Mongarlowe, New South Wales

Mongarlowe is a village in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia in Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional Council. In former times, it was also known, in various contexts, as Little River, Monga, and Sergeants Point. The name, Mongarlowe, also applies to the surrounding area, for postal and statistical purposes.

It is situated on the Mongarlowe River and about 13 km east of Braidwood. At the 2016 census, the village and the surrounding area had a population of 117.

Several buildings have survived from the 19th century, when it was much larger, as has the village's cemetery.

Mongarlowe was a substantial mining settlement during the mid-19th century due to the New South Wales gold rush. It was called Monga until 1891.

The area now known as Mongarlowe lies on the traditional lands of Walbanga people, a group of Yuin.

Dispossessed of their best land during settler colonisation, individual Aboriginal families sought land on which to live. 140 acres of land was set aside as a reserve for Aborigines, in 1879—north of Mongarlowe in the neighbouring Parish of Mongarlowe—in the name of an Aboriginal woman, Mary Ann Willoughby. In 1885, a second reserve, of just under 9 acres, was set aside there, in the name of another Aboriginal woman, Margaret Bryant. In 1893, these earlier reserves were revoked and a new reserve of 50 acres was set aside on the left bank of Currowan Creek, not far from its confluence with the Clyde River estuary, on the coastal side of the Budawang Range. That reserve, Currowan Creek Aboriginal Reserve, lasted until 1956.

Probably due to reasons such as finding a viable means of sustenance, most of the surviving Aborigines living in the goldfields around Braidwood, migrated toward the coast—also Walbanga country—in the later years of the 19th century. Mary Ann Willoughby—already living thereabouts in 1876—and her children were still living near Mongarlowe in 1902.

Following other alluvial gold finds in the Braidwood district, prospectors were searching the Little River (now Mongarlowe River), a tributary of the Shoalhaven River), as early as December 1851, and there were miners working the Little River diggings by March 1852. The river was called the Little River, because another name for the Shoalhaven was the 'Big River'.