Sex, vibes and influencers: searching for the soul of Byron Bay
An expose turned Byron Bay’s ‘utopia’ into a joke, but can an outsider ever understand it?
It is 9.57am on a warm spring morning and for the fifth time this year I’m about to ascend Cape Byron — Australia’s easternmost tip — in search of the soul of this place that I now call home. Byron Bay.
I know the soul is up there, somewhere, with the lighthouse and the ghosts of Aboriginal elders and the chatty crows and the endless streams of gelato-licking, whale and dolphin-hunting tourists. Instinct tells me the soul hovers about this tip of volcanic rock capped by a lighthouse, above the multi-millionaires’ enclave of Wategos Beach, the surfing mecca of The Pass, the grid of streets in “old” Byron named after famous writers (John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle: “Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.”) It lingers above Main Beach near town and Belongil Beach and all the Instagram influencers and Murfers (mummy surfers). Above the long stretch of beach at Tyagarah, where naked latter-middle-aged men ponder the meaning of life attired in just straw porkpie hats and a thin film of sunscreen.
And it extends beyond all of this pot-holed paradise into the past, back to the Aquarius Festival in 1973 that brought wide-eyed and pot-fogged hippies to the dairy farms of the Northern Rivers of NSW and the little hinterland town of Nimbin, and gave birth to the Byron Shire hippie counterculture. It goes back to the Bundjalung of Byron Bay, the Arakwal people, meeting on and around the cape, a place they called Walgun, “the shoulder”, where tribes gathered and feasted and told stories.
The soul. It’s up there. I know it.
I take the track through Palm Valley at the back of The Pass, with its ancient middens, through stands of grey ironbark and brush box and clusters of three-veined cryptocarya. I trek onward to Wategos where a young woman with long blonde hair and a neon-pink bikini is being photographed on the beach, attended to by a crew of seven. She is posing on the lichen-green boulders that have rested there forever.
Then up, up hundreds of stairs on the cape ridge, lifting higher, passing the stupefied tourists who have spotted in the distance a funnel of spray from a whale blowhole, or caught the unexpected emergence of a black fin (“It’s waving!”) on a day where the jade ocean off the cape is so full of whale that it resembles an M1 crowded with submerged semi-trailer-sized mammals.
To the final 47 steps to the lighthouse, that famous 22m-tall concrete-rendered finger of light, the light, at two million candelas, flashing white every 15 seconds between sunset and daybreak, warning of danger since 1901, protecting, a light that draws in pilgrims from all over the world.
The views are spectacular, from Mount Warning in the west to Tallow Beach and Broken Head to the south to the busy freeway of whales to the east. Is this the soul of this place? Have I found it?
I approach Jenny, a volunteer for NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, in the snug museum at the bottom of the lighthouse. “Is it here, Jenny?” I ask. “The soul of Byron Bay?” She looks at me intently. Then a warm smile slowly spreads across her face, and she starts to softly speak.
The shire locals will tell you that you don’t decide to move to Byron Bay, you just somehow end up there. That if you enter its orbit, “the pull” begins and, in the end, will take you, like a rip off Tallow Beach. It took hold of my Sydney-born wife, Katie, in the early 1990s. A child of the Age of Aquarius, she had been to Byron many times with her family. At the end of high school in Sydney she drove north to Byron with a friend and simply dropped anchor for a few years.
I was born and bred in Brisbane, moved to Sydney in 1986, then back to the Queensland capital permanently with Katie in 2004. We had three children. Yet barely a week passed when she didn’t mention the possibilities of moving to Byron Bay. The pull was back. For several years we had a modest weekender in the Byron Shire and I slowly fell in love with the area, yet the pull for me remained a polite nudge.
Then late last year, a powerful unforeseen squall hit our family at rapid speed. Decisions were made quickly. Boxes were packed. A For Sale sign was erected outside our Brisbane house, and all of a sudden we were living in Byron Bay.
