The Byron Bay File — 4…
Troubled paradise: Byron Bay faces change
Originally published in 2008 when I lived in Byron Bay. Part 4 of the Byron Bay Files.
THE MAN ON THE END STALL is selling longans, tropical fruits whose hard, brittle skin you break with your teeth before chewing the juicy white pulp off the large black seed. At $8 a kilo, you are presented with a length of branch with the tan, centimeter-wide fruits dangling from it.
At the other end, a man feeds a long stalk of sugarcane into a heavy duty juicer while his female partner sells the squeezings to the thirsty. Nearby, glossy green and rosy red capsicums shine with reflected light amid the eggplants, lettuce and other vegetables of one of several organic produce stalls. There’s organic meats for the omnivorous and, a little further along, two Indian women sell home made pastes and cooked Indian snacks. The baker offers so wide a range of breads that shoppers have to stop and think — which one today? The rye? The wholemeal?
I settle for organic tomatoes, a capsicum, some onions, a lettuce, a loaf of local sourdough and a bottle of sweet chilli sauce laced with an Australian bush food, plus a bag of Northern Rivers Arabica coffee. I have to admit that shopping at the Byron Bay Farmers’ Market is better than tramping up and down the aisles in Woolworths, the only supermarket in the town centre and the place where you get to breathe the volatile organic compound emissions from the products in the bathroom and laundry aisle. The farmers’ market is a far-more-pleasant and less-odouriferous environment.
Yet dissatisfaction bubbles below this surface of abundance. Some local growers say they cannot get access to the market to sell, implying the management is creating something of an exclusive club. The management says there is no space, yet that comes across as a bit ironic because the market is on the edge of a large sports field. I don’t know which side of the argument it was that said the farmers’ market management wants to restrict seller numbers to maintain the viability of those already selling. That too I have questions about because Byron Bay is a not a town devoid of sufficient affluent people to support an expanded weekly farmers’ market. Shopping there has a hip enough alternative vibe about it to attract the well-heeled. Whatever the truths or otherwise in this mini-controversy, it is yet another sign that not all is well here in this northern coastal paradise.
The town
Byron Bay, the one-time whaling town, past destination of holidaying families with their caravans and marquis tents, discovered by surfers in the seventies and later by hippies, is today a town for tourists, not locals, according to an influential minority of residents.
It’s a strongly held opinion in a town that relies on the seasonal influx of holidaymakers to keep going economically. The fact that the population of around 9000 in the town and hinterland swells to triple that size in the summer holiday season is an indication of the importance of the tourist dollar to Byron’s economy.
Complainant residents exhibit the same love/hate sentiment I have encountered in other tourist towns. Take a walk down Jonson Street, the main thoroughfare, and you will see what they say about Byron being a town for transient visitors is true, they say. I accepted their advice and set off from the beach end of the street.
Near the beach, the street offers a cluster of funky shops and eateries. The diversity of locally owned, small retailers brings an ambience that compares favourably with places dominated by the franchised retailers found all over the country. Small shops offering unique and sometimes locally made goods increase the value of the street as destination rather than thoroughfare, and in so doing encourage people to linger. Lingering people bring business.
Clothing, Eastern bric-a-brac, local crafts, jewellery, ice cream and a store selling the works of a local photographer make up the shops at the easternmost reach of Jonson Street closest to the beach.
The big hotel on the corner, across the road from the park and beach, is a social centre for the town. Walking past the cafe next to the hotel I am reminded of how, back in the 1990s, I dined with friends when a different cafe was here, one that specialised in cheap pasta meals. It was usually packed and there was a constant flow-through of patrons. It wasn’t that the food was extra good, in fact it was as ordinary as you would expect in a cheap eatery. The place wasn’t where you would go for a convivial evening with friends, however. When we asked or coffee after eating we were refused by the harried looking waitress. They wanted turnover, not lingering customers. Neither culinary arts or business reputation dominate there. Just the dollar.
With the Norfolk pines that line the street, the outdoor dining and the press of people on the footpath, the ambiance along this short strip is one of relaxed busyness. Beyond, we enter a part of town dominated by nondescript, one or two level commercial buildings of little architectural significance interspersed with modern buildings no higher than two stories. Here, the town’s commercial services are congregated. A bank, the Great Northern Hotel, a couple clothing stores, another surf shop, another ice cream shop, a convenience store and more cafes. Pass the fire station there’s more of the same plus one of the town’s real estate agents, a lucrative industry hereabouts as demand for housing increases.
The next section bears out the fears of those critical of the backpacker invasion. Here, in less than 100 metres, are five travel agents all with their internet cafes catering to backpackers. Their spruikers, backpackers themselves and most likely cheap labour, make no eye contact with anyone other than their own kind. If you look over 30 or look like a local they ignore you. There’s an all-night cafe in this strip, a couple more clothing retailers, the Mad Dog surfshop and an organic food retailer.
