Welcome to Lost the Manly and the Northern Beaches Preservation Society
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Lost Manly — Guardians of the Northern Beaches Story
If you grew up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, you know the feeling.
It’s the quiet certainty that no matter how far you travel, no matter how long you live elsewhere, something in you remains tethered to this stretch of coast — the beaches, the ferries, the headlands, the small daily rituals of life by the sea. For many Northern Beaches locals, leaving doesn’t loosen that bond. It sharpens it.
You can take the girl out of the Northern Beaches —
but you can’t take the Northern Beaches out of the girl.
Lost Manly was born from that longing.
Founded in 2013, Lost Manly started as a personal digital filing cabinet — a place to store and organise my family history research, photographs, and stories connected to growing up on the Northern Beaches, and family connections I encountered along the way. What started as a private archive, shared with family and friends, scattered around the world, grew into something larger: an open invitation for others to explore, preserve, and share their own local histories on the Northern Beaches, whether locally born and bred, or transplanted along the way.
Today, Lost Manly is a growing community reaching more than 35,000 members — locals, former locals, descendants, historians, photographers, and passionate custodians of Northern Beaches memory. Together, we document a place not just as it looks now, but as it has been lived, worked, swum, commuted, and loved across generations.
At its heart, Lost Manly is about preservation.
We collect and restore photographs, postcards, artworks, ferry ephemera, and personal records — often fragile, fading, or overlooked — and bring them back into public view with care and context. Each image is treated not as decoration, but as a record: a piece of visual evidence in the ongoing story of coastal life along Sydney’s northern edge.
That commitment to archiving and restoration took a new form in 2020, when Lost Manly produced its first calendar for 2021. Created in support of the campaign to save the Freshwater Ferries, the calendar featured remarkable photographs taken by ferry crew themselves — from sunrise crossings to late-night returns. Many copies were distributed during Save Our Freshwater Ferries events, helping build awareness and momentum. The campaign was successful, though the work of preservation continues. The calendar sold out.
In 2022, the project expanded. Three calendars were produced: one celebrating the South Steyne and Queenscliff ferries, another dedicated to vintage Manly imagery, and a third capturing the changing moods of Manly through a sunrise series. Each calendar functioned as both a practical object and a portable archive — something to live with, page by page, across the year.
Lost Manly’s work sits alongside broader heritage efforts, including advocacy for the preservation of vessels such as the Baragoola and the ongoing call to bring back the South Steyne. These ferries are more than transport; they are floating chapters of Sydney Harbour history. Preserving them means recognising that our harbour’s character is shaped not only by landmarks, but by the working vessels and everyday journeys that defined life here.
The Northern Beaches has always been a place of movement — across water, across generations, across time. Lost Manly exists to ensure those stories are not lost to memory alone.
We see ourselves as guardians of the past — collecting, restoring, and sharing the visual and cultural history of Manly and the Northern Beaches, so it can continue to be understood, valued, and carried forward.
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Northern Beaches history
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Manly heritage
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Sydney Harbour ferries
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Vintage Manly photographs
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Archiving and restoration
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Local history preservation
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Freshwater Ferries
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South Steyne / Baragoola
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Northern Beaches community archive
