Australasia > Australia > New South Wales > Byron Bay > Articles > Byron Bay: From Hippie to Chichi

“The only trouble with paradise,” a ‘blow-in’ Sydney surfie told me as she picked up her longboard, “is that everyone wants a piece of it.” Paradise Australian-style is miles of pristine sand, whipbirds at dawn and a flotation tank across from Woolworth's. Emerald parrots screech in casuarina groves. Heavenly footpaths wind through rainforests. Dread-locked surfers catch long right-hander breaks while superannuated retirees throw king prawns on the barbie.

This Aussie-kingdom-come is Byron Bay, surfing mecca and baby boomer utopia, Greens' heartland and honeymooners' hideaway; an hedonistic haven where the sun shines, the wide blue Pacific is always warm and 1.7 million visitors - including me - will check in for a Bonza Time this year.

It was James Cook who gave Cape Byron - the most easterly tip of Australia - its name, in 1770. One hundred years later the first tourist followed. Others soon steamed into the Bay. A pier and hotels were built and Byron declared itself to be a seaside resort, although tourism was somewhat hindered by the stink of the town's abattoir. It closed down about the time that Californian surfers added Byron to the international surf circuit.

Now I'm no beach person. I don't tan, as Woody Allen once said, I stroke. But when I dropped into town for a day I ended up staying a week. Byron cast a spell over me, and not just because half-a-dozen naked Swedes were dancing around the lighthouse. Spectacular natural wonders enchant every visitor. Beneath the Cape's rugged cliff faces, washed by blue, mauve and aquamarine seas, migrating Humpback whales can be heard breathing at sunrise. Tandem hang-gliders soar above schools of dolphin. Scuba divers explore the Julian Rocks Marine Reserve while bushwalkers stride into the rolling green hinterlands, through koala forests and macadamia plantations. And no one can resist the temptation to sprint along the sand and leap into the ocean.

Byron's alternative, laid-back residents have long fought to defend this subtropical paradise. Ten years ago, an unlikely alliance of environmentalists and local businesses was formed to stop construction of the biggest resort in New South Wales. Club Med had proposed building an 800 unit, $85 million resort which would have transformed Byron into another populist, high-rise Gold Coast. The alliance's 'No Club Med' campaign focused local opposition. More than half of the residents took to the streets. After four years of meetings and hearings, the Land and Environment Court withdrew planning approval for the scheme.

So, today, instead of ranks of concrete towers, small, exclusive hotels and restaurants have taken root among old Byron's pastel shade, tin-roofed bungalows, set back from the road on green verges overhung with gums and eucalyptus. Bob and Patti Lowry, who converted an abandoned piggery into the vibrant Arts Factory Lodge and Supernatural restaurant, have built two retreats in town. Their intimate Garden Burées comprises split-level Balinese houses enclosed by tranquil private gardens. The Peak is a lofty sanctuary with views of the Border ranges silhouetted smoky-blue against the sky.

One balmy morning I found myself at Azabu, a luxury lodge of five suites set amongst remnant rain forest. On the teak deck, among guests freshly polished from the Aveda Day Spa, I met Ward Gunn, a passionate advocate of native Australian cuisine, glowing with rude health.

”In Sydney I was working as a chef 60 or 70 hours a week,” Gunn explained over a cup of Stovetopper espresso. 'The food was increasingly packaged: steaks pre-cut and apples waxed. The connection to the farmer had been lost. Then my apprentice introduced me to ‘bush tucker’. Suddenly I saw a way to bring me closer to the land.”

Gunn quit the city, settled in a Rainbow Country bushfood farm and - at the Bay Pavilion restaurant and now at Azabu - began incorporating rainforest produce into his cooking, helping to develop a remarkable, regional cuisine. His favoured Mod Oz dishes include gum-smoked crocodile in kakadu plum sauce, kangaroo with hot, fruity Dorrigo peppers and swordfish baked in paper bark and infused with aniseed myrtle. A top dessert is apple and riberry pie, a native spicefruit with a ginger-clove- cherry taste.

“This is the new Australia: a glass of full-on red in your hand and clean, green, gourmet tucker on the barbie,” said Gunn. “Life can be a struggle sometimes,” he laughed, “but here in Byron it's a delicious struggle.”

I met another 'blow in' on the balcony of his dazzling white villa overlooking the sea. Nick Towers arrived from England in 1967, Byron's breathtaking natural beauty reminding him of the Bamburgh coast of his youth. “I came to Australia looking for that same beach and found it here - with endless sunshine.”

