I find the whole thing distasteful and tawdry.” I’ve got lots of clients but I’m not making deals because I’m just in the queue like everybody else. There’s people from Melbourne or Sydney just throwing 100, 200 grand more at something and not even viewing it. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Michael Murray, a buyer’s agent who has lived in the area for more than 35 years. The same forces are at work throughout Australia and across the globe, but in the Byron Shire, with a permanent population of around 35,000 – a little more than the combined population of Bondi and Carlton – we see it in exaggerated form: a collision between what wealth can buy and what a community can withstand in order to still flourish.īuyer’s agent Michael Murray finds the housing mania “tawdry”.
Eco global survival renting property Patch#
Credit:Hannah LeserĮxcept those who live – or are being forced to leave – this emerald patch of northern NSW know exactly what they’ve got: a unique, vibrant community inhabiting one of the most biodiverse places on earth, where in recent times, fires, plague, closed borders, celebrity fascination and a world awash with money have combined to create a crisis of economic disparity, social dislocation, demographic upheaval and seething community resentment. “You don’t know what you’ve got.”īyron’s New Age culture was seeded in 1973 when many who attended Nimbin’s Aquarius Festival never left. “This is paradise here, you guys,” Hollywood star Matt Damon reportedly told two locals recently.
In the last 18 months we have heard a lot about staggering property price increases and soaring rents, about swelling numbers of homeless about the influx of Hollywood stars who came to make movies in a COVID-19-free country about all the so-called “influencers” that Netflix hopes to promote to its 200 million subscribers, but very little – beyond easy clichés – about what has made Byron so distinctive. You demonstrated here – on occasions without clothes on – against the ban on nude bathing, the destruction of rainforests, the fracking of the earth, McDonald’s, Club Med, the war in Iraq, a consumption tax on tampons, vaccinations, 5G and now Netflix because, in the aftermath of all the destruction that had ravaged this once hard-boiled, working-class region, Byron had become a community of rebels, dreamers, misfits and back-to-nature paradigm busters who wanted to inhabit a more environmentally conscious and egalitarian world, and were prepared to take on multinationals and governments to protect that. “Whales don’t breathe through their throats.” “You f…ing idiots,” the protesters would rail even back in the early ’60s. You kayaked with dolphins and sea turtles you heard the migratory humpback whales singing their way up the coast, long after their parents and grandparents had been harpooned, their throats cut, then shipped to the slaughterhouse to be processed into margarine. You danced till dawn in the hills, learnt to surf on those perfectly formed point breaks. You wrote your book here, or spent years pretending to do so. You fell in love here, married here, gave birth here. There is no way to tell the story of a place as beautiful, fractious, mocked, stereotyped and beloved as Byron Bay, unless you admit, firstly, that everyone will have their own version.
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