The hills are alive

Can't afford Woollahra or Toorak? Join the treechangers moving to boutique Bangalow in northern NSW

Can't afford Woollahra or Toorak? Join the treechangers moving to boutique Bangalow in northern NSW, where prime real estate is more affordable and community values are priceless.

Cheated. We were cheated, that’s all there is to it. There we were, my daughter and I, lined up with our fox terrier/King Charles spaniel, Belle, in the Curliest Tail category of the Bangalow Pet Parade, thinking we were a lay-down misere for at least a place. But no, it wasn’t to be. The top two places went to pugs – we could hardly beat that – but the third-placed dog ... well, his tail was so not curly you could have balanced a plate on it.

It was looking as if there might be a tearful moment or two – and that was just me – when we picked up second place in the “Pet with the Nicest Smile” category. Phew. Honour was satisfied. The labrador belonging to Morag Page, a well-known Bangalow real-estate agent, was disqualified from the “Friendliest Pet” category because the dog kept trying to eat the competition. I guess real estate really is a dog-eat-dog world.

The Bangalow Show, usually held on the middle weekend of November, is the last agricultural how of the year in the Northern Rivers. In the past few years, my daughter and I have put pikelets in the kids’ section (don’t tell, but we made them from a packet), hung craft and photographs, and paraded pets. Our Arabian horse has competed in all its classes with various riders, my son has jumped horses and my daughter was once was the champion under-six rider on her Shetland pony.

Everybody loves the Bangalow Show. The showground hall is always beautifully decorated and the Agriculture & Industry Hall is chock-full of quilts, jams, preserves and useful things like tissue-box covers. Perhaps the best thing of all is that it brings together the incredibly diverse population that makes up Bangalow and its environs. Think mind/body/spirit meets rodeo riders and you get an idea of the mix.

In the past decade there has been an influx of sea and treechangers – including yours truly – to this beautiful part of the world. At the show you see it all: cowboys and cowgirls, National Party farmers, hippies, out-of-towners, urbanites who’ve taken up country living and, even, from time to time, an original local, a species so threatened with extinction that, along with all the other causes we support up here, there’s now a “Save the Locals” fund (well, not yet, but probably soon).

If you look at a map of the Northern Rivers area of NSW, the first thing you notice is the fine spiderweb of roads and intersections, crisscrossing in every direction. When the cedar cutters arrived in the region in the 1840s, they set about literally carving their way through the Big Scrub (as the little that’s left of the original flora is called), establishing small communities on their way. They remodelled the landscape with hundreds of country lanes and small communities, more reminiscent of somewhere in England (Devon or Cornwall, for instance) than anywhere I’ve been in Australia.

Once a small agricultural hill-town, Bangalow is the place those in the know go if they don’t enjoy the increasingly congested atmosphere of Byron Bay. Nestled in the almost fluorescent green hills between Byron and Ballina, Bangalow is a thriving little town full of restaurants, cafes and one-off designer shops. Also packed into the main street and a couple of sidestreets are several churches and halls, and the historical society. Then there’s the park (complete with a river where teenagers hang precariously off chairs they’ve tied to ropes before doing dare-devil leaps into murky water).

In a previous life in Sydney, I’d take my dog for the obligatory weekend walk in Centennial Park and then head to Queen Street in Woollahra for a cafe moment. These days, when I’ve had enough of picking up horse manure, I dust myself off and head for Bangalow. Its change from sleepy village to a main street full of European cars (on weekends, when Queenslanders descend for day trips) has been quick. Morag Page, owner of the ferocious labrador and partner of GNF Real Estate, has seen the prices rocket in the past few years.

“The rise was very quick,” she says. “If you’d bought a house for $375,000 four years ago, 18 months later it would have been worth $500,000 – and you could work on that same rise up the scale. It has levelled out now but Bangalow will always be highly desirable. There’s not much product in comparison to other local places, and it’s perfectly situated between the coast and inland.” A house in Charlotte Street recently sold for more than $1.5 million and an exclusive B&B is on the market for $2.25 million. The average price for a family home would be around $600,000. New roads, such as the Tugun Bypass, bring in weekend visitors from Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast and there has been an increase in commuters between Bangalow and Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

I chanced on Bangalow about 10 years ago, reconnoitring a treechange some time before we actually made one. It was winter and there was an early morning mist. It was so quiet you could almost hear a pin drop. The one exception was the Urban cafe, which was buzzing and already a landmark. Though it’s among a plethora of places to eat – namely Ate, Utopia, Choux Choux and Fishheads, the Bangalow Pizza shop, Indian restaurant, Chinese restaurant and noodle shop – it still manages to stand out on the crossroads between the main thoroughfare (Byron Street) and the road to the showground.

Like most of the places these days, it is owned by seachangers, in this case Georgina and her husband, Jay Allison. Georgina, who had previously owned an award-winning manufacturing business and started the boutique coffee-roasting business Atomica in Melbourne, bought the Urban nearly six years ago.

“It was very much the community cafe,” she says. “I grew up on a farm in the country and understood the notion of food from the ground up – growing vegetables and making butter and ice cream – so I felt like I understood the dynamics of country life. Even so, the first few years were challenging. I felt I needed to consult the community before I made changes to ‘their’ cafe and I guess changing the culture in the kitchen took longer than I expected.”

When the very swish Utopia opened up the road (all minimal white decor and varied menu) it brought the first fusion of country and city. Initially worried it would hurt business, Georgina found that the “upmarketing” of Bangalow was exactly the boost her business needed. “To be honest, I go through a bit of heartache when yet another cafe opens,” she says, “but it means you have to be very creative with what you do, and expand the notion of the business.”

