The way south from Byron Bay passes through the spreading southern suburbs of the holiday town and enters the adjoining dormitory settlement of Suffolk Park where the road to Bangalow takes off. Don’t stop in Suffolk unless your brain requires caffeinating to start the day—you can get a reasonable cup at the
cafe in town or, at other times of the day, a cold beer at the pub—for we are southward bound… not far southward, it turns out.

Ascend the gentle uphill that takes you out of Suffolk, pass Bateson’s quarry that has so troubled local greens at times and do as the sign suggests—turn off the Byron-Ballina road and head down to Broken Head.

If you follow the narrow asphalt it’s full length, all of a few kilometers, you stop where the road stops—at the car park behind the beach. Look behind and you see the green grass of the caravan park, largely bereft of happy campers a good part of the year but packed full come the holidays. This and similar places hidden along the east coast are the surviving remnants of Australia’s traditional family holiday, end points of so many long road trips over the generations that are etched into the memory of today’s adults.

The caravan park occupies the lower slope of the headland and, standing there, you see the yellow sand of a long, long beach backed by low, coastal scrubland that stretches all the way to Cozy Corner at the foot of Cape Byron. Somewhere along there, hidden by the spray from the sea, is the beachfront of Suffolk Park. In the opposite direction a walking track takes you along the rugged, rocky coast of the Broken Head Reserve, a rough remnant of coastal-rainforest-clad slope falling steeply from ridge to sea to culminate in cliffs, rocky headlands and small, sandy beaches. The only noise here is the surge of the surf punctuated now and then by the raucous call of some large bird.

It’s that ridge above the coast that we are bound for today.

Finding Serendipity

Those who know where they are going leave the asphalt that connects the Byron-Ballina road to the beach and take an inconspicuous turnoff. This soon becomes a gravel road barely wide enough for small cars to pass. It’s is a low-gear drive that winds and twists its rocky way upwards through the coastal rainforest, a green wall of tall trees, dark understorey and dangling vine from which the occasional scrub turkey dashes suicidally to cross the road.

A few kilometers go by… then the road crests at the ranger station and house. Go further and you begin the descent to Seven Mile Beach, one of the area’s lesser-frequented coastal locales, and you pass the pyramidal form of the house built decades ago by surfing movie producer, George Greenough.

Today, though, we leave the road opposite the rangers station where a small sign carries the name ‘Serendipity’.

That proposal crashed, as did the Brigade, on the hard rocks of corruption…

Told by the man who bought the property and the hand built house that sits on the crest of the ridge, it was acquired so that he and his fellow shareholders and residents could protect the rainforest reserve from developers.

Protection of this sort has a fine history here on NSW’s far north coast. Every few years, it seems, locals have a new development proposal to stop. Back in the 1980s it was the White Shoe Brigade form Jo Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland. That proposal crashed, as did the Brigade, on the hard rocks of corruption.

In the 90s Club Med became one of the casualties, the proposal stillborn well before the first hole could be dug. The latest points of conflict have been the tourism development of department story millionaire, Harvey Norman, and the redevelopment of an existing holiday park on the north side of town. Both of those went ahead, but not without scrutiny by local environmental interests. The incident led to Harvey offering verbal criticism of locals, which, like an incident around the same time with television fishing series host, Rex Hunt, did not go down well with locals.

Serendipity dates from the 1970s when Ian Cohen, who founded the establishment, came to town. Ian, long the popular, sometimes vociferous Greens MP for the region, retired from parliament with the state election of 2011. That transition from local environmental campaigner (that included several unsuccessful runs in local government elections) to politician brought a personality change in Ian, something of a mellowing. It’s unlikely that this can be put down simply to growing into middle age, rather it’s an example of how environments shape and change people. Gone is the loud, confrontational  campaigner, now given way to the quieter but no less determined, and far more politically savvy, politician.

To see Serendipity as merely another manifestation of the intentional community movement of the 70s is to misunderstand the place, it’s origin and it’s history.

When Ian and his shareholders acquired what would become the de-facto intentional community of Serendipity, they found themselves the owners of a large wooden house surrounded by a broad verandah supported by thick treelike posts, and a large forested expanse of land that falls from the ridge crest inland and downslope towards the Byron-Ballina road. Here they set up home, conveniently close to the track that leads downhill to the surfing beach.
To see Serendipity as merely another manifestation of the intentional community movement of the 70s is to misunderstand the place, it’s origin and it’s history.

Ian is a tall, strongly built, suntanned man whose spiritual interests have more to do with Buddhism than his family’s Judaism. Veteran of numerous environmental campaigns stemming right back to those against sand mining, Ian rose to prominence through his dedication to making the natural environment one that would be worthwhile passing on to future generations. He also had a reputation as a fiery character, his loud voice somehow amplified by his tall stature. Eventually, his environmental campaigning would lead from the close dampness of the rainforest around Serendipity to the quiet corridors of state parliament.

An unusual sort of domesticity

A succession of visitors made their way to Serendipity. The place had a reputation as something of a refuge, a shelter you could go to chill out after some particularly gruelling environmental campaign. Perhaps more than any other intentional community, and largely thanks to Ian’s presence, Serendipity was closely connected to the campaigns of the natural environment that so strongly marked the latter decades of the Twentieth Century. By the 1990s, however, residents were attempting to steer Serendipity away from this role. Yes, Serendipity had been a community settlement but it was always something more than this.

At Serendipity, Ian occupied one of the outbuildings adjacent to the house. They were single room dwellings somehow appropriate to the materially simple life enjoyed by the residents. Others lived in similar structures and at one time there was someone living in a dilapidated van tucked below the rainforest trees, their power supply consisting of a vary long extension cable strung from house to tree to van.

Inside, the house consisted of a spacious living/dining area, a large bathroom, a bedroom and a set of stairs that took you to an upstairs room housing a large Buddha statue and used for yoga and meditation. During the 1990s, a couple with a small child bought a share in Serendipity and moved into the bedroom.

On clear days you could stand on the verandah and looking north and you might just be able to discern the peak of Mt Warning

The bathroom at Serendipity came with a conventional flush toilet but this was seldom used. A more rustic and, according to Ian, environmentally sound double pit toilet was built on a ledge flattened into the slope between house and road. Concealed by the bush, it was not visible from the road or from the house above, but passing vehicles could be momentarily glimpsed through the vegetation as they passed.

Like so many rural homes, Serendipity harvested the rain that fell on it’s roof and stored it in a large, galvanized iron tank on the eastern side of the house. The place would today be described as a ‘sustainable house’, however it was no different in this respect to it’s contemporaries on intentional communities and to rural dwellings where self-provisioning in water, energy and food was merely business as usual.