I stop and reflect. Yes, the backpacker tourism industry is dominant at this end of town. There are also the types of service industries you expect in any town and that serve both locals and tourists — pharmacies, banks, cafes. I find difficulty in reconciling these observations with the notion of the town being only for visitors.
Backpackers: benefit or scourge?
Live in Byron for even a short time and you soon discover that much of the resentment of tourism is directed specifically at the backpacker end of the industry. It is the backpacker travel agencies, their hostels and the sheer number of backpackers on the street that make them so conspicuous.
Hostel owners acknowledge the behaviour problems their clientele bring, the noise, drunkenness and litter. They told the local press they enforce behavioural standards in the hostels, however that is of little value as bad behaviour occurs not in the hostels but outside.
Opinion about the backpacker industry is polarised. You find people who are opposed to backpacker tourism and those who support it, however there is a middle ground that is happy to have the industry in town provided its excesses are curbed. They accept its economic importance but not the reputation it fosters on Byron Bay as a party town. For some, though, it is the numbers of backpackers and their visual dominance that is troubling.
Supporters of the industry say backpackers bring dollars although individually, backpackers are budget travellers and are not exactly big spenders.
Big concrete box in a car park
Down Jonson Street, opposite the park in front of the disused railway station — the state government ended the train service several years ago, much to the anger of local people — you find Fundamental Foods. Fundies, as locals call it, made its start in the nearby city of Lismore back in the 1970s when the ‘alternative’ lifestyle culture it emerged from, and which was particularly strong in the region, was gaining economic influence. The business later started a shop in Byron where it has now been for years. It is one of a number of organic food and products retailers along this and the next block, and, like the real estate agents on Fletcher Street and the backpacker travel agencies nearby, it is an example of how similar businesses cluster.
In marked contrast, across the street is the architecturally unimaginative concrete mass of Woolworths, a big concrete box amid an equally big carpark. Like the food it sells, Woolies is a cookie-cutter version of what you find in any other town. There is no architectural concession to Byron’s coastal ambience here. Despite this, Woolies is well-patronised as a convenient stop to pick up the week’s groceries, and you can usually find a parking space. Although I haven’t heard any comment to support it, I suspect that it attracts the less-affluent with lower prices than you find in the organic food stores. Perhaps that is important in a town with a broad wealth distribution where employment opportunities are few and often seasonal, a reality reflected in incomes.
Life is not without challenge for Woolies. In 2005, the management unexpectedly found themselves the target of an anti-packaging-waste campaign when local surfer and then-NSW Upper House MP, Ian Cohen, led a large group into the store to make their point. The manager, though taken by surprise, dealt with the intrusion comfortably and the event proceeded trouble-free.
The Green Garage occupies a corner of the roundabout at the other end of town. It is a local business that bridges the gap between the corner grocer and the supermarket. The saving grace of Green Garage is that the proprietors stock local farm products. Although further from the central business strip, Green Garage attracts customers put off by the impersonalised, industrial scale of shopping at Woolies and who prefer to support local enterprise.
A cultural remaking
The swells roll into The Pass and Cosy Corner as green walls of surging energy. There, waiting for them early most mornings are the surfers whose day starts in the water, summer and winter. They are the descendants of the traveling surfers who in the 1970s realised that they would be able to catch waves every day if they settled in town. This they did and the revival of Byron Bay as an iconic surfing venue was born.
A few years later came a type whose spiritual home lay over an hour drive inland in the village of Nimbin. The ‘alternatives’ or ‘hippies’ left a lasting mark on Byron and contributed to its present funkiness. In comparison to the influence of the surfing subculture, theirs’ was a lesser mark, in-part because their economic legacy was local arts rather than the hard cash legacy of the surfers in the form of the surf shops, board manufacturers and surf schools.
Later, in the 1980s and on to the present day, came retirees and sea changers. Still later, cheap international air travel brought the backpackers who, like the surfers and alternatives, have made their own economic mark in town and who, like the surfers and alternatives, experienced local resentment of their presence. Unlike the surfers and alternatives who became part of Byron’s economy and culture, the backpackers are ephemeral. They come, they party, they go.
Dealing with development pressures
When a place becomes popular with tourists and attracts an growing permanent population, development pressures are sure to become prominent. People moving into town need somewhere to live and tourists somewhere to stay. Fail to open land to development and you get a housing shortage and rising land values and rents. People end up renting converted garages and similar accommodation because it is more affordable even if not quite legal. Even many of the older children of those who moved into town in the past cannot afford to buy there. The result is a population of affluent, middle class people buying expensive houses and another population of lower income people who cannot afford to join them as home owners.
With the successive waves of immigrants came increasing pressure to develop Byron Bay. I lived part-time in a community in the rainforest close to Byron during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, before moving there full time. Then, I would walk past old weatherboard houses remade as shops that gave Byron a point of difference to other coastal towns like Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour further down the coast. I didn’t know then that it was the end of an era as Byron transitioned from informal holiday town to Byron-the-rebuilt.
