I saw Byron Bay for the first time three years ago. I was driving north on the coastal highway from Sydney to Brisbane with my wife. The rain had stopped just beyond the town of Ballina, where the highway snakes inland toward the foothills of the northern coastal ranges. By the time we were west of Byron Bay, the iron-gray wedge of cloud had lifted to let the sun cast its warm, early evening light across the undulating grasslands to the flat brown marshes and pale dunes on the ocean's edge. Cape Byron was a distant grass-covered dome surmounted by a white lighthouse. Shafts of sunlight caught the rainfall evaporating from its rocky ledges and the salt-laden spray blowing in from the sea to form a bright rainbow that bridged the shores of the Cape and the patchwork of colored rooftops to the west of it.
The rainbow was enough to make us detour to Byron Bay. We followed a narrow road past marshland and blocks of whitewashed houses to the small town's main street. From there we found our way to the beach. By then it was dusk. A glassy swell rose and broke in even white lines along the sand and dolphins were playing inshore, their dorsal fins tracing lazy arches above the wave crests.
Without rainbows and dolphins, the town itself might appear to be just another of the many old beach communities scattered along the New South Wales coast. It isn't particularly picturesque; off the main street — and behind the motels and new apartment blocks on the beachfront — boxy, fibro’ weekenders with corrugated tin roofs stand eave to eave on an accidental grid of potholed, unguttered streets.
The people are part of what make Byron Bay different. Look at the faces on Jonson Street, the town's main street: bleached-blond surfers with their boards piled on the roofs of battered station wagons; bare-chested country boys in stovepipe jeans and slouch hats guzzling beer in the back of pickup trucks; doe-eyed earth mothers in batik sarongs back-packing suntanned babies; not-so-young survivors of the 60's love generation and dreadlocked white Rastafarians. Together with the pale-skinned holidaymakers from out-of-state, whose money is beginning to turn Byron Bay into something of a fashionable resort, they all hang loose together in an easy subcultural truce. Because of this, Byron Bay is a congenial home to the sorts of ideas about alternative, natural or creative living that took root in the 60's, and the surrounding countryside has become home to various writers, painters, retired rock musicians, film producers — the producer of Crocodile Dundee, for one — gurus, small-time drug dealers and reclusive Vietnam vets.
From the brightly painted timber facade of the community center, the boutique, health food stores, cafes and pubs straggle down Jonson Street to the beach, and the nearness of that broad stretch of sand and warm Pacific surf is what induces Byron Bay's relaxed, almost indolent mood. Most of the town's population, it seems, hits the beach at sunrise. Barefoot joggers pad along the sand. Surfers paddle out through the foam to catch a few smooth, well-formed waves before the sea breeze sets in. And devout sun-worshipers settle their oiled bodies on rattan mats to soak in the earliest rays. Looking across the bay from the beach, the surrounding landscape is reminiscent of the west coasts of Wales and Ireland. As on those Atlantic shores, the fine white sand gives way to grasslands that sweep up to hills dotted with pastures and plantations and, farther inland, thick forests and a sawtooth of dark, low mountains.
The country didn't always look this way. In 1770, when Capt. James Cook explored this coast — and named Byron Bay after the poet's grandfather, Vice Adm. John Byron — the now treeless foothills were overgrown with tall timber and dense subtropical scrub. The Big Scrub, as it became known, was the largest tract of rain forest in the state, covering tens of thousands of acres southwest of the bay. Loggers began clearing the forest in 1842 to reach the valuable red cedar trees within it and they were followed by farmers who cleared more land for grazing and crops. Within 60 years the Big Scrub was reduced to a mere 484 acres west of Byron Bay, next to what is now the Rocky Creek Dam. It's an eerie feeling to enter the surviving rain forest, where a footfall is deadened by a thick carpet of decaying leaves fallen from trees that might be 1,500 years old.