On clear days you could stand on the verandah and looking north and you might just be able to discern the peak of Mt Warning on the horizon. Look closer, where the land forms the top of a gentle slope and you would see a vegetable garden that descended to the scrub below as low terraces. This was the province of the more enthusiastic residents but it was not an intensively managed garden and could have been far more productive that it was. This reflected the reality that most of the residents worked and had only limited time to devote to the garden. Most of the food that people ate at Serendipity came from organic retailers in Byron. In this sense the place did not live up to the stereotype of the ‘self-sufficient’ community, but it never set out to do so and, anyway, that had more to do with myth than reality. In this way it might not have been all that different to other intentional communities.

Food was a communal affair at least once a week. On Friday evenings residents would make the effort to be home to share an evening meal. Salad, as always, played a big part in the Serendipity diet and meat never made an appearance —Serendipity was a vegetarian household. It was also an alcohol-free household, those feeling the need for a cold beer on hot summer evenings being forced down the road to Byron’s bars.

Ambience subdued and quiet

Life at Serendipity changed over the years, as you would expect. Generally, during my association with the place, the shared meals were convivial but the day to day ambiance of the place was subdued and quiet. This was all to the good in as much as the place served as a refuge from the chaos of life beyond. Sometimes there would be a flurry of activity as when banners needed painting for some campaign or other, but these times were the exception.

For Peter, starting the day by driving his Kombi into Byron was his Monday to Friday reality…he worked in the childcare centre in town. For Fiona, the day started in her Yellow Mitsubishi van but at the Byron-Ballina road intersection she turned in the opposite direction to David, southwards for the run into Lennox Head where she worked at the local town planners studio. She would joke that she would leave work to come home to people painting banners to campaign against the projects her employer was engaged in the planning of.

Some days there was a complication when one of the local pythons would be found twined around the meusli container

So it was that some who lived at Serendipity had day jobs and would disappear in the morning to drive the winding gravel road to the hardtop. Like so many intentional communities, Serendipity residents were car dependent, public transport being non-existent beyond the bus service plying the Byron-Ballina road. Sometimes, the hardier would ride a bicycle to town. Like surfboards, there were several community bicycles. In an age when people await the arrival of peak oil and rising fuel prices, the isolation so sought out in the hills by some of those early communards is turning into a liability as distance equals increasing costs. Serendipity is better placed in this regard, being isolated from Byron but not beyond a bicycle commute.

If people were around in the evening other than the Friday shared meal, they would share in preparing food that would be eaten together from the low table, the eaters seated on cushions. Breakfasts were more or less personal affairs unless others were eating at the same time, and meusli from the communal muesli container was a standard for those start-of-day meals. Some days there was a complication when one of the local pythons would be found twined around the meusli container.

Living in a rainforest, wildlife becomes a daily presence. One or two green tree frogs would populate the kitchen sink. Pythons were a presence around the house and residents in the outbuildings would at night hear a slithering sound coming from the space between roof and ceiling. Another reptilian presence was the long, slim brown tree snake. Unlike the python, these were venomous though reputedly not aggressive. People were more cautious around them and the family in the bedroom inside the house were a little concerned to discover the creatures in the wall cavity. Once, a child staying at Serendipity, a Tasmanian named Ailsa, came inside to report a snake in the ferns by the front door.

There was a more persistent form of wildlife than slithering, legless reptiles, however. These were flying insects— mosquitoes—and their presence required sleeping under a mosquito net. No one should have been surprised at their presence in the rainforest, though, as it is their habitat.

People – variety, temperaments and quite a mix

During my association with Serendipity there were two shareholding residents living there—Ian and Penny—before the family moved in.

Penny was an ex of Ian’s, a slim, olive skinned young woman with dark curly hair that fell to shoulder length, and large brown eyes. Of lithe build, Penny could be described as of Mediterranean appearance and, in fact, was of Greek heritage. Her manner was calm but you could see an alert sharpness behind those sparkling eyes and a potential to be critical were that ever required.

Like Ian, Penny had a history of involvement in environmental campaigning and with the help of Gummy, a quietly spoken but practical man living at Tuntable Falls community in the hills behind Nimbin—an hour and a half drive into the hinterland west of Broken Head—she built a small, two level cottage on the south-facing slope just below the parking area at Serendipity. Needless to say, neither of them saw any value in consulting the council’s building inspector about the construction. Eventually, she fell in with Gummy and moved to Tuntable.

All of those I met at Serendipity could be described as calm personalities though Ian, and I suspect Penny, could be fiery when riled. I saw this once when I told Ian that, in his absence, someone he knew had pitched a tipi in a clearing further into the property. Ian’s reaction immediately made it clear that he was not happy with this or with the person and I believe he soon asked him to move on. Clearly, there was some history there. Better not to ask, I figured.

Peter was not given to emotional surges. He rented at Serendipity and, as already revealed, worked at a child care centre in Byron, his calm personality no doubt an asset in the job. Somewhere in his early thirties at the time, David was not tall but was slim of build and relaxed of speech, his wavy brown hair worn pushed back from his tanned face. He seemed content with his life in the little community and in his work in town, however David lived with a challenge.

As already told, Serendipity had gained a reputation as something of a rest and recreation centre. One day, a woman with a young child in tow turned up. She must have been in her thirties and was quite attractive… not what you would call either tall or short. She wore her dark hair to below ear but above shoulder length. Her olive complexion and softness of speech made her one of those women who some men feel an instant rapport with and who are easy to like.  And so it was that this was the way Peter reacted, so much that, after her few days staying at Serendipity, he asked her to stay on… with him. She politely declined and for Peter it was opportunity lost as she returned to Sydney.

One day, a police officer turned up at Serendipity. He was looking for Peter who that afternoon had driven his Kombi off the winding gravel road and down into the rainforest, where it came to an abrupt stop. He was unhurt but the incident revealed that challenge that Peter was living with—his struggle with alcohol. The good news is that, years after we had all left Serendipity, Peter was achieving success in this struggle.

Overall, Serendipity was a quiet place to live, something of a world set in the rainforest and apart from the tourism of the town and coastal strip

Sometimes, you associate a particular food with a particular person. And, so, sprouted ryegrain bread came to be associated with Warren. Why? Because he baked the stuff. You would walk out onto the verandah and there, resting quietly in the sun, would be several loaves of the moist, heavy stuff curing, or whatever it is that sprouted bread does in the sun.

Short of stature but not of imagination, Warren was one of those people on whom it is difficult to pin an age. My guess is that he was in his late twenties or early thirties. Appearance wise, Warren would have looked at home during the heyday of the intentional community movement. Long, dark hair was parted in the middle so that it flopped almost to his shoulders, though, unlike so many of that time alluded to, he remained clean shaven. Personality wise, he was pleasant company and quiet, the impression being of someone reflective and capable of deep thought.