Fletcher Street has been almost completely reconstructed since the 1990s. The block behind the Great Northern Hotel was remade a few years ago and the beachside strip next to the Beach Hotel was then in process of renewal as tourist accommodation. It is less this smaller scale rebuilding of the town that worries townsfolk, however.
Sentiment in town is firmly against big development although there are those who would welcome it. It’s like those who are wary of it are fighting a rearguard action that started when small scale developments began to progressively replace much of the old building stock. That might have left longer term residents with a pang of loss at seeing the old buildings go, but it was the larger development proposals that really raised their ire.
Opposition gained political strength in hard-fought campaigns against big money with big ideas. The campaign against Kurt Schafer and the White Shoe Brigade from Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland was successfully concluded in the 1980s. Midway through the next decade, Club Med’s proposal to set up in Byron brought people onto the streets. Club Med Byron Bay never happened. The latest has been the Becton redevelopment of an existing town-edge tourist facility that is opposed by the anti-developmnent lobby as well as by a Greens-dominated local council. Millionaire Gerry Harvey’s of the Harvey Norman national department store chain, who built a tourism facility just out of town at Suffolk Park, also felt the wrath of the lobby and became engaged in a bitter contest with council. The issue was his building a tourism facility that local opponents claimed would have environmental impacts, however there was already development along the strip and it had been there for decades. It was unfortunate that Gerry Harvey got into vociferous argument with locals. It did his reputation no good.
The road
Traffic is an issue. The long single lane road that connects Byron to the Pacific Highway becomes a multi-kilometre traffic snarl in peak holiday times and on Friday afternoons when visitors from Brisbane and the Gold Coast converge on Byron for the weekend.
Car parking is difficult in the peak tourism months. Street parking becomes scarce and Woolies carpark becomes an unofficial town carpark rather than parking for the supermarket, cinema and the cluster of small shops it is supposed to serve. The dearth of parking makes it unlikely that the large carpark on the beachfront will be removed and landscaped as parkland any time soon. The idea has been raised. Although it provides locals as well as tourists with convenient parking close to the town centre, it is hardly the most appropriate use of beachfront land in a major tourism centre.
Then there are issues affecting localised parts of town. Rising sea levels, it is predicted, are likely to erode the Belongil coastal strip. At issue was whether council should reinforce the beach with rocks or, as one correspondent in the local newspaper proposed, let the houses slide into the sea. Further along the road, the chicken factory used to occasionally blanket parts of Sunrise Estate with a pungent stench. When the factory’s waste plant broke down awhile ago, a public meeting was called. It became acrimonious with a manager from the chicken processing plant engaging in a stand up argument with the Greens mayor.
I am sure we have not seen the last of the development battles in Byron Bay. A growing population is likely to create the demand for further land releases. Whether this can be done without trashing the natural or disrupting the visual environment I wait to see.
The northern coastal paradise
This is Byron Bay, the northern coastal paradise, a pleasant town fortunately located behind the wide sandy beach of a long, sweeping bay and backed by a coastal escarpment, farmland, forest and, in the far distance, the Border Range with the spire of Mt Warning pointing skyward.
What is to become of this place, the easternmost point of the Australian mainland fronting the Pacific?
Here’s my guess.
Controversies over development will continue because Byron relies on the tourism industry for its economy and for local employment. What alternative does it have? None. The population is highly educated but attracting the industries employing high-level technical skills is unlikely to happen. It’s the location of Byron on the coast amid spectacular scenery that is the basis of its tourism livelihood and I can’t see that changing anytime soon.
There will always be pressure to build new visitor facilities. A way that tackles development without damaging natural environments, co-opt beachfront land for private benefit or adopt a scale out of place in the built environment and that recognises in its design the history and culture of Byron is needed. Making sure that happens will be the job of Byron Shire Council, and doing that ensures that development will continue as a lively focus for townspeople. A strong local environment movement the cultural artefact of the alternative culture of the 1970s will flex its muscles from time to time and will retain a focus on development issues. In doing this it has potential to continue its role as counterweight to development pressures of the potentially damaging kind.
Byron Bay lives with a dilemma. A growing population brings pressure to release more land for residential development. At the same time the opposition to development promises to continue the already-high demand-driven housing costs, high rents and the social costs that come with that. The outcome could be a continuation of Byron as a divided society, split between those fortunate enough to own a house and those destined never to do so and who will continue to pay big rents.
Is high rise, even moderate high rise an option for more housing? Forget it. People look north towards the Gold Coast. The big fear in Byron is that those towers will march south.
And the backpackers? They will continue to come while the global economy continues to be buoyant enough and air travel remains cheap enough to support their peripatetic lifestyle.
The Byron Bay files…
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