Cyclone Alfred latest news: violent storm hammering towards Byron Bay, northern NSW

You knew by mid-morning in the NSW Northern Rivers region that something wicked was on its way.

Spectators gathered on the shores of beaches at Byron Bay to watch the thunderous waves. Picture: Matt Condon

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You knew by mid-morning in the NSW Northern Rivers region that something wicked was on its way.

It wasn’t just the sporadic rainfall, violent then feathery then ­violent again, but the peculiar pearl light that illuminated the skies above the beaches from Brunswick Heads and Byron Bay to Lennox Head and Ballina, and the hinterland towns of Mullumbimby, Bangalow and Lismore.

If you’ve ever experienced that light before you remember it. It’s cyclone light. An almost beatific glow that comes before a monster, in this instance Cyclone Alfred. It was there in Brisbane in early 1974 (Wanda), if you’re old enough to remember. And it was back again on Wednesday, coddling southeast Queensland and the Northern Rivers. Many were oblivious to it as a portent of danger. Others knew exactly what it meant.

It’s the sort of rare and unusual light that gives you the sense that everything is holding its breath.

By midday Alfred was flexing its muscles. Huge waves surged at Brunswick, eating the beach up to its dune grass.

Kids watch on as a few brave surfers braved the huge swell.

In Byron Bay, the Woolworths supermarket shelves were largely empty of essentials, save for a clutch of pears in the fruit section and half-a-kilo of grass-fed mince in the meat fridge. For days it’s been impossible to buy a flashlight or even candles.

The streets, too, are empty. A third of the shops are closed. A handful have positioned sandbags under their store doors. Over at Main Beach, it’s hard to get a park. Hundreds of people line the foreshore watching surfers risking their lives on enormous waves. It is carnivale. Boomboxes are playing. Cameras clicking. Huge cheers go up for the daredevils.

“What’s going on here are possibly the biggest waves since 1974,” says Terry McGrath, a Byron local for 40 years, who’s positioned a fold-out chair on the water’s edge. “There’s a couple of broken boards in the bins behind us. These guys are risking their lives. There are paramedics and police on standby but … the average age out here is under 25. They’re brave guys.”

Terry has the memory. He knows that pearl light. The danger on the horizon. Not these young surfers, though. Take Oscar Loudon, 16, from Byron.

“I’m so excited. Maybe I could score the wave of my life,” he says. “I’m just frothing. You can’t be afraid. You gotta just go out there and send it.”

He disappears down the beach, hooting, screeching, frothing, a millennial with no historical touchstone, no disaster memory like Terry. Oscar’s generation sees Alfred as a giver, not a taker. A giver of maybe the wave of a ­lifetime.

Seaside Lennox Head, just south of Byron Bay, is so empty you could fire a cannon down the main drag. There are more sporadic sandbags, and some cafes open for business, the rain now sheeting.

An elderly couple sit at a table on a sheltered section of the footpath, enjoying coffee in the ­approaching gloom, and you wonder if natural disasters bring out two types of human beings – those who carry on, oblivious to what’s happening around them, and those who cling to the window ledge, waiting for the apocalypse.

In Ballina, south of Lennox, Katrina Porteus, drenched to the bone, is shovelling sand into hessian bags at a pop-up SES centre at the back of the bowling alley. She bought a house on Riverside Drive in Ballina four months before the region’s most recent flooding event in early 2022, a catastrophe of Biblical proportions that also decimated Lismore.

“I don’t want to have to rip all the walls and floors out again,” she says. “It’d be good if we could keep the water out.”

Ballina deputy mayor Damian Loone, the former Sydney detective famous for his work on the Christopher Dawson murder case immortalised in The Teacher’s Pet podcast, says the locals are made of tough stuff. “Ballina residents are pretty resilient,” he says. “We’ve had floods, but this is the first time in a while we’ve been on cyclone watch. Everyone’s offering to help each other. We faced a catastrophe not that long ago. So everyone knows what’s going on.”

Inland at Lismore, which was scoured by floodwaters almost three years ago to the day, the scars of that disaster are still everywhere. Abandoned houses. Shuttered businesses. Piles of debris. In the CBD it was as if someone had poked an ant’s nest.

Everywhere were SES personnel and workers in hi-vis vests. The fridges and fryers of a pub and some take-away businesses were being packed into trucks, cars and even horse floats. There was a weary here-we-go-again countenance about the place. Northern Rivers NSW SES issued a severe weather warning.

“You should stay indoors and avoid any unnecessary travel,” it said. “If you need to evacuate in the next 48 hours we advise you leave as early as possible.”

It was red-bin night in some parts of the Northern Rivers. Yellow bins in others. Out the front of driveways they stood, some tipped over by the wind, most upright, sentinels to civility and the normal way of things. Waiting for Alfred, life tried to hold it together.