The population of the Byron Shire was 34,574 as of 2018. The Byron township was estimated at 9600. More than 23 per cent of Byronians had a bachelor degree or higher. Only eight per cent of the population was aged between 70 and 84, according to Byron Shire Council statistics.
It was the height of summer when we moved, and for me it seemed unreal, as though we were simply on an extended holiday. We rented near the beach. We frolicked and swam. And when autumn came, we were still there. Friends and family were mystified. When told of our migration many expressed a barely perceptible look of distaste, the one where the corners of the mouth seem lifted by an invisible thread. Oh. Byron Bay. We may as well have moved to Mongolia.
We settled in. Sort of. Work ties in Brisbane were still strong. I became a commuter. I discovered that if you left the city on the Pacific Motorway any later than 2pm on a weekday for the 160km trip to Byron, it was bumper to bumper to the NSW border. Four-hour journeys that should have taken less than two were not uncommon.
And despite Byron Bay’s outsized beauty and its hordes of backpackers, disgorged from buses near the Rails Hotel, it was, at heart, just a small town. You could encounter the same faces three or four times in a single day. And I saw many things that I never saw in Brisbane’s inner-west.
One Saturday, my oldest son was playing soccer for the Byron Bay Rams against a team from Nimbin, the famed “hippie” town that hosted the Aquarius Festival in May 1973 — a moment that changed the Byron Shire forever. (It was our Woodstock. Nimbin, over the decades, became a byword for marijuana: the purchase of it, the smoking of it, the joy of it. It was Rainbow Country.) The Nimbin team’s jerseys were, of course, the verdant colour of a healthy plant. Just after kick-off, one of the Nimbin mothers on the sideline lowered herself into a crouch, hugged her knees, rocked back and forth and repeated the mantra: “Having an anxiety attack! Having an anxiety attack! Having an anxiety attack!”
One morning, in the pale pre-dawn light, I headed off for a beach walk, the beam of the lighthouse still strafing away, when I saw two young women in an animated discussion on the sand. They appeared to be dressed in just their knickers (looking out of the corner of your eye can be unreliable) and were yabbering away as if they were still inside a nightclub they’d left hours earlier. At a polite distance I turned around and saw them, side-by-side, performing perfect headstands.
There were stories in the local paper, The Echo, about Byron Shire Council plans to turn off some street lights at night to save on power costs. Really? Didn’t millionaires and movie stars live here? And there wasn’t enough money to keep the lights on?
Then, just a couple of months into our tenure as bona fide residents of the Shire, my children blustered into the house.
“Dad!” my daughter said breathlessly.
“What? Is everything OK?”
“We just saw Thor!”
I didn’t quite grasp the magnitude of this news.
“Who?”
“Thorrrrr!”
“What?”
“Thor. The actor! Chris Hemsworth! Avengers? Marvel Universe?”
I turned to my wife. She was speechless. Flushed even. She nodded coyly.
It turned out that Thor and his family lived just a dozen houses down the street from us in a nice house with some stellar Hollywood-style palm trees out the front. This was Thor’s home while his mega-mansion was being constructed at Broken Head, just a few kilometres south.
Thor. God of thunder. God help me.
Hemsworth sighting #1: A friend, whose daughter works at The Park Hotel, says Hemsworth and fellow Hollywood superstar Matt Damon were in the pub and Damon handed over a credit card to pay his bill and the staff member said she needed proof of identity. She looked at the group with Damon. She pointed to Hemsworth and said: “I know who he is, but I don’t know who you are.”
After a few months in Byron Bay, or in any newhome, there comes a time when it’s important to drill down and find out more about the place, its history, the fabric of its community. I knew some of this because I had some friends living in the Shire, and others who had come and gone having done their Byron “thing”.