A house, a community

So this was Serendipity, a house on the edge of the forest atop the high ridge of the rainforest reserve. Of course it was more than a house on a block of land—it was a small community made up of those who lived there. It wasn’t a tight community and it was relaxed in its doings. It was a changing community as people came and went but it retained a stability that was cohesive.

Overall, Serendipity was a quiet place to live, something of a world set in the rainforest and apart from the tourism of the town and coastal strip. In that way it could have been seen as a refuge, however those that lived there were firmly engaged in the world beyond. A monastery Serendipity was not.

Precious times

Once, Fiona was offered a share in the place but turned down the offer, and in the years since she has wondered at the wisdom of that decision. So do I.

They were precious times for me, those short years I was associated with Serendipity and the people that life and its currents of uncertainty threw together there. I recall them all, some clearer than others, and they are fond memories. I also remember the place… the big timber house, the outbuildings where people lived… the loo in the bush on the slope… the python in the kitchen… Warren’s sprouted rye bread… the garden… the forest… and that long, winding gravel road all the way down to Broken Head and beyond.

Serendipity is still there on the edge of the rainforest on the crest of that ridge. And so is that little sign that points from the road.

Now that he has retired from parliament, Ian might have more time to rise with the first light of dawn, pick up one of the shared surfboards and set off downhill through the rainforest to the surging sea. Next time, let’s hope that he avoids stepping over that log across the track and onto a python, or having to quickly exit the water again after a menacing dark shape with dorsal fin passes below his surfboard.

Photos show the currency issued by the combined northern NSW LETSystems in the 1990s.

IN THE LATE 1990s the combined LETS systems of the NSW Northern Rivers region — aka the Rainbow Region — issued a printed local currency, possibly the first issue of such currency in recent times.

The currency was negotiable for LETS transactions — LETS is an acronym for Local Exchange and Trading System — by members of Northern Rivers, Nimbin and Mullum Byron Tweed LETSystems.

The full range of LETS local currency

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LETS is a community-based trading system than operates either cashless or with partial federal currency. This latter was introduced in the 1990s so that people could meet taxation and other obligations only serviceable in federal currency. Usually, LETS transactions are negotiated between supplier and user for an agreed price in LETS credits, the transaction being entered on a database and member accounts adjusted accordingly. This enables trading without direct reciprocal exchange, which diffentiates LETS from barter where the exchange of goods and services is direct between those in the transaction. With LETS, you don’t have to swap something of equal value with the person you trade with.

Once, Blue Mountains LETS, a mere 90 minutes by electric train west from Sydney, was the largest such system in the world. Blue Mountains LETS negotiated with the Department to Social Security to clear up ambiguities around beneficiaries receiving payment in LETS for trading in the community. According to Blue Mountains LETS, trading made it possible for unemployed people to maintain their worklife skills and was, therefore, a socially beneficially thing.

One Australian LETSystem — I don’t recall whether it was Blue Mountains LETS — approached the taxation office about paying tax in local LETS currency. Unfortunately, the department declined.

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Australia a LETS early adopter

As I understand the history, LETS was developed in Canada by Michael Linton. He came out to Australia in the 1990s and spent some time here working on LETSystems, particularly one that never eventuated. That was Sydney LETS and Michael and locals working with him envisioned it as a metropolitan-wide trading system.

I recall Michael and the team working into the night at the Old Randwick Community Centre in Bundock Street, not all that far from the newer centre presently being retrofitted for energy and water efficiency and being fitted with a PIG — a Permaculture Interpretive Garden which will serve as a training garden for Randwick City Council’s Sustainable Gardening course for home and community gardeners, and for school and other visitors to the planned education program.

Somehow, the association of LETS with the Centre is fitting as, just down the hall from the LETS office was the office of another metropolitan group that spawned a number of regional sub-groups, Permaculture Sydney. We offered our 110 hour Permaculture Design Course from the premises and out of that grew the Centre’s own community garden — Randwick Community Organic Garden.

Sydney LETS didn’t get quite as far as issuing its own currency, however.

The local LETS currency is explained on the flip side of each note.

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Why northern NSW?

Why was it that northern NSW proved economically fertile ground for the issuing of a local currency?

I believe the answer is due to demographic reasons. The region, particularly the sector inland from Byran Bay on the coast, through the regional small city of Lismore and further inland to the green fields around Nimbin became Australia’s premier counterculture zone in the early 1970s and attracted a  youthful and mainly innovative group of what was then known as ‘new settlers’ — rural reinhabitants whose previous lives had been spent in the cities. These people, searching for new ways of living, created their own culture over the years and, as it and they matured, the milieu proved intellectually and culturally susceptible to novel ideas like starting your own currency.

Seen in this light, the Northern Rivers LETS currency can be seen as a natural outgrowth, as an emergent property, of the culture that emerged in that region in those not-really-so-distant days.

The notes were similar size to federal dollars, looked like money and had a texture similar to federal currency. This afforded them a certain credibility and made use of what people already knew about money. Nimbin Rocks, a prominent local landmark, is seen in the background with the ranges surrounding the town of Nimbin. The snake suggests the Rainbow Serpent of Aboriginal mythology and is a recognition of the place and role of the local Badndjalung people in the landscape.

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Bloom and decline

It was the permaculture movement of the 1980s that had much to do with the development of LETSystems in Australia. Robert Rosen, an innovator in the permaculture approach to economics and ethical investment has written on this website about the history of permaculture’s involvement in community economics through initiatives such as the Permaculture Earthbank. Also at work at the time was social investment innovator, Damien Lynch, who started with August Investments (still going) and went on to help found Australian Ethical and Ecoforest Pty Ltd.

In many ways, the permaculture of the 1980s was quite different to what it is today. Then, there was, proportionally, a great deal more focus on and involvement in things economic and community development than, perhaps, there is today. For one thing, the ideas of EF Schumacher, the British economist who wrote Small Is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered were more in the forefront or permaculture thinking. There was an active interest in technologies such as the intermediate or appropriate technologies championed by Schumacher. There was also influence from an economic-oriented US group, the Schumacher Society.

Some of those early permaculture adopters had a more social focus to their use of the design system, being involved in community work of different sorts. Being both a part of mainstream society and at the cutting edge of a new social movement, it was more or less natural that they would turn their attention to innovations like LETS when it came along.

Soon, regional permaculture associations had adopted LETS trading. Then those in the permaculture of that time let it go where it wanted to go. LETS spread and broadened and the golden age of LETS in Australia dawned like a warm orange sun coming over the horizon.

