About The Escarpment

The escarpment runs the whole length of this region. From Stanwell Tops behind Helensburgh to the hills behind Kiama, everyone here lives between the cliff line and the sea. That shared landform is the masthead's name and its promise: one region, covered whole, not as Wollongong plus its fringes.

The Illawarra is roughly 314,000 people governed by three councils and shaped by one of the heaviest state and industrial layers of any Australian region: a working port, a steelworks, a university, a hospital building program, three planning systems and an unusually senior bench of local members of parliament. The public record of all this, the business papers, project pages, budget documents, registers and releases, is rich, and very little of it gets read end to end.

We read it. The Escarpment answers the standing questions of anyone who lives here: what did my council actually decide, and what does it cost me? What is being built near me, and is it on time? What is happening to the jobs base? Is the health system delivering? Who represents me, and what did they do this week? Every factual claim in every story links to the primary source we actually read, and the way the site is made is set out plainly on how this site works.

Contact

News tips, corrections and advertising enquiries all go through the tips page. Tips can be anonymous, and every claim is verified against primary sources before anything is published.