Port Macquarie Region

Distinguished and Famous people from Port Macquarie Region

🏐 Ryley Batt

Ryley Batt was born in Port Macquarie in 1989. He preferred a skateboard to a wheelchair, but a school visit by wheelchair rugby player Brad Dubberley helped change his view of the sport. He began competing in 2002 and made his Australian debut the following year. Paralympic gold followed at London in 2012 and Rio in 2016, with silver at Beijing and bronze at Paris also among his team achievements. His path from reluctant wheelchair user to an elite player began with seeing what someone else could do, rather than accepting a narrow idea of what was possible.

📔 Annabella Boswell

Annabella Boswell lived at Lake Innes House during the 1840s and recorded visitors, clothes, meals, gardening and family life in her journals. Botanical watercolours accompanied her keen observation of the surrounding environment. The household belonged to her uncle Archibald Innes; its hospitality and servants reveal a privileged colonial setting, rather than the experience of everyone in the district. Her account nevertheless preserves vivid details that official reports rarely capture, including personal quirks and the everyday work of maintaining a country household. The surviving journals and paintings have made her an enduring witness to Port Macquarie’s nineteenth-century social history.