This was the 1990s. Around the start of the new century however, the number of LETSystems had gone into decline. “What’s happened to LETS?”, was a question that you would be asked. Blue Mountains LETS shrunk as did others. LETS survived, but as a microcosm of its earlier promise.

I don’t know why this happened, why something that caught the public imagination and bloomed went into sudden decline. Was here insufficient popularisation and recruitment into LETSystems? Was it that people became wealthier and found no need for LETS? Did development of the system fall below a critical level? Did permaculture change and take on a new focus?

One explanation I have encountered a number of times is that you couldn’t buy all that much by way of daily living necessities through LETSystems. It was easy to trade for a massage or some similar service, but an incapacity to buy food, construction materials and some skills became LETS’ weak point. This might be something worthy of the emerging community currencies mulling over.

Images of local wildlife lend the LETS notes a bioregional character and suggest coexistence between nature and human culture. The scene depicts the broad expanse of water that is Byron Bay and beaches stretch far to the north. The prominent peak on the horizon is Mt Warning, named by Captain Cook the navigator on his 1770 transit of the Australian East Coast. Mt Warning, the first point of the Australian maintand to be touched by the morning's sunlight, is flanked by the Border Ranges, the political boundary between the states of New South Wales and Queensland.

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A new dawn and rebirth

It was only a couple days ago that someone said this to me: “You know, those things we were ivolved in years ago are only now coming into their own time”.

What he was saying was that we should be cognisant of the ideas innovation curve when we look back on these innovations in social history, such as permaculture and LETS. All new ideas are born of innovators on the creative fringe of society, are taken up by early adopters who tweak the innovators’ ideas and make them workable and then are taken up by early and later mass adopters.

Could it be that this early phase of LETS, whose history I have briefly described, was the innovator and early adopter stage? And that what we are now seeing with what seems to be a creeping popularity of LETS and local currency ideas being the start of a late early adopter phase, a time when the wrinkles of those early attempts will be ironed out of the fabric of community econmics and newer, better systems developed? Could this be where the work of the Transition movement in local currencies fits into the development of the idea?

I hope so. The continuance of LETSystems suggests a level of popularity for an idea that persists. It may be that the permaculture movement and the first phase of community economics focused on LETS in the 1990s has unconsciously handed on the idea to the emerging Transition movement and that it is here that we will see the action. People and ideas, we know, flow from place to place and come together in new milieus that emerge from the turmoil and churn of societies and global trends. This would comply with a trend that has seen ideas popularised in the permaculture movement only to be taken up and developed fully by organisations and movements beyond permaculture.

Whether these are the social dynamics that will recreate those early innovations in LETS and similar schemes as something new and exciting enough to capture the public imagination will be known in time. Let’s watch and, perhaps, help make it happen.

More on LETS in Australia: Find links to LETSystems across the continent — http://www.lets.org.au/

The echidna is found is the forests of northern NSW where it digs for insects with its long snout. It is another of the local wildlife to appear on the notes.

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And there it is. A big bird, white head and chest, black wings, in a big blue seascape edged by the golden sands of a coastline that stretches all the way north towards the Gold Coast.

An iconic image of the the far north coast of NSW — Mt Warning on the horizon, the bay and a sea eagle.

On my morning walks from town to Cape Byron and back I got to know that big grey bird that the walker told me about. It was often there on that broken branch of that grayed, dead tree. One day, I was lucky enough to watch it feeding on some silvery fish it had scooped from the ocean surface. Other times it would sit passively, only the occasional and barely perceptible movement of its head giving away the fact that it was awake.

I saw that walker who had told me about the bird again, too. He was one of the early morning regulars, people who walk by themselves or with a friend or two to to get some exercise before the heat of the day made such activities sweaty and uncomfortable. They start from somewhere in town and walk up the road that takes you to the lighthouse, then down the track along the edge of the cliffline, down to Wattegos Beach. Or, sometimes, they — and I — might go other way with the steeper climb up the cliffline track making a tougher route.

When you start early enough you made the walk in the cooler light of early morning. Leave the same time in winter and you started by streetlight, the sun still well below the horizon. There’s a delicious strangeness to starting then and you arrived on Cape Byron in time to watch the sun rise from the eastern ocean.

On those winter mornings, when you to look to the northern horizon and see the pale glow there, you realise just how close is the Gold Coast. Look hard enough when the air is clear — binoculars help — and you see the top of of some of those Gold Coast high-rise spires. Closer at hand, though still a great many kilometres across the bay, are the scattered lights of the Pottsville area and, looking out, I wonder if there is some early riser at the same time looking towards the strobing beacon of Cape Byron on which I stood.

The lighthouse on Cape Byron seen on an early morning walk to the Cape

Sometimes, there’s the visual treat of watching a pod of dolphins close to the shore or, in the right season, of watching a humpback whale leap from the sea to splash down into it with a great spray of foam. This is a special place and it was fortunate to live here.

Seen from Cape Byron, the sun emerges from the Pacific. The sculpture was one of a number along the Cape Byron walking track during the annual sculpture festival.

Less a town than a landscape

Some say that Byron isn’t much of a town… that it doesn’t have the visual cohesiveness of Noosa’s town centre, up on the Sunshine Coast, that it is overpopulated by transients… but that’s not what matters. What matters is not the town itself but its setting, for the best thing about this nook of the north coast is the landscape. Where else do you find visions of long beaches and hills and distant mountains framing your northern horizon?

That’s why I always stop on those early morning hikes to sit and gaze from Cape Byron, to see the landscape in the grays of an early winter morning with the lights of town and farmstead still twinkling in the folds of the hills and along the stretch of the coastline, just before the sun comes over the horizon; to see the that vast bay and those mountains painted in the blues of early morning; then to descend the cliffline track, enter the low forest and emerge at the end of Wattegos.

The Border ranges and others closer frame the view from Cape Byron over Byron Bay to the north. Mt Warning, the plug of an ancient shield volcano, stands above the ranges to be the first point of the Australian mainland to receive the sun.

Those critics are right about Bryon — it isn’t much of a town. Just an ad-hoc collection of buildings, old and new, clinging to the bay at the southern end of its long, curving sweep where it takes a turn to culminate at the Cape.

But Byron is mare than a town. It’s a landscape where sea, mountain, coastal plain and beach come together in a geographic juxtaposition that pleases the eye and the mind, and in doing so made those early morning treks to the Cape so worthwhile, and the sight of that sea eagle perched on its dead branch a reminder that, here, geological history has created something truly inspiring and beautiful.

MARCH DAYS ARE MILD DAYS in the sleepy northern NSW town of Lismore. And this year they were no different. What was different was that the subtropical city of 28,000 played host to a rather unusual conference, a conference about food… local food.

