It’s a morning ritual. Pick up the surfboard not long after sunrise has paled the eastern sky and descend through the rainforest to the small beach below. It’s a good day if the Pacific’s swells are pumping and it’s a good day when the swell is only small. For many who live in this fortunate  Read more »

Local currencies are coming back into popularity to judge by a couple issued by Transition initiatives in the UK. Australian social innovators, however, experimented with a local currency well before the British…

It’s not the town, its the landscape it is set in that gives the Byron region its spectacular character. This I was taught by a sea eagle and by quietness as I gazed over coast and ocean to a northern horizon bounded by mountains…

MARCH DAYS ARE MILD DAYS in the sleepy northern NSW town of Lismore. And this year they were no different…

A discussion with local fishermen hauling in their catch on a Byron Bay beach in 2006 disclosed how they might be the losers had environmentalists succeeded in having the area zoned as a marine reserve…

First published in 2008. IF YOU HAVE TIME TO HANG AROUND, I’ll tell you a little story about literature and coincidence. It’s not a significant story nor an exciting one, rather a recounting on one of those minor occurrences that sometimes appear in our lives. A couple months ago I accidentally embarked on a Jack  Read more »

The first time I saw it, the North Coast lay inspiring and revealed from my vantage point part way down a steep, winding road that took me to the coastal plain below…