Author and journalist David Leser had a long stint in Byron Bay. I sought his counsel. “Byron used to be a brutal little working-class town, right?” he said. “They clear-felled timber there and sent it off to Europe. They sand-mined there. They grazed there. They had the abattoir there. They had the whaling station there. It was a town of slaughter. When some of the early board riders were first surfing just near the top pub where the old jetty was, where the whaling station was, the sea was just red with whales and blubber and sharks swimming around.” (One old local told me he recalled seeing abattoir workers going into the Great Northern Hotel for a beer in the early 1970s with blood splashed over their boots.)
Leser said it was impossible to “get” Byron if you didn’t understand the 50,000-year Aboriginal history of this part of the country. “It was a meeting place for tribes and clans from all over Australia,” he said. “They’d come to Cavanbah. That was where they had their ceremonial rights. Wategos is a women’s dreaming place. You can see it in the curves and folds of the bay, it’s a very feminine place; women did their secret business there for thousands of years.
“This is ancient Gondwana land. Mount Warning is what remains of the caldera, and many people believe the granite has this energetic force. I can’t float anywhere in any water except in Byron — it’s the shape of my body — but I can float in Byron.” There was a texture to the water, he said, and some believe the ocean floor at Byron was left over from that ancient caldera. “If you believe the land speaks to you, that the land holds memory, then that’s the heart and soul of Byron.”
Then there was the sex. When Leser first arrived in Byron in 1999 he got talking to a local historian aged in his 80s. “He said, ‘Why did you come here?’ I told him this was the place where me and my friends would get our rocks off. He laughed and said people have been coming to Byron for sex since the 1930s. Trains would come from all over — Casino, Murwillumbah, Ballina; young lovers would go up to the lighthouse, guys would dig their stirrups in the side of the hill, couples would fornicate on the side of the hill near the lighthouse. Under the moonlight. This was a place for love, sex and romance. I think it still is.”
After Leser told me about all that rutting on Cape Byron I returned to the lighthouse, still looking for the heart of the place, and studied the steep, wind-strafed ocean side of the ridge and imagined old-fashioned skirts and petticoats lifting into huge and beautiful carnations in the breeze. Under the moonlight.
Was this the soul of Byron?
Hemsworth sighting #2: A neighbour of ours said she was down at the beach for her regular daily swim when she noticed Hemsworth sitting in the dunes with his dog. Later, the dog accidentally followed her down the track to her own home on the beachfront, and she returned it to the movie star. “He was thankful,” she said. “But a bit removed, like, ‘Is she going to ask me for an autograph?’ But he was nice.”
I contacted Mandy Nolan, entrenched local, comedian, writer, performer and mother, to discuss all this rutting and the soul. She kindly sent me a fetching photograph of herself (and her naked butt) at a pro-nudist rally in the late 1990s.
She was precisely the right person to talk to about this. “I found all my husbands here,” she said. (There have been three.) “For anyone who has ever been an outsider, there is a peculiar sense of home here, that you belong. When you meet people here you don’t ask what they do. It’s not the most interesting thing about them. I have a lot of friends and don’t know their last name.
“Everyone is so different. An ex-police officer. An Irish singer-songwriter. A pot-smoking concreter. That’s kind of what I love. It feels like a cliche… until you’re in the middle of it. Sometimes I feel like I’m sitting in an episode of a TV show written about a place like this.”
She repeated what many had told me about Byron over the years. That it was the “home of the black sheep”. “Yes, I think it attracts all the black sheep, the people who thought a little differently or wanted to try something different,” Nolan said.
“I don’t agree with every mindset here, especially some of the conspiracists. But it’s exciting to live in a community where there’s a boundlessness in what people do. There’s a woman here who does Yoni mapping. Mapping your vagina. If you have an idea, you can make it happen here.”
She mentioned the recent hullabaloo caused by a feature in the US magazine Vanity Fair about the Instagram influencers and yummy-mummy surfers of chic Byron. “Byron Bay, which has long been an actual hippie-surfer-wellness alterna- lifestyle destination, has lately emerged as a kind of virtual utopia as well — thanks, in part, to all the ethical, organic, sustainable, conscious fashion labels to come out of there in recent years,” the article stated. “Also, Chris Hemsworth lives there. Also, influencers.”
