Three cheers for the Byron Writers Festival!
The ultimate antidote to the I-can’t-believe-it’s-still-winter blues
As the second half of winter begins — or, to put it more optimistically, as the days start to get a little longer and warmer — the biggest thing keeping me going is the knowledge that in just two weeks’ time I’ll be in Byron Bay for the Byron Writers Festival.
Thoughts of the winter blues vanishing in a puff of breath vapor have probably got a lot to do with Charlie Veron, the king and caretaker of the Great Barrier Reef, and the speaker I’m most excited to see. He’ll be talking about his memoir, Life Underwater. Who better to evoke hours spent swimming among rays of sunshine filtered through the surface, coral of a thousand textures and small fish? I’m reminded of American writer Elif Batuman’s “Translucent minnows … They were so alive. It was almost pure life in those little bodies, there was so little room for anything else.”
All this and, well, the coral bleaching that spells grave, grave doom.
As Tim Elliott wrote in his Good Weekend profile, Veron believes that we have just a decade left before climate change begins to drastically affect life on earth. This goes for life underwater, too. Veron told Elliott that “The reef is in strife, and to say otherwise is bullshit,” and that “Half the place is dead already. It won’t be here in 15 years.”
I moved to Sydney six months ago with my husband, and ever since, have read many articles on the Great Barrier Reef, which, in addition to Uluru and saltwater crocodiles, loomed large in my imagination as Extremely Australian. I’ve since added to that list the sharp, clear sunlight that on most days has me squinting happily, and near-constant conversation about property prices.
The reef seems like an entry point to understanding Australia, especially when paired with debates over the Adani’s proposed Carmichael coal mine: the priorities of Labor versus Liberal, out of touch left-wing city slickers versus central Queenslanders in need of jobs, long-term versus short, the dying groans of fossil fuel and the technologies that existed alongside it. Hello renewable energy, hello climate change anyway, hello job automation, hello the influence of Facebook on election outcomes.
It’s to learn a little more about what to expect from life, and how to deal with it, that we go to festivals like Byron Bay. In addition to looking to Veron for guidance, I’ll be figuring out what it means to be Australian at talks about luck, Making Art About Country, dirty politics and loud women, with my mother in law, her best friend (who she met at maternity classes while pregnant with my husband), my husband, his sister and their uncle.
Few things are more luxurious than being in a beautiful place with people you love, learning about life from wonderful writers. And what better way to ring in the summer?
The Byron Writers Festival takes place Aug. 4–6 this year. Get tickets online here or call (02) 6685 5115.
