear from you.

Crescent Head in 1917

Crescent Head looked very different when Herbert died. It had only been declared a village in 1894, and it was a quiet, remote place on Dunghutti Country. People came out from Kempsey and the Macleay farms to camp, fish and get away from things. The busy holiday town we know today was still decades away.

The headlands were fishing spots then, as they are now. Locals climbed down to the rocks for bream, tailor and drummer, with the swell breaking just below. Rock fishing has always been dangerous on this coast. A single big set can sweep someone off a ledge without warning.

Herbert drowned in the fourth year of the First World War. Many young men from the Macleay were away fighting in France and Belgium. For a small community already losing sons overseas, losing another young man at home to the sea would have been a heavy blow.