The conference was the reason for Lismore City Council bringing me to town. I’m no stranger to the place and I sort of like it despite its steamy summer days when the sun beats down mercilessly and the sweat streams off the skin.Sort of like summer in Brisbane, only a little less extreme.

Arriving in town, I made my way to my council contact. Council is up on the hill, isolated from the city and well above flood level. Walking into the office, I was immediately cajoled into two radio interviews about food localisation and the conference, one on the ABC and the other on local radio. Although I once worked in radio, I still find something vague about telephone interviews, something disembodied, especially when I’m not the one asking the questions.

Northern Rivers locally produced food - adding up the kilometres.

Down the road and on the coast

First off, though, was participation on a panel three days before the Feeding Our Future conference in a town just 30 downhill kilometres from the Lismore metropolis.

There, the editor of Kindred magazine, Kali Weirdorf — Kindred is a parenting magazine with a heavy emphasis on sustainability — and Ken McLeod from the Ethos Foundation, a sustainability education organisation active in the northern region, had invited me to join Brisbane Food Connects’ Robert Pekin, a former farmer — and the manager of Byron Farmers’ Market who is an organic farmer — in a panel to have a conversation with Cuban urban agriculturist, Roberto Perez.

Robert just made it to the Byron Bay seminar, having hitched up from a Food Connect meeting in Yamba and waiting 275 cars for a lift (yes, he counted them). When he made it to the later Lismore conference, he accounted for the surfboard that he had squeezed into his car by telling the rather tall tale that it was required at the meeting to serve as a table, their being none of those in Yamba. There was something less than credible about his explanation.

Byron Bay Community Centre was packed for Roberto’s session. The video, The Power of Community, was screened first, then the panel asked questions of Roberto about Cuba’s experience in adjusting to its own peak oil crisis.

Permaculture educators, Tim Winton (Permaforest Trust) , who is also on the Permaculture International board of directors, and Robyn Francis (Permaculture Education) were present. Robyn, through the Cuba-Australia Permaculture Exchange, was hosting Roberto in Australia.

Northern Rivers imported food - adding up the kilometres.

The Byron event went well. Locally owned organics food company, Santos, co-sponsored the event.

At a meeting with Ken McLeod and Robert just up the highway in sunny Brunswick Heads next day, we lunched at the Riverside Café in view of the town’s shallow but broad river. At Riverside, the owners attempt to use as much locally produced food as possible. That, they say, can be a challenge as sourcing the locally grown is not all that easy. In part, that’s because the market for local food is only in its infancy and because there is no local foods logo or other means of eater assurance that what is claimed as local really is that.

The road west to localisation

It’s a nice drive along the winding two-way, following the asphalt from Byron to Lismore. The road twists around some wonderfully curvacaous bends just outside of Banlgalow, then passes below an arch of tree canopy that brings a refreshing coolness to the air before climbing up to the small town of Clunes. A place of old weatherboard homes juxtaposed with more recent urban brick houses, the road passes through town, past the sign on the outskirts advertising local coffee and then its more or less a downward trend (in topography, not quality of town or countryside) to the flats on the Lismore ourskirts.

The Feeding Our Future conference was held at Southern Cross University, one of the sponsors and organisers (that was done through Leigh Davidson, greywater expert and longtime resident of one of Australia’s oldest intentional communities). Other organisers were Tropo, the local organic farming agency, and Lismore City Council.

The lecture hall was packed. What had started as 80 registrations (registration was necessary to attend) a week or so before the conference had swollen to 200 in the days immediately prior. And, on the morning, there were many people turning up, cash in hand, wanting to attend. Their money was accepted, though they missed out on the tasty lunch of local food. People arriving were greeted with free coffee grown within 30km of Lismore as well as free passionfruit, similarly grown. All food on display at the stalls carried food miles on their signs.

Roberto, who was first speaker up, is a young Cuban with good English and a clear speaking voice, his accent not so pronounced that it gets in the way of understanding. It is said that he is perhaps the only Cuban speaking English with an Australian accent. That is attributable to the Australian PGAN (Permaculture Global Assistance Network) team that went to Havana in the 1990s to teach Cubans about urban agriculture and permaculture. A biologist, Roberto is an easy going and non-dogmatic person whose curly black hair falls to his shoulders, enclosing a trimmed beard and glasses. Could Roberto be, if it’s not stretching a likeness too far, the Che Geuvara of Cuba’s urban agricultural revolution?

Other speakers included Dr Leigh Davidson from SCU, Rebecca Lines-Kelly of NSW DPI (on the UK response to the recent food crisis), Alan Roberts of TROPO (who spoke on food miles and energy costs), David Roberts from TROPO (organic growing options), Jude Fanton from the Seed Savers Network and myself,  speaking on food localisation and community gardening’s role in it.

Immediately prior to the proceedings and again during lunch, Morag Gamble and Evan Raymond’s 15 minute video, Think Global, Eat Local, was screened. The video is designed as a conversation starter for discussions on food localisation and I think it succeeds in this goal quite well.

Growing soon in Lismore

This was a busy few days in the north. The next day saw a meeting with the local community garden crew, Rainbow Region Community Farms Inc. They are a capable bunch who have already operated a work for the dole farming skills project. We took a look at the spacious site that they may be able to acquire access to for a community garden.

We met at one of the few cafes open of a Sunday, the Goanna Bakery (in the city at 171 Keen Street), where you can get a good vego feed any day of the week, good coffee and a fresh loaf of bread. We bought a loaf of spelt and pumpkin, which I have to say was delicious, and carried it back to Sydney. Now, that’s food miles.

Rest asssured that Lismore, that flood-prone, sleepy town tucked into a valley inland of Byron Bay, is about to see a resurgence of community-based food activity. The town already has an organic farmers’ market and the presence of a focus such as the proposed community garden can only add impetus to the food localisation scene in the far north. That’s a scene boosted region-wide by farmers’ markets in, not only Lismore, but Bangalow, Byron Bay and New Brunswick.

So what has participating in these events and talking to these people shown? Well, I think that some of what I saw, some of the people I met, some of the organisations they are involved in leave me with the impression that the localisatiion idea is set to grow on the East Coast, and soon. There are ideas in the wind to stimulate this.

“This is probably one of our last catches around here”, said the fisherman. “It’s this marine park thing – it’ll be the end of us around here”.

Of middle age and weathered as you would expect a fisherman to be without becoming a characture of himself, he speaks with me briefly before joining his mates to drag in the net. It takes four of them to do that. I continue to take pictures, zooming out to capture the group then zooming in to get close ups of the large, silver fish flopping about entangled in the nylon lattice.

He had been fishing these waters for some years and the impending doom he feels comes from the campaign to declare the shoreline around here a marine park. For everyone, that will mean no fishing. For this fisherman, it means going further north or south and putting out his nets in the shallow coastal waters there.

