Cooranbong - NSW

Cooranbong is a suburban and educational development to the west of Lake Macquarie and about 30km southwest of Newcastle. It owes its being to the arrival of Seventh Day Adventist missionaries in the late 19th century.

Cooranbong is a strange town. It lies to the west of Lake Macquarie on the Dora Creek. It is a town which, although it is close to major tourist areas on the Central Coast, has largely side stepped commercial development and remained the home of the Seventh Day Adventists in Australia. Avondale College, the South Seas Islands Museum and Sunnyside (an historic home occupied between 1896-1900 by Ellen Gould White, one of the founders of the Seventh-Day Adventist movement) are all located in the township and worth visiting. The highlights of the area are the remarkably beautiful bushwalks and panoramas overlooking the coastline which can be experienced in the Watagans National Park to the west of the town.

The first Seventh-day Adventist missionaries arrived in Australia during 1885; after only nine years a group rowed up Dora Creek to Cooranbong and chose 585 hectares as the location for a multi-disciplinary, co-educational college. At that time the land had known centuries of sustainable use by Aborigines but since 1900 it has been used variously for grazing and as a source for firewood and pit props (that’s coal miner’s language).

Following the exponential development of aviation that occurred during WW2, the SDA church at Cooranbong realised the potential of aviation in delivering its message. Around 1949 a small airfield was developed at Avondale and improved over the years, being used as a location for recreational aviation, evangelistic aviation and flying instruction in its School of Aviation until about 2005. As of 2021 it is under suburban development.

Cooranbong was the original home of the SDA's Sanitarium health food factory, now moved to several locations in NSW, Qld and WA.

The SDA college is a recognised university.