Looking around for drawcards, the Allisons started The Big Joke Comedy Festival, which is held annually in March or April. Comedian Mandy Nolan, a Northern Rivers resident for almost 20 years, had the bright idea of bringing comics to the area, realising that with the amount of people from elsewhere all looking for the same sort of entertainment values they could find in the city, there was a market for comedy workshops and venues. She’s now the festival director.

“You wouldn’t believe the people I get in my workshops,” says Nolan. “In the last class alone I had an ex-cop from Sydney, an ex-crim, a psychic and a builder who does marriage counselling at the weekend. I’ve even had an exorcist.” She sees comedy as a way for people to expand their ideas of who they are. “It’s scary for people to put themselves out there,” she says, “but they discover all sorts of things about themselves in the process – it’s the stuff of their lives that makes for good comedy.”

Nolan, who came to the area for a holiday and never left, loves Bangalow’s diverse population. Recently, she pioneered a comedy workshop for dementia patients. “Of course,” she says, “a lot of them don’t remember anything we did the week before, but we can see just how much laughing helps them cope.”

This year’s The Big Joke, held last month, featured guests such as Arj Barker and Tim Minchin (of Rock N Roll Nerd fame). Nolan taught a Funny Kids program; there was the Cracked Eggs breakfast show (showcasing female comics); and four heats of the Village Idiot, a search for new comic talent that culminates in the closing event – the Village Idiot Cup.

One word you hear a lot if you live in the country is “community”. For me it’s a mixed bag – it means the neighbours know your business but you also know your neighbours by name and your children can wander safely up the road. Bangalow’s oldest resident, Frank Scarrabelotti, died recently at 108 and hundreds of people turned up to farewell him. The “celebration” of his life went on for weeks. And after a rugby scrum that broke Richard Allen’s neck, the community threw themselves into providing financial support for him and his family.

One of the differences between Bangalow and many other country towns is the quality of the goods on offer. The prices are, shall we say, “aspirational” but places such as Tracey Hocking’s Lazy Bones, in the wonderful old Masonic Hall on Station Steet, Wax Jambu with its eclectic mix of sian and Australian goods, the meditative space of The Rug Shop, and all the other individual and nteresting retail therapy outlets, contain things you won’t find elsewhere.

Despite the urbane feel it has acquired in the past few years, Bangalow remains child-friendly and its Abracadabra store is the place to go if you want to get a lot for your money (especially if you own small girl who loves pink). In among it all is the Country Women’s Association, a reminder of days one by. Its shopfront sports all manner of knitted clothes and cosies (tea cosies, egg cosies and hotwater-bottle cosies). Every purchase is original and half the fun is trying to get there during the ew hours a week that it’s open.

John Herne, a local who was born at Lismore Base Hospital, has been at the butcher’s shop for 3 years. He chooses not to provide modern complicated marinades or almost pre-cooked choices. “We’re a slightly older age bracket here,” he says. “People like good-quality cuts to cook up at ome.” These days, Herne resides in Ewingsdale, where he has a cattle property, so all his meat is truly local. But he’s a bit different to your average butcher. “I can’t always send all the meat to the battoir,” he says. “I had a couple of heifers in the last lot and just couldn’t send them because they ere too friendly.”

Once, the meat was slaughtered on the premises. “When we re-did the shop we dug up all sorts of stuff – including a whole heap of rum bottles,” Herne recalls. Of the mega-changes he has lived through, the biggest was the re-routing of the Pacific Highway, which used to run through the town. “I guess that was the beginning of the new Bangalow, although most of the changes have taken lace in the past 15 years,” he says. “Once the traffic rolled through here day and night, and the old oods trains were loaded up with produce.” The railway station is closed now, adding to the increased traffic on the over-crowded highway.

But for those drawn to an idyllic picture of life in the country, Bangalow’s charm is that it provides a contrast to life on surrounding farms or properties, which have their own set of frustrations. Residents of NSW will be familiar with the weather warning: “Showers, contracting to the northeast of the state.” That usually means Bangalow. Even as I write it’s pouring and my gumboots are waterlogged from feeding the horses in the rain. A local pair of songwriting sisters, who go by the  name of Scarlett Affection, have even written a song about the never-ending wet.

We don’t have droughts here – and thank goodness for that – but for horse-lovers, the wet weather brings fungal diseases with attractive-sounding names like greasy heel and seedy toe to our equine friends. Lots of rain has its blessings though. Children can “accidentally” leave taps on and everything grows at an alarming rate: weeds, cane toads, snakes and especially grass, which has to be cut every week in summer.

Whatever’s going on beyond Bangalow, locals can always don their glad rags and stroll down the restored 19th-century main street, shopping or deciding on a great restaurant. And, just for a moment, the image we had of what our lives might be up here actually meets reality.

MORE INFO
Among the full and varied program of events and regular meetings on offer in Bangalow throughout the year are:

The Big Joke Comedy Festival (March)
Billy Cart Derby (May)
FEHVA visual arts festival (May)
North Coast Jazz Festival (June)
Bangalow Music Festival (July/August)
Fatherhood Festival (September)
The Bangalow Show (November)
Christmas Eve Carnival
Farmers Markets (every weekend)
Bangalow Market (every fourth Sunday)
Blessing of the Animals (not to be confused with the Pet Parade)
Poetry and music at the local pub (which has a great bistro called Fresca)
Plus numerous gigs, conferences, workshops and events at the A & I Hall