Stories of the road…
A town rediscovered
THE SEARCH. I don’t mean it in the way that Australian surfing equipment company Rip Curl uses the phrase as a sales gimmick. My search is a different search. It is the search for a morning coffee.
A morning coffee. When I first came to this town there wasn’t all that much choice. There was a place on the western side of the main street and one near the surf shop across the road. There might have been more but I didn’t frequent them.
I’m walking along the street and I’m thinking how different then is to now. More cafes have come to town over the years, more opportunities for a morning coffee to stimulate the biochemistry and get the day started. They came with the partial rebuilding of the commercial strip, not that it is all that large. It isn’t. It’s still a strip of shops strung out along the main road, a mix of the new and what was. Only, the main road isn’t the main road anymore. The traffic that once made its slow way through town it is now diverted along a bypass.
Those new cafes, they are a sign of demographic change, what someone back in the eighties or nineties coined the name ‘seachange’ for. People sold up in the city and, cashed-up, came north to this and other towns clinging to the subtropical coast. They brought their city lifestyles with them, including the cafes. Now, new businesses occupy old shopfronts and thrive off the tourist trade because, like other towns up this way, tourism sustains the local economy, provides the usually-seasonal and usually-low-skilled jobs and brings wealth to the few.
“Cafes… they’re the signs of change in town,” the middle aged man sitting at the next table says. He’s a local who prefers to sip his coffee in company rather than use his cappuccino machine at home. Not that he always strikes up a conversation. “Just sitting by yourself among the people in the cafe is a social thing in its own right,” he later tells me. Being social in solitude, I suppose.
He’s what… in his sixties? He reminds me of that bunch who of mornings would appear at the outside table of the little cafe down by the park in Byron Bay. Retired folk, I guessed. This was when I lived on the northern outskirts of the town in the days before it became the overpriced haunt of the wealthy property owning class, most being urban refugees in search of a warm climate are rising property values. Like this man at the neighbouring table, the men on that group of friends went unshaven for days at a time and their clothing signified that they were coastal dwellers.
“This town used to be a bit of a refuge from Byron Bay. A place for people who preferred a quieter holiday. Now, well, it’s still that but not to the extent it was. Tourists pack out the place in summer just like they do Byron, only there are fewer of them than in Byron. Thankfully.”
His comment suggests the way many locals regard tourism. They know that in the economic sense their town needs it yet when they talk about it you pick up this partially-hidden resentment of it. It interests me, this contradictory attitude to tourism, so whenever I hear people talking about it in a cafe or at the pub I surreptitiously eavesdrop on what they say. It is a sentiment I have heard in other tourist centres in other states. I think it is about the fear of being overrun in your home town.
The man at the neighbouring table tells me that he moved here from Sydney around ten years ago. That was with his wife, however she sought greener pastures elsewhere — that’s how he put it. I pick up a tone of resignation in his voice, as if he was not surprised she up and left. He spent too much time at the point break off the headland, he speculates in wondering why non-surfing women who marry surfers should expect anything different. Surf widows are nothing new hereabouts. They get used to husbands getting up early when the swell is running and disappearing for an hour or two before breakfast, or taking off for the whole day with their mates. Maybe it gives the men a few hours of much-needed solitude. Does it work the other way around?
The break
The point break. It is probably the best thing that Lennox Head had going for it. I was up there on the headland this morning and the swells… the swells… well, they were long and languid as they came in off the sea and curved around the headland. The headland is a right hander, the break, best in winter and with an offshore blowing in from the south. The town beaches, though. They are maybe not the best on the coast. Narrow by the commercial centre but wider and better around the northern part of town by Lake Ainsworth, close to where I am camping.
From the headland you see the grand view along coast and over sea to where the misty grey shape of Cape Byron sits on the horizon. You also see people standing by their surfboard-laden cars, checking out conditions at the point. Small? Big? Choppy? Mush? Onshore? Offshore? Go? Not go? But it is not only those off the point riding nature’s swells of surging energy. Look up. In the right conditions the swells of airflow curving over the headland bring out the paragliders. Soon, paraflyers will start complaining about crowded skies just as surfers already complain about crowded breaks.