Towers started a fruit farm, growing bananas and avocados. The American surfers, with Malibu boards balanced on their heads, christened him the Avocado Man. “Byron was then a working class, tin-pot town. There was only one restaurant, Mexican Mick's, where all the surfies ate. When the police took a dislike to them they'd run them out of town.”

The Avocado Man retrained as an auctioneer, sold his plantation and began to deal in property. In 1973 the Aquarius Festival in nearby Nimbin celebrated the 'back-to-the-land' counter-culture movement. Thousands of students and hippies were drawn to the region, transforming the 'tin-pot town'. Tepees mushroomed along the beach. Yoga teachers took over the community centre. Dairy and cattle farmers sold up to make way for backpacker hostels. Twenty years later, wealthy Sydneysiders snatched the bargain beach shacks where they'd partied as teenagers. Property prices doubled in a year, then doubled again. Now a good lot sells in excess of a million dollars.

“When I was a child in Northumberland,” Towers remembered, “we played a game counting the stars. If you managed to count seven stars you were granted a wish. Here in paradise I can count 700 stars on a good night.”

For most visitors, as well as new residents, Byron does still seem to fringe on perfection. The beaches stretch 40 miles or more northwards to the Gold Coast. To the south, the rust-red Seven Mile Beach Road winds through the Broken Head Nature Reserve from where rough trails plunge down to hidden sandy coves, deserted but for the fine salt spray sweeping up against the enclosing hills. Families, if they ever manage to get off the beach, can tuck into gourmet ice cream at Australia's finest gelateria, learn to play the didgeridoo and have their aura photographed at the Crystal Castle. Horse riding and white water rafting are available, as are an abundance of relaxed art and crafts stores.

And the legacy of the Aquarius Festival lives on, bestowing on Byron the highest concentration of spiritual healers per capita in the western world. At nearby Mullumbimby - best known for 'Mullumbimby Madness' marijuana - weekenders sip on wheat grass and ginger takeaways, indulge in Experimental Tarot, Deep Foot Work Reflexology and 'Inversion Workshops' with Mrika, ‘the Inversion Queen'. Eco-warriors can sign up to any number of worthy causes. “Red Alert!” cried a sign outside Om Gaia 'the North Coast's only organic juice bar', “Activists needed to be arrested at Naranba to stop food irradiation!”

“It may surprise you, but the people coming to Byron in the last five years want to think,” said Chris Hanley, founder of the Byron Bay Writers' Festival, “as well as enjoy themselves.”

The hugely-popular Festival was created in 1997 as an egalitarian event, reflecting the diverse nature of contemporary Australian writing and reading.

“We made it a specific objective to keep away the big names authors,” the Festival director Jill Eddington told me. “So there are no barriers here, no airs and graces. Our writers feel special because they are treated as equals. Ours is a gathering of ideas, rather than publishers' promotion campaigns.”

Last year the Festival featured a dozen indigenous authors from Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Over three days in August 17,500 people came to listen to these and 80 other writers.

”More than half of our audience consider themselves to be writers as well as readers,” said Eddington. “So those seeking professional development can speak to one another over a beer, on the beach, in a hot tub. People here are hungry for informed opinion and debate. We try to give it to them.”

The festival has had a dramatic effect on the intellectual life of Byron. In its first year Hanley could only find two local authors to invite to participate. By last year 50 professional writers had settled in the area.

Byron is also home to the East Coast Blues and Roots Festival, a pivotal event in the Australian music scene. Every Easter weekend 25,000 fans descend on the town to listen to over 120 international performers including such names as John Hammond, Arlo Guthrie and Ben Harper.

Given the passion for preserving Byron Bay, it's a paradox that today this Aussie paradise is not so much a community as a society of diverse cliques: environmental chefs, world class surfers, militant Greens, hobby farmers, sun-tanned scribblers - and the last locals driving to the beach in their new Landcruisers.

“All the pervasive effects of our success are now having the ultimate effect on the community,” mayor Tom Wilson explained to me in the Shire Council office. “The genuine core of local people has been pushed out not because of economic pressure but because of economic windfall.”

Most of the town's long-term residents have now sold their bungalows on the ocean and bought into brick veneer subdivisions with manicured lawns, banking a few hundred thousand dollars in the process.

“Many people are hard-put to resist the opportunity, and who can blame them? But it eats away at the fabric. Nevertheless,” the mayor insisted, “Byron will always fight to be a community, not a commodity.”

And to the rest of us - the 'blow in' surfies, dancing Swedes and visitors kayaking among dolphins, this heavenly coastal town will remain nearly paradise.

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