South Coast History Society has grown significantly over the past decade but it needs help to continue bringing the stories of yesteryear to life.

The Society, which covers the vast coastal expanse from Wollongong to the Victorian border, publishes the popular Recollections quarterly magazine and runs an in-depth website featuring tales of the past.

It is “Australia's largest, most innovative, most active history society”, according to founder and president Peter Lacey.

But it can’t run on volunteers alone and the Society is putting out the call for donations to keep its operations running smoothly.

The Society needs to raise $40,000 per year to meet current demands, an ongoing challenge for the community-focused, volunteer organisation.

“We’re run totally by volunteers, and what we're trying to do is to simply provide interesting South Coast history to anybody, anywhere in the world who's interested, and particularly to people who live on the South Coast,” Lacey said.

“I guess you could say that we're Australia's largest purveyor of history, and the beneficiaries of that are the people who are interested in history or live on the South Coast. We've been going for almost 10 years now.

“Our philosophy is that it's our history, it's your history, and we shouldn't charge a monetary amount of money to share it with anybody.

“So right from the start, Recollections magazine has been free and it has been extremely popular as a result of that. We now have to print at least 4,000 copies of each edition.”

The Society’s website has been live for a year and has received hundreds of thousands of hits from people all around the world.

Lacey said they also deliver talks to community groups and liaise with the other 22 locally-based historical societies up and down the coast.

The local history groups are generally focused on their town and running a museum whereas the South Coast Society is concerned with recounting the tales of the past.

“We don't have a museum. We don't have a library. We just are interested in the stories,” Lacey explained.

“Using a marketing analogy, we're interested in the sizzle, not the sausage.”

Lacey said he would much prefer to be focusing on history rather than appealing for donations but “fundraising is just a fact of life”.

“We get nothing from councils. We get nothing from the state or federal governments. We're totally reliant on commercial organisations, Rotary Clubs or groups like that, and primarily on individuals who simply support the Society.

“With the latest edition of Recollections, we made an appeal to people saying, would you assist us by giving us a donation? Last year, we spent $40,000 basically on printing Recollections. So we've got to raise a considerable amount of money for a small volunteer group organisation.

“If you're interested in history, if you're interested in supporting us, please do.”

Lacey said one of the joys of the Society was reliving quirky events from the distant past, such as the article in the most recent edition about whales at Twofold Bay around the turn of the 20th century providing “a miracle cure” for rheumatism.

Patients were rowed to the whaling station where blubber would be cut out of a carcass and the sufferer, stripped naked, would stand inside the whale for two hours at a time.

“The whalers would dig out a piece of blubber and you would climb in there,” Lacey said.

“It's a fascinating story.”

A patient told the Sydney Bulletin in 1896: “For exactly 12 months, the rheumatism left me. Then it came back again as bad as ever. The smell has never left me: that dead whale haunts me still.”

If you would like to help fund Recollections, send a cheque to South Coast History Society, 90 Whitby Wilson Road, Quaama NSW 2550, via a deposit into account (100112005) with Horizon Bank (BSB 802-124) or over the phone at 0448 160 852.