The squeezing of the middle

The campaign to declare the marine park has been more than controversial around Byron Bay. It has been vociferously and determinedly fought both by those wanting the declaration and those that don’t. As usually in this town, the middle ground had been squeezed out and the controversy polarised.

The green lobby here can be a tough, uncompromising bunch and they fight hard. Over the past 25 years they have defeated some formidable opponents including the financially powerful Club Med. They have a lot of support in town and it comes for the most part not from some stereotypical green fringe but from conventional, middle class folk. Sure, that green fringe exists but it is its unmediated alliance with those respectable middle class folk who have made Byron home over these past three decades that brings it strength.

The polarisation of opinion, so typical of Byron Bay, means that local government elections are fought hard. Ask around, and you soon find that council has a bit of a reputation as a den of unruly renegades of varying political hues. It all depends who you ask, though, and those that support the present mayoral incumbent, Jan Barnam, will expound on her virtues. Not so her opponents who in 2005 had T-shirts printed bearing the slogan “Not happy Jan”. Just a further sign of the polarisation.

Cr Barnam is a Green, a product of Byron’s environmental struggles. Youthful looking with long brown hair down to her shoulders, her size belies an articulate, critical mind. She is given to the occasional display of temper, characteristics suited to a sometimes fiery politician. Jan is admired among the region’s environmentalists but not so by some others.

An effect of the squeezing of the middle ground of opinion, as has happened in Byron Bay, is that issues become polarised and their resolution comes down to the wielding of political strength. Its either this or that, not some middle ground that can achieve at least some of the demands of both contenders. This is the way that environmental politics have evolved in Australia.

Issue are not so simple

The voice of that professional fishermen hauling in his net has an edge of resentment to it. Clearly, he feels that he and his industry are being pushed out.

I’m not a fisherman and I like the idea of marine parks. I also like the idea that fishing can supply a town with a portion of its locally produced food and continue to supply a livelihood to local people. It’s iniquitous to be asked to choose between park and local food and that is why I resent the squeezing out of the middle band of options and opinion.

But it isn’t quite so simple, I discover. As I talked to the fisherman I learn that most of his catch goes north, up Brisbane way. What happens to it then I do not know. Does it go into the city’s food supply or is it cleaned, frozen and exported? Fair enough if it goes to feeding the city because Byron can be included in Brisbane’s regional food catchment – the region from which the city draws most of its food. It’s clear that the population of Byron is too small to sustain anything more than the smallest fishing industry.

I wonder, as I click the shutter of my camera time after time, whether I am witnessing the sun set on another of the country’s small industries. I feel a tinge of sadness at what might be the loss of a way of life in Byron Bay. At the same time I feel that the town might gain something with the declaration of a marine park. It’s a dilemma.

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 Kerouac reading binge. What happened was that I noticed the copy of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums on my bookshelf and thought it would make rewarding bedtime reading. It did. Finishing the novel a few nights later, I replaced it on the bookshelf and… it was almost automatic… took down the neighbouring volume – On The Road. My binge was underway.

This was not the first time I had read these books.

Words revisited

It was perhaps the late 1960s when I discovered those two Kerouac books. On The Road was my first find. As I started reading it I felt a little uncertain about Kerouac’s ‘spontaneous prose’ style of writing (I didn’t know then that it was called this), but sooner rather than later it caught on and I was hooked. His rolling spur-of-the-moment unpunctuated impressionistic writing was refreshingly different and I found On The Road, and The Dharma Bums – the next of his works I stumbled upon – to be exhilerating reading.

My discovery of Kerouac came after Alan Watts and just before Ernest Hemingway and Yvonne. Watts was an American Buddhist whose writing preceded the mass discovery of Eastern spirituality by hordes of youthful and footloose Western youths. That was during that great outpouring of the late 1960s, when so many went forth into the world to discover what was out there and, perhaps for the few, to discover themselves.

Now, to Ernest Hemingway. The novel was called For Whom the Bell Tolls, his tale of the Spanish Civil War. I recall sitting around the kitchen table in our big share house in Wooloomooloo discussing the book with the other residents. I even suggested that Yvonne’s sister, Sol, name her soon-to-be-child after one of the main characters. That didn’t happen, but the reading of Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Green Hills of Africa did.

Books trigger association

Books become associated with places and people. Yvonne, my campanion when I discovered Hemingway, was a spontaneous, go-getting, sometimes bold young woman with dark, shoulder length hair parted down the middle – when she actually bothered to brush it. Her boldness and assertiveness, I came to realise, covered a psychological vulnerability that was well hidden and that seldom surfaced in those years.

She showed no literary bent then. She didn’t read much and there were no books in her room. In fact, there wasn’t much at all in her room… a wardrobe for her minimalist set of uncoordinated clothes, a matress and a chair. Yet, years later, she would put together more than a few words of fiction and even venture into journalism while living in Beijing. That, I understand, was accidental, having more to do with serendipity than planning.

We were together there at 168 Cathedral Street, Wooloomooloo (“…there, in my own slum”, as she would later write) as the new decade dawned. Despite my interest in Hemingway at that time, I didn’t see her as a Hemingwayesque or Kerouacesque character, not consciously anyway, but her up-front approach to life and the way she wore her khaki jacket with its big pockets and her dark blue beret set her apart from her contemporaries. Yes, perhaps she could have slipped out of either writer’s novels because there was an attitude, a presence about her that suggested that here was a young woman eager to taste life and ready to go where it took her.

With the end of the decade, and Yvonne’s immediate presence in my life, I put Kerouac and Hemingway aside, for years as it turned out.

Quite a pleasant place in winter

Byron Bay in winter is a pleasant place to be. There’s none of the steamy heat of summer nor the mobs of tourists that season brings. You can wander streets without crowds and even get a seat in a coffee shop.

You can also explore the town’s bookshops. The good news is that these have multiplied. Once, there were two – Icon, in Jonson Street, which sold second hand, and a small shop selling new titles on Fletcher Street.

Now there are four. Those earlier two still exist but they have been joined by another second hand dealer and – until it closed a year or so after opening – by Byron Books, which was on the corner just down the road. Making up the four is a branch of Brisbane’s Mary Martin bookshop which, like those in that city, includes a coffee shop.

How four bookshops survive the off-season in Byron Bay, a town of only 9000, remains a mystery, but the area does have an abundance of literati, some with deep pockets, and an annual writers festival to keep things literary moving along.

It was some months ago that I was in Byron and I took a walk downtown. When not in a hurry to be anywhere, when simply wandering, bookshops attract me. Like the way that honey attracts ants, their presence is somehow carried on the air and this I seem to detect and slowly home in on. So it was that this subconscious homing behaviour brought me to the newer of the town’s second hand dealers.

I wandered in – the place was empty save for a saleswoman busy shuffling books in the way bookshop staff do. She didn’t notice me walk in but as I did so my attention was drawn to a rack of books next to the counter. My eyes skimmed over titles and author’s names… and then I realised what I was looking at… Corso, Ferhlengetti, Ginsberg and… yes, Kerouac. Here they all were, the famous coterie, the inner circle, the Beats… here, in front of my eyes in, of all places, Byron Bay. I would have anticipated finding their works in an inner-urban bookshop of one in the big cities – Sydney, certainly; Melbourne, for sure; Brisbane, doubt it; Adelaide, just possibly; Hobart, forget it.

“Are people still interested in reading this stuff?”, I asked the saleswoman as I flicked through a second hand Kerouac. “Oh, yes”, she answered. “There’s quite a lot on interest in the Beats. Especially among young people”.

Satori in Desire

Another beachside place, another city.

In distance and ambiance Manly is far from Byron Bay. It’s less-well endowered with bookshops and, unlike Byron, does not have an annual writer’s festival.

What Manly does have is two sellers of new books. There’s a branch, a franchise I think, of Dymocks, the Sydney bookseller you find in suburban shopping malls whose stores range from the banal to the almost interesting. There’s also Humphrey’s newsagency, a large establishment that carries a modest stock of new titles.

Like Byron, Manly has two second hand dealers. One is tucked away in the corner of the minor arcade that gives onto the pedestrian area that was once Sydney Road. It’s a cramped little shop selling mainly popular fiction. The other is called Desire, a place with an Art Deco ambiance that matches the building that houses it and suggests, architecturally, Manly’s origin as a holiday destination of the 1930s.

Desire is that sort of small bookshop that attracts the serious reader as well as the passer-by looking for a cheap, quality, second hand read. The lighting, a helpful staff, the record player that staff sometimes play jazz LP’s on give it a sort of vintage, comfortable atmosphere that makes you feel as though you can linger as long as you like. It has seats and a table. It’s what a serious bookstore should be and what some of those big book barns are not. Writing on July 2008 in the comments on the dumbofeather.com/bookshops/, Jade voted Desire her favouite, describing it this way: ” …Put a bow tie on the front window and I would marry this store. All the second-hand treasures inside would become my little babies and we’d live happily ever after!”

Anyway, I wandered into Desire and started looking around… plenty of contemporary titles, some older books, fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, psychology and philosophy… even a large format hardcover of the work of Magnum agency photographer, George Rodger… different themes neatly arrayed along the walls and across the stands in the centre of the shop. Completing my circuit I edged closer to the counter and, there, I came across a peculiar set of titles arranged according to theme.

A mixed bunch of authors they turned out to be as my eyes scanned the titles. And there again were those familiar names – Ferleghetti, Corso, Ginsberg (quite a selection of his work), Cassidy (who was the main character of Kerouac’s On The Road), Clark’s biography of Kerouac, Memory Babe – Gerald Nicosa’s biography of the man and a copy of Gary Sneider’s Turtle Island. Sneider, you probably know, appeared as Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, in my opinion the most enjoyable, most life-loving and exuberant of Kerouac’s works. Deja vue a la Byron Bay, I thought.

“Is there still a demand for the authors on this shelf?”, I asked the shopkeeper who had by now given up on his chess game outside in the arcade.

“Oh, yes”, he responded. “Especially among young people. Stuff like Kerouac’s On The Road appeals to them… the life, the experiences he writes about. It’s why we keep the writings of The Beats on a shelf by themselves. I’ll bet you haven’t seen anything like that in any other bookshop”.

How do I break the news, I wondered? How do I tell this proud bookshop owner, with his specialist sideline in the writings of The Beats, that his shop is not quite as unique as he imagines… nearly, but not quite?

“Well…”, I replied somewhat hesistantly, ” …there’s this little second hand bookshop up the coast in Byron Bay… and they too have a shelf set aside for the writings of The Beats… but I’ve never seen anything similar elsewhere in Sydney” – the latter added as an afterthought to head off any loss of bookseller ego.

“The Icon?”, he asked about the Byron shop.

“No, the new one the next street over”, I responded, knowing now then that he must not have been to Byron for some time.

Late the next day I once again walk through Desire’s Art Deco doorway and part with $16 each for Clark’e and Gerald Nicosa’s biographries of Kerouac.

Authors refound

I can’t account for my recent immersion in Kerouac’s writing. I enjoyed reading him in times past but I find so much more in his work now. I’ve still got a copy of Big Sur to get through – that somewhat downbeat tale of Kerouac’s time in a cabin on the sparsely populated Big Sur coast of California where the Santa Lucia mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific, and where in 1960 he sought escape from the fame that On The Road had brought. There’s a copy of Lonesome Traveller next to it on the shelf.

As for Desolation Angels, Kerouac’s story of his time as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascades (something he took up on the suggestion of Gary Sneider, who spent a number of seasons isolated on one high peak or another reading, studying, writing, philosophising, doing his Buddhist practices and looking out for forest fires), I hadn’t been able to locate a copy at the time. One day while downtown I recalled seeing Satori in Paris in Borders bookshop in the city – which keeps perhaps the best selection of Kerouac of any mainstream bookshop, even more titles than that home of Sydney’s literati – Gleebooks – though I had wandered in to find their last copy of Desolation Angels.

This renewed interest in Kerouac kicked off a minor Hemingway binge. I didn’t return to those titles I read decades ago but did enjoy The Sun Also Rises (also published as Fiesta), To have and Have Not and A Moveable Feast, all early works. The latter is about his six years in Paris in the 1920s when the city was the counterculture capital of the time, home to writers, artists and jazz musicians. It’s a book about living cheap and trying to make it in journalism and, later, as a writer. It’s about the people he met and the cafes he frequented. The Sun Also Rises, too, comes out of his Paris years. It describes the lives of that avant-guard coterie which stimulated Gertrude Stein to exclaim to Hemingway that “You are all a lost generation”.

Books first read decades ago, now redicovered. Why? One thing – I now have greater understanding of the social currents of those times, and having that context makes sense of much of what those books say.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that I rediscovered Kerouac and Hemingway at the same time Yvonne and I started a writing exercise – a shared memoir. An experiment this certainly is, but I’m curious – what will it yield about my association of Yvonne, Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac?

I cross a narrow bridge then, cresting the top of a bare hill I catch a distant glimpse of the ocean. A sharp turn and it‘s up a hill then into a long, sweeping curve that brings me to the road along the edge of the escarpment that forms the backdrop to the narrow coastal plain.

Seen from Cape Byron, the long beach to the north seems to go on and on.

Here on the edge of the escarpment a farmer has retained a big patch of subtropical rainforest of the type that once covered this rolling country. I slow to take a closer look. “Tall trees, dark forest”, comes the thought as my eyes traverse the trees and their shady interstices. “Looks mysterious, primeval even” comes a thought unbidden.

The dense, green wall blocks the view over the coast but in a few minutes I clear this remnant and approach the sharp turn that precedes the plunge to the plain. Brake, change down, into the sharp turn… and I come to a stop a little way down the hill where I pull over, pull on the handbrake, turn off the motor, get out and look on country new to me.

…………………………

It is the closing years of the 1960s and I am on the first of my solo road trips along the great highway that goes north from Sydney all the way to Queensland. It’s a long line of asphalt that takes travellers to destinations planned and unplanned, to those imagined and to others discovered only by chance. To set out on the highway without any firm idea of destination is to accept serendipity. I know that it is a type of aimlessness but doing it makes me happy.

I resist the urge to move on… I resist that senseless pull that I experience all to often, that seeks to keep me moving for no good reason at all. “Pointless urgency”, I think.

But there is some impetus that keeps me going as long as the direction is north, and I have to admit to finding happiness in traversing this ribbon of grey that links town and city, farm and coast. This is something I don’t talk about with friends in Sydney for I fear that they would not identify with such sentiment.

Road signs bearing the names of towns encourage turning off the highway and this I cannot resist. I know it makes the journey long but I am in no hurry. Obediently I turn to follow minor roads to minor towns that cling to the coast… places of old fibro houses with rusty galvanised iron roofs… of men and women standing patently on piers with lines curving into the water, their gaze and minds elsewhere… of people taking the morning sun on long yellow beaches. These are towns the images of which assume a sameness in mind and, given only a little time, blend together into some composite of Australian coastal existence.

This is all part of the joy of movement over long distances… it is refreshing, it is exhilarating, it is freedom.

…………………………

I close the door and look out over the little patchwork of roofs down there, where the coast turns abruptly to climb as a headland atop which stands a tall white lighthouse. Stretching north, a long way north from that cape all the way to a horizon concealed by sea mist is a beach that seemingly goes on and on.

“Something special about this place”, I think, looking out over it for the first time. I stay here awhile, propped on the bonnet of my small grey car. Then I drive into town.

…………………………

“Bit like other towns on the coast”, comes the thought as I drive slowly past houses, some old, some newer but most of them older structures of painted weatherboard. Here and there are people — families on their annual holiday from the city; older people, presumably retirees and not particularly wealthy looking, the type you might find around the bar of an RSL or a football club; and younger folk in couples or walking along in small groups.

A sharp left then a sharp right and soon I realise I’m on the main street. It’s a town of low buildings, Byron Bay. Old timber houses turned into shops, cafes and milk bars. There’s an intersection where the road turns north, towards Queensland, but I keep straight ahead and come to a large car park behind the beach. To my left is the town’s swimming pool and I wonder why people would swim in its chlorinated waters when there’s this beautiful beach a few metres away. And there’s that headland with the lighthouse I saw from the escarpment above.

“So, this I Byron Bay”, I think as I get out and lock the car before walking into town.

There’s a temporariness about this place. Is it the buildings of wood and iron? The way the town sits on the very edge of the land as if about to topple into the sea? Is it something about the ambience of the place? Yes, it’s like other coastal towns, insubstantial in some way. There are a couple solid-looking buildings, both hotels, and there’s that old two story timber place on the intersection where the road takes you north. A bit run down perhaps, it appears to have been here awhile. As for the town centre, there’s nothing of great substance there.

I had seen other places on this journey north. Earlier today there had seen Lismore, a sprawling, sleepy place with a lazy feel about it basking in the heat of the summer sun. If you stop and listen, I imagine, you would hear the crack of iron roofs expanding.

It was a more substantial a place than Byron Bay and had a feel of having been there longer… there were those old houses whose timbers have greyed with the years, long ago having become a stranger to paint. Its city centre, too, I found a slow place completely lacking any sense of bustle or urgency. Different way of living here, I thought.

It — Lismore —  wasn’t an unpleasant place but I didn’t say long and set off on the road to the east and up into the hills. But once up there I stop because the land t0 the west lay revealed… rolling country to a horizon of blue mountains that form a distant edge to the view. What are they? What’s out there among them? Where are they? What do people do out there? Thoughts come and go unanswered. Maybe, one day, I’ll go out there and find answers to these questions.

Then there was Bangalow, a town that spills down a steep hill. It occupies a bowl in the landscape that opens to the east and driving into town from Lismore the steepness of the main road is such that you need to apply your brakes lest you zap through town so rapidly that you find yourself in open country again before you know it.

Byron Bay — town by the sea. I drive up to the lighthouse and see that long beach that seems to go on and on. I look south over bush and beach to a distant headland.

I stay, but not all that long. The road continues and I must get back onto it.

…………………………

It’s a decade later and I am a long way from Byron Bay when I pick up a book of short stories by Australian author, Craig McGregor. I’ve encountered his writing before, quite by accident, and I liked it because it was life translated into stories… I would like to be able to write that way myself one day, I think.

I start to read, then I encounter something familiar, something I imagine I have experienced years ago. The realisation comes as a sense of familiarity that starts as a vague tingling feeling then grows into a dawning of realisation.

It was this. McGregor, too, followed that winding strip of grey asphalt that joins Lismore to Byron Bay and he, too, stopped at that same place on the winding downhill run, just past that patch of rainforest, and looked over that same view of coast, cape and lighthouse.

This must have been some years before I did the same but what was pleasing to find was that he, too, experienced some sense of place on that road where it descends the escarpment to the narrow coastal plain below.

…………………………

More years pass… many of them. I drive that long road north again and, turning eastward at Lismore, eventually come to that bare hill atop the escarpment. I brake and curve into the sharp turn… and come to a stop a little way down the hill where I pull over, pull on the handbrake, turn off the motor, get out and look on country now better known to me.

Below is that town that I first saw from the escarpment all those years ago as a patchwork of roofs amid trees. And here, on the headland, is that white lighthouse. The difference is that, this time, I have come to stay.

Many times I drive that same winding road that descends the escarpment but only occasionally now do I stop to look. When I do, memory takes me back and I again feel that same sense of being here.

Yes, it is still the same view, the same long beach stretching far to the north, a view largely unchanged from when I first looked upon it. Yet, it is always a new experience, a landscape seemingly unchanged but a mindscape that sees the familiar as if for the first time. The difference is that this landscape is now home.

Byron Bay. Discovered and rediscovered.