Nolan reflects: “I constantly get jokes out of this place, I’m not a cynic, and of course it was always going to become a Vanity Fair article… it’s perfect. Who isn’t seeking this utopian life?”
But which place is ever perfect? The Byron Shire roads are pitted with countless potholes (I stopped counting at 50 in the street where my kids go to school downtown, and there were more than 20 patched holes in a short stretch of our own street, in a suburb south of the lighthouse. Curiously, there were none in front of the Hemsworth home.) The council roadworks backlog, according to a source, was $60 million worth.
A page one article in The Echo in early September stated that outside Sydney, the Byron Shire had the highest number of people sleeping rough per capita in NSW. That was an 18 per cent increase on last year. And the town was still in mourning for missing Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez, 18, who vanished into thin air on May 31. His father, Laurent, recently returned to Byron to continue looking for his boy, and said the family were living “a nightmare in paradise”. The extraordinarily close-knit and caring community that is Byron Bay has taken his disappearance personally. It has refused to accept that he can’t be found, and there are still regular volunteer searches.
After three months, I felt I had a better understanding of the place. I had walked to the lighthouse three times. But I had still not really penetrated the surface of the community and the landscape. How long would it take?
I went to see local surfing legend Rusty Miller, 1965 US surf champion, who came to Byron for a friend’s wedding in 1970 and never left. When I asked him what the heart and soul of Byron was, he said with a grin: “I’ve been here for nearly 50 years. When you find it, let me know!”
And, despite regular reports of his whereabouts from my excited children (and flushed wife), I had still not laid eyes on Thor.
Hemsworth sighting #3: My barber in town, Jimmy, is snipping away and I bring up Hemsworth. Has he seen him? “Yeah,” says Jimmy. “He walked past the shop here not long ago. Had a hat on pulled right down, you know? I’ll be honest, I got a bit of a thing for that Hollywood glamour, yeah? I could see it was him right away, no matter how far he pulled his hat down.”
I drove down to Ballina, 35km south of Byron, along the old coast road, to see the local Greens MP, Tamara Smith. Elected to a second term at this year’s NSW election, she is a no-nonsense straight shooter who appears to know her electorate like the back of her hand. Her concern is that the place has been loved to death.
“The pressures on us — and the region — are enormous,” she said. “I feel like we’re probably past the tipping point.” Even though the state government’s North Coast Regional Plan stated four years ago that there would be no new developments east of the highway, there were already thousands of new homes in the pipeline. “What we’re seeing, if we drive along the coast, is a crazy level of new developments. When it comes to roads and infrastructure, there are 27,000 ratepayers in the Byron Shire… and 1.5 to 2.5 million visitors a year. We’re unique, to have that dilemma.” (Her comments brought to mind the swish new “Mercato on Byron” retail, restaurant and cinema complex, a huge development that had delivered the town its first ever escalator. “Yeah,” said one local. “You can see these stoned kids riding it, up and down, all night.”)
It was clear, as told by Smith and many other people I interviewed, that Byron Shire Council was in an almost impossible situation — a small ratepayer base, a tourism explosion, and little financial assistance from the state government. It was whispered that the fact the council was also run by the Greens didn’t help its cause. “There’s a massive issue around the disconnect between ratepayers and wear and tear,” Smith said. “It’s like your house. If you have tenants, that’s one thing. But if you have hundreds and hundreds of people coming through that house… you can’t capture that but everyone knows that’s the problem. I think we’re beyond the critical point.”
She said a simple “bed tax” would make an enormous difference to funding, but she wasn’t holding her breath waiting for the Berejiklian Government to act anytime soon.
