Turns out Home and Away legend Lyn Collingwood has a fair bit in common with disgraced Sydney conwoman Melissa Caddick.
“As soon as I heard she’d been arrested at her multi-million-dollar home, I knew instinctively that it must be in Dover Heights,” Lyn exclusively told New Idea, after she had just been awarded an Order of Australia for her service to community history and the arts.
Best known for playing Summer Bay’s loveable busybody Colleen Smart, Lyn has now written a history of the clifftop suburb where she grew up – Dover Heights: Rocks and sand they couldn’t sell.
The book documents the suburb’s transformation from an area with a desolate stretch of windswept scrub to one of the most affluent areas in the country.
Before the suburb became what it is, it was home to characters like nude surfer Bonus Clarke, singers Johnny O’Keefe and Renée Geyer, and murdered whistleblower Sallie-Anne Huckstepp.
According to realestate.com.au, as of February 2026, the median house price in the Sydney suburb is $7.5 million.
“There didn’t seem to be a huge amount of money there when I was growing up, but I suspect there are a huge number of wealthy criminals living there now,” the 89-year-old shared with us.
Is Melissa Caddick still missing?
Melissa Caddick disappeared on November 12, 2020, the morning her home was raided by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission.
It was later revealed that the then-49-year-old financial advisor had been operating a sham investment scheme, raking in around $23 million from at least 65 people, including family and friends.
Three months after she vanished, her decomposed foot was found on a remote NSW beach, leading police to believe she had possibly jumped to her death from the Dover Heights cliffs.
“Her foot being washed up down the coast, that certainly captured the public imagination,” Lyn said, who worked as a teacher, encyclopedist, researcher and editor, as well as an actor.
While Caddick was considered deceased by the coroner, there have been wild conspiracy theories about the vanishing advisor, including an alleged sighting in Bali, and that she was still alive.
While Lyn said she didn’t know much about the theories, she doubted that Caddick was alive.
“I could have written a whole book about people falling or jumping off the cliffs at Dover Heights, or being washed off the rocks,” Lyn continued.
What is the history of Dover Heights?
While Dover Heights has a colourful history, the Home and Away star has many positive memories of the area growing up.
“As a child, we were never all that far from real danger, living on the edge,” she shared.
“Back then, it was a growing suburb with Hills Hoists and all that stuff, but there was still a lot of scrub around. The grim reality was that nature was ever present.”
“I used to crawl through our back fence to find goannas, flannel flowers and blue tongue lizards. There was even an ostrich farm back in the day, but it’s amazing how quickly it all went from bush to built up.”
Despite Dover Heights becoming one of Australia’s richest postcodes, no history has been written about it until now.
Her book also includes 250 historical books and maps, and accounts from locals.
But it seems the suburb had a reputation for attracting crooks, cheats and con artists ever since its first subdivision in the 1880s.
It’s ironic, considering what her TV character was like!
“It’s funny because there was a Home and Away storyline about Colleen plagiarising something,” she previously shared with New Idea. “But this book definitely isn’t plagiarised!”
She also thought her recent AO honour was a scam!
“When I got the email, I thought it was some kind of joke,” she recently admitted to us. “It was a very pleasant surprise, right out of the blue.”
Learn more about her book by visiting doverheightsbook.com.au.