After a good rainfall — more than 70 inches are recorded in an average year — the inland forests and pastures turn rich, contrasting shades of green and amber. South of the Brunswick Valley township of Mullumbimby, a 15-minute drive from Byron Bay, the Coolamon Road unravels like a black ribbon over the hill slopes. In the humid morning hours after rain, the road provides heart-stopping views of hillocks scarfed with mist and valleys studded with the glistening red and silver roofs of farm buildings.
At Montecollum, the Coolamon Road forks farther inland to Cooper's and Repentance Creeks. From there a rough gravel side road ascends a forested ridge to Minyon Falls, its waters plunging 100 yards down volcanic cliffs to a palm-fringed gorge. A little farther west, other gravel roads — most of them impassable after a heavy rain — lead to the sparse eucalyptus and red cedars of the Whian Whian State Forest, to the last of the Big Scrub and to the high, brush-covered slopes and cool grassy valleys of Nightcap National Park.
Except for local traffic in such small communities as Rosebank, Eureka, Federal or Dorroughby, which are often little more than a general store and a community hall, these inland roads are empty, even in summer. On hot days, the sandy-bottomed creeks are welcome oases, their water sweet to taste and comfortably tepid. Swimsuits aren't always required for a quick dip. Once, while crossing Cooper's Creek, I saw a young man stretched out naked on a log in the middle of the creek, his clothes neatly folded on the seat of a motorbike parked on the bank.
But on hot days, who would want to stray far from the bay? Especially if the wind and swell are in the right directions and the Pass is working. The Pass is a wave well-known to Australian surfers that breaks continously from the tip of Watego's Gap, an outcrop of jagged rocks east of the town, to the sandbanks off the main beachfront.
Since the early 60's, when board-riders first claimed this northern coast, the waves at Byron Bay have been legendary. Nowadays, though, the near-perfect breaks have become crowded and uncomfortably competitive, with surfers jostling for position on every wave at the Pass, at Watego's Beach to the east and on the fast left-hander that breaks just west of the beachfront car park at the end of Jonson Street. The car park is next to the the half-submerged rudder section of the Wollongbar, a 1,965-ton passenger steamer that was wrecked in a sudden gale in 1921. Swimmers and body surfers avoid confrontations with aggressive board-riders by going to Main Beach, just west of the car park. The scrubland around the base of Cape Byron is a place where one can retreat from the beach for a couple of hours' solitude.
From the car park at Palm Valley, near Watego's Gap (the site of Cavanbah, the bay's first settlement in the late 1870's), there is a walking track that winds northeast across Watego's Beach to the end of the Cape. Standing on this crumbling knuckle just below the easternmost point of the continent, I have watched the shadowy wings of large rays glide across the clear sand on the ocean's bottom and sharks — big bronze whalers, tigers, and hammerheads — weave predatory patterns off Little Watego's Beach. Whales, too, can sometimes be spotted out at sea, although they keep their distance from the bay, maybe because of an atavistic memory of the whaling done from here from 1954 to 1962.
Atop the cape stands the 85-year-old lighthouse, one of the last still manned in the state. From the lighthouse keeper's grounds, the view north and west is expansive, even a little humbling: trace the long crescent of empty beach from Byron Bay town to Brunswick and farther north, past New Brighton and Wooynung, and the mountains that stand like battlements beneath the deep blue sky – from the Nightcaps in the west to the ranges that form the Tweed Valley caldera around the cathedral-like Mount Warning.
The lighthouse grounds close just before sunset. But days end slowly in Byron Bay. There is time yet to have a last surf ride at the Pass, where the breakers become gentle and glassy as the sea breeze dies, or to sit on the beach and watch the ocean turn pink, then pale gray-blue as the sun dissolves into the inland hills. You might even get lucky and see dolphins, their sleek gray backs glistening in the last of the sunlight as they meander across the bay.
First published in The New York Times’ Travel & Leisure section, USA, 1988.
