There has been a lot of technically poor guitar strumming among the soul searching in the town of Byron Bay.
Gasping with outrage and shaking with indignity while jumping up and down in a manner that could cause a serious imbalance to their chakras, furious local protestors are locked in battle for the soul of Australia’s most easterly point.
The locals claim a Netflix reality show barely in production, Byron Baes (in the ongoing net-based massacre of the English language ‘Baes’ stands for Babes apparently) could challenge their already questionable lifestyle choices.
Welcome to the amusing struggle where some of the country’s most air-headed people face off against the world’s most insipid folk in a battle that might just shrink the collective IQ of the joint down to its regular daily weather forecasts, fine and sunny, 28.
And we’re starting from a pretty low base as it is.
For those of us who weren’t raised in idyllic surroundings where the rising sun casts gentle lilac and maroon pastel shades over the Pacific Ocean, it’s difficult to comprehend all the angst.
I grew up in Reservoir in Melbourne’s north in the 1960s and 70s. It was a rough joint, I tell you. How rough was it, I hear you ask? It was so rough, the butcher sold broken legs of lamb. Boom tish.
Seriously, back then we would have flocked to the streets excitedly in the unlikely event anyone from Hollywood showed the slightest interest in the place. Hell, we would have supported a toxic waste dump at the local park in the hope it might kick up real estate prices.
The show, a conceptual nightmare if ever there was one, appears to be based on ‘hot’ Instagrammers en masse
Instagrammers arriving en masse in Byron and well … that’s where it starts not to make very much sense other than a viewers’ voyeuristic glimpses into a group of people they would otherwise forbid from crossing the threshold.
What are ‘hot’ Instagrammers (‘Grammers if you’re cool but I’m not so we’ll stick to the unabbreviated term)? Hot Instagrammers are the world’s new cultural parasites. By sheer weight of followers on the Facebook owned social media platform, which oddly they can buy for a relatively modest amount of money, they pronounce things good or bad but mostly good because they didn’t have to pay for them in the first place.
It’s the sort of practice frowned upon in traditional media. Well, not just that. It is a behaviour considered more than a bit dodgy. Advertising without acknowledgment. It necessarily raises a singular point of conflict of interest, but no one seems to mind because the Instagrammers are hot.
Instagram followers are like a form of currency these days. Hot Instagrammers get stuff for free. The more followers they have, the more free stuff they get which apparently now includes all expenses paid trips to Byron. Hooray for everything!
Or so they think.
“It’s potentially going to threaten businesses if the portrayal of Byron is as absurd as I guess a lot of the doco-soap-reality shows are,” Byron Shire Mayor Simon Richardson told the ABC on Monday.
Talk about your first world problems. Something the Mayor of Byron Shire hasn’t seen could be worse than a whole lot of other things he hasn’t seen. Why, it’s a potential disaster. Potentially.
No Netflix
Netflix couldn’t buy this sort of publicity. Well, they could but it would add millions to the budget in advertising and publicity.
Seemingly bemused by the donnybrook, Netflix issued a statement which in part said, “The reason behind choosing Byron Bay as a location was driven by the area’s unique attributes as a melting pot of entrepreneurialism, lifestyle and health practices, and the sometimes uneasy coming together of the traditional ‘old Byron’ and the alternative ‘new,’ all of which we’ll address in the series.”
I think it could have been shortened to say, we’re going to take a look at what happens when old hippies meet young grifters but maybe that’s giving the game away.
When the kerfuffle first hit the media last week, one young brain-addled hippy told a reporter, “We don’t need any more people in this town but if we did, we wouldn’t want these types of people.”
Hmmm. Behold the mournful cry of the nimby in the wild who doesn’t want any more people in his town at all but if they did come, they would need to be acceptable to him and promise to keep the local economy running and directly and indirectly pay for his dismally hollow lifestyle.
Banning Tom Hanks
Of course, if the locals really wanted to make a stand, the rich and famous would be barred from local cafes. “I’m sorry Tom Hanks, we just won’t accept your money anymore.” “Not in those shoes, Mr Efron.” Or maybe the artisanal bakeries in Byron could feature a picture of Matt Damon on their counters, “Do not serve this man.”
Without all that tourist money where would Byron-istas be? Purer of heart and soul possibly but a lot poorer certainly. After a while, we’d have to send the army in to scrub them all down with big soapy brushes and vaccinate their children.
And that’s what it comes down to. Half-baked nimbies vs bird-brained Insta-clones. The vapid meet the vacuous and as anyone scientist will tell you, (not that they go for science around those parts) vacuums are gonna fill.
It’s the clash of the morons. A battle about nothing for nothing with the prize going to no one. Grammers will give it five stars.
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