Byron Bay Holiday Guide Archives :. Out of the cities...to the coast

by Craig McGregor

Out of the cities...to the coast

'The beach' is really just shorthand for 'the coast' (all 19,000 kilometres of it) one of the longest national coastlines in the world. And most Australians live relatively near the coast; apart from Canberra all the major cities are located there, so are many of the largest towns, and it is the coast which is