We weren’t planning to stop in Bodalla at all. It’s one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it villages on the Princes Highway, somewhere between Batemans Bay and Narooma, and if it weren’t for a friend’s offhand comment about “the dairy place with the calves,” we’d have driven straight past it. Instead, we lost a happy hour and a half there, and it ended up being the best part of the whole trip down.
Why Bodalla, of All Places
Bodalla is a tiny village with an outsized dairy history. Farming has shaped the area for more than 150 years, ever since businessman Thomas Sutcliffe Mort set up his dairy estate there in the 1860s, and the local cheese is still the thing the town is known for (Visit NSW). The Dairy Shed itself sits right on the highway, so you genuinely can’t miss it. There’s a small free car park around the side, though it does fill up, especially on weekends.
We went on a weekday, and it made a real difference. There was no queue for the ice cream counter, and the young woman serving us kept handing over little taster spoons of whatever we hadn’t tried yet, in no rush to move us along.
Timing It for the Calf Feeding
This is the bit worth planning around. The calves are bottle-fed at 10am and 4pm every day, and it’s free (Bodalla Dairy). We got there right on 10, and the farmyard was already buzzing. A staff member came out with big bottles of milk, the calves crowded round mooing, and our kids were absolutely beside themselves.
If you can manage it, go for the morning session rather than the afternoon one. The animals seem hungrier and more alert, and you’ll have the rest of the day free for Narooma afterwards.
Out the back there’s a proper little farmyard beyond the calves too, with goats and chickens wandering around. It’s not fenced off into a formal petting zoo, it’s more that the animals have the run of the yard and you wander in among them, which our kids loved.
The Cheese Tasting Was the Real Surprise
I went in expecting the ice cream to be the highlight and came out talking about the cheese. You can taste as much as you like before you buy, and the staff steered us towards their most popular blocks: a pepperberry cheddar and a three-year vintage. We ended up buying six small blocks between those two, a smoked one, and whatever else caught our eye, enough to share around when we got home.
A lot of the flavours lean into native Australian ingredients, wattleseed, saltbush, pepperberry, which isn’t something you see on a supermarket cheese board. It’s worth asking what’s new, because the range seems to change with the seasons.
Twenty-Odd Ice Cream Flavours, and Yes, We Tried Most of Them
The ice cream and gelato are made on-site from the dairy’s own milk, and there’s a genuinely long list of flavours on the board. We counted somewhere around twenty on the day we went, though I’d expect that to shift depending on what they’ve made that week.
Standouts for us were milk and honey, berry cheesecake, sticky date, Kakadu plum, and a wattleseed and coffee that I ended up choosing myself. It tasted a bit like bottled iced coffee from the supermarket fridge, only creamier, with a faint bitterness from little flecks of ground wattleseed running through it. My son went for one of the brighter, more colourful flavours and I fully expected it to be all sugar and no substance. It wasn’t. Underneath the colour it still tasted properly milky, not sickly at all, which surprised both of us.
Australian ice cream does run sweeter than what you might be used to, so the free taste before you commit is genuinely useful rather than just a nice touch.
Good to Know Before You Go
- Address: 52 Princes Hwy, Bodalla NSW 2545
- Calf feeding: 10am and 4pm, daily, free
- Bookings: Not needed, it’s a walk-in cafe and farm shop
- Cost: Tastings of cheese and ice cream are free; you only pay for what you take home or eat there
- Best time to go: A weekday morning, arriving just before 10am, if you want to beat the crowds
- How long to allow: About an hour, more if the kids want to linger with the animals
If you’ve got younger children who love this sort of hands-on animal experience, it’s worth pairing with our guide to free animal feeding at a 200-year-old farm for something similar closer to Sydney, or our roundup of the best alpaca farms near Sydney if you want to build a whole trip around farm stops. Bodalla is also an easy one to slot into a longer break, so it’s worth checking the NSW school holiday dates before you lock in travel, since the South Coast gets busy the moment term ends.
Where We Went Next: Narooma
Bodalla sits close enough to Narooma that it’s an easy add-on rather than a special trip in itself. We carried on down and spent the afternoon at two spots locals kept mentioning:
Australia Rock, where wild fur seals haul themselves out onto the rocks below and doze in the sun, seemingly unbothered by the small crowd watching them.
Mill Bay Boardwalk, a flat, easy walk over the water where we spotted several large stingrays gliding beneath the boardwalk, along with plenty of fish and a few pelicans working the shallows.
Both are free, both are stroller-friendly, and neither takes more than half an hour unless you decide to linger, which we did.
Was It Worth the Stop?
Completely. We went in thinking of it as a five-minute leg-stretch and left having fed calves, tasted six cheeses, eaten proper gelato, and watched wild seals a short drive down the road. If you’re doing the Princes Highway run to Narooma, Batemans Bay or further south, it’s worth timing your drive so you roll into Bodalla right around 10am. The calves will be hungry, the ice cream counter will be quiet, and you’ll have the rest of a good day still ahead of you.