Municipality of Woollahra: History
The name 'Woollahra' is thought to be derived from an Aboriginal word meaning 'camp' or 'meeting ground'.
A petition was submitted in 1859 with 144 signatures of local residents from Darling Point, Paddington and Watsons Bay for the formation of the Municipality. With no petition against formation of the Municipality, Woollahra was proclaimed to be named so on 17 April 1860, and gazetted on 20 April 1860. At the first meeting, The Hon. George Thornton was elected as the first Chairman of Woollahra. The municipality was expanded in 1949 by uniting with the Municipality of Vaucluse under the Local Government (Areas) Act 1948
In 1947, after previously acquiring 'Iron House' on Ocean Street, in the 1860s, Council transferred to the current site at Redleaf.
Woollahra largely developed as a residential locality. A few small local industries were established in Woollahra, Double Bay and Paddington; but with the residential gentrification of Paddington and Woollahra in the 1960s, most of these cottage industries had vanished by the end of the 20th century.
Woollahra's cultural heritage has been enriched by the influx of people from many different cultural backgrounds. Some of the influential immigrants to Woollahra have been the Chinese market gardeners, who began leasing land in Double Bay gully and Rose Bay in the 1880s; the Portuguese whalers who settled at Watsons Bay in the 19th century, building a church and becoming a part of the village life, and the many Europeans who migrated after World War II and helped change the face of commercial centres such as Double Bay.
A 2015 review of local government boundaries recommended that the Municipality of Woollahra merge with the Waverley and Randwick councils to form a new council with an area of 58 square kilometres (22 sq mi) and support a population of approximately 274,000. Following an independent review, in May 2016 the NSW Government sought to dismiss the council and force its amalgamation with Waverley and Randwick councils. Woollahra Council instigated legal action claiming that there was procedural unfairness and that a KPMG report at the centre of merger proposals had been "misleading". The matter was heard before the NSW Court of Appeal who, in December 2016, unanimously dismissed the council's appeal, finding no merit in its arguments that the proposed merger with its neighbouring councils was invalid. In July 2017, the Berejiklian government decided to abandon the forced merger of the Woollahra, Waverley and Randwick local government areas, along with several other proposed forced mergers.
Woollahra's population history from the 1960s to 2021 has been stable and slowly risen since the late 1960s to present, rising from 47,326 in 1966 to 53,295 in 1976. It is noted that the area is not comparable between these periods due to a boundary adjustment in the Paddington area in 1968 of approximately 330 acres (1.33 square kilometres) of land. This change removed a portion of land from the City of Sydney, which had been part of an addition made to it twenty years earlier when the entirety of the former Municipality of Paddington had been added to the City of Sydney under the Local Government (Areas) Act 1948, adding it to Woollahra. The population of Woollahra had fallen to 51,659 by 1986. The population was relatively stable between 1991 and 2006, at around 50,000. In 2003 there was a significant land transfer of 0.14 square kilometres of land to Waverley Council. …