Over in the funky little town of Mullumbimby, a 15-minute drive north of Byron, I have coffee with Aslan Shand, acting editor of The Echo. Her father Nicholas founded the paper (23,200 free copies distributed per week) in 1986. “It is a small ratepayer base,” she said. “It needs to be recognised that this place has become this icon. Brisbane is only two hours way. Thirty years ago it was a journey to get here from Brisbane. The Gold Coast is an hour to the airport, and that’s on a bad traffic day.
“The Pacific Highway upgrade has changed the dynamic of people coming into the area. There is the question — when does a place get full? At what point do you go, ‘We’re not going to build any more housing’. Venice. Dubrovnik. They’re no longer functioning entities, just a sea of tourists.
“People come here for a sense of community and connection… and once you don’t have that community functioning anymore, that’s when you lose the heart of a place.”
Hemsworth sighting #4: On April 30 this year a male teacher at Byron Bay Public School was stabbed by a female parent with a pair of scissors. He was taken to hospital and she was arrested and charged. To distract from the drama, Hemsworth, whose children attend another school across the road, came to the public school immediately and helped out in the canteen. A friend’s son was delirious with excitement. “It was Thor right there,” the boy said, “making me a sushi roll for lunch.”
It’s just after 8am on a cloudy morning and thedawn pilgrims are already up at the foot of the lighthouse or making their way up the ridge, marching with purpose like Lycra-clad soldiers. I’m waiting to meet Arakwal elder and spokesperson Delta Kay. And while I do, scanning the ocean, I remember the smile of Jenny the lighthouse volunteer and her answer to my question — where is the soul of Byron Bay?
It’s the way we live, Jenny told me quietly. Without pretence. Without deference to fame or money. Here, we are all the same. Doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor. We respect your right to be here. We respect your privacy. If you live here, you are one of us. Our values are the heart and soul of Byron, Jenny said.
Delta joins me here on the roof of the world and we look towards Mount Warning. “They can build their buildings, but the landscape never changes,” she says. “This is the crown of Byron.”
The Bundjalung people of Byron Bay had been agitating for native title for years, and this year the Federal Court finally granted it. Delta points out the stretch of Tallow Beach and the estuary where generations of her relatives have lived and raised families. Delta resides in a house built on the old campsite where her mother lived as a child. Further down, past the suburb of Suffolk Park, was the ancient ti tree lake, a sacred site for women.
What was it like before Byron became Byron? “It was very quiet,” she says, “growing up by the creek. My Mum was one of 13 children. They walked this beach. They got their fish and pipis and beach turtles. This has always been a place for wellbeing. Those bays around the cape are important to us. But this place is sacred. Walgun. Cape Byron. Imagine them coming up here for a ceremony with its 360-degree views of country.
“This was a meeting place. The inland Bundjalung would come here to fish. The tribes would gather. The old people say the ocean would be black with mullet during the mullet run. This is our landscape and embedded in it are our stories. It is our duty to look after this place. That’s true belonging. The stories hold us here. Our people have been travelling here for thousands of years. We have a different type of people that travel here now.”
It has been a long and at times difficult expedition, this search for Byron’s soul, and I’m driving down our street on my way home. It’s early evening on a Friday, and the street lights (hopefully) are about to flicker on. In the distance I see a man on a bicycle, and trailing behind him a small helmeted child on a little bike with trainer wheels. I slow down and move to the left edge of the bitumen, over the patched potholes. The man is in black boardshorts and a black T-shirt. He wears no helmet. He’s standing high on the pedals, circling around his child, instructive and protective, like a black swan caring for his young.
I turn into my driveway and just happen to glance out the driver’s side window. And realise it is him, Chris Hemsworth. Thor. The Mighty Thor. Who, on this warm evening, happened to be just a dad taking one of his kids for a ride down our neighbourhood street. No paparazzi. No gawking fans. No autograph hunters.
If you live here, you are one of us. Here, we are all the same.
It took me more than eight months to learn that to find the heart and soul of my new home, I just had to step out the front door and breathe it in. It was all around me the whole time.