The man in the cafe continues his lament. “The place is growing, spilling over the headland on its southern edge and into the farmland behind the beaches. How long will it be before it connects with Ballina to make a long suburban conurbation strung out between farmland and coast? Fortunately, the development is of human-scale with commercial and residential buildings less than two stories. Sure, they lack the traditional Australian character of those old weatherboard houses that you still find around town, but they are not all architecturally obnoxious like they are in some other places”.
“Yeah, I have this fear of the coastline here becoming like that up at the Gold Coast, a long strip development crowding the beaches and headlands,” I answer. He is silent as he considers this.
The town has changed and is still changing. Growing in population. Expanding in area as it colonises farm fields and replaces grazing cattle with expensive houses. The growing population must account for some of the demand that sustains the new cafes, but their economic mainstay is the booming summer tourism market.
Coming and going
I’ve come and gone through Lennox over the years. I know the place because my partner worked here at the local planner’s office. Every morning over the two weeks or so of the month when I was up from my editor’s job in the city we would climb into her van and I would drive her to work and then spend the rest of the day somewhere along the coast. Our’s was a long-distance relationship between the small community in the rainforest where she lived at Broken Head and my life in the big city. Lennox was a different town then, still overpopulated by summer’s tourists, yet it maintained a slower, more laid back vibe. I liked the place. That vibe is still here, in part, anyway, but you have had to know it to recognise it now.
I walk into the art gallery. Some nice works here. Being a photographer my preference is for fine art black and white prints, however there are none. There are some paintings, landscapes, that appeal, and there are plenty of ceramic works. I don’t buy art so my visit is that of a looker. I see that the gallery offers art classes. When did it open? Couldn’t have been all that long ago, there is a feeling of fresh paint about it.
I walk through town and notice the how the new comingles with the old. There is the usual mix you get in North Coast towns — natural therapies practitioners, shopfronts reeking of essential oils and incense and selling mysterious stuff in bottles and jars, a couple shops selling organic veges, fruit and other stuff.
The business mix speaks heaps about the people who have moved in, yet the changes they brought overlay those already existing in Lennox. Natural therapies, funky clothing and organic food have a long presence on this part of the coast. I suppose we can trace that back to the coming of the hippies, or ‘alternatives’, in the eighties. Their presence marked Byron Bay too and, like here on Lennox, it is still visible there. It overlaid the earlier surfing subculture that is still very much alive on this coast, which itself overlaid the old coastal town that was Byron Bay and its southern outlier, Lennox head.
Ever changing but always the same
Occasionally I remember that man in the cafe that morning and wonder how life is turning out for him. Does he still walk down for a mornng coffee? Does he still start up conversations with strangers at the neighbouring table? There was something indefinably North Coast about him, something about his manner and tone of speech, his clothing, the laid-back vibe he exuded. It was like he was a person who has found his place and plans on going nowhere else.
Like Byron, Lennox is a pastiche of past and present, of businesses serving local needs and those of transient tourists, of residents old and new.
Reassuring is finding shops that were here when we lived up this way. The fruit and veg store, the hip clothing shop, the little cafe and takeaway. The good news is that Lennox Surf Shop is still here on the corner, a good thirty years after I first walked through its doors back when old weatherboard houses lined the main street. Then, it sold Town & Country surfboards and clothing. It still does. Some things don’t change even though the town around them changes. A surf shop as a sign of stability. Who would have imagined? I’m happy with that.
The author, Wallace Stegner, wrote that “Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.” I go along with what he wrote, to some extent at least. The old Lennox certainly had character because the past was visible within the changes of present. It’s a bit less-so now. Just as in Byron Bay, the new buildings could be anywhere…the old, like those weatherboard houses that lined the street close to town, have been replaced, renovated and rebuilt. Sure, towns change. New people bring new ideas and new demands. Commercial centres are rebuilt or renovated beyond recognition. It’s not that bad in Lennox yet and the surf shop is still there as a visible, commercial anchor offering a sense of stability among change.
What doesn’t change is the headland and the swells that wash and surge against its point. If anything is, I suggest it is the headland rather than the small commercial centre that is the real anchor of what was once a minor North Coast town that people drove through on their way to Byron Bay just along the road a little way.
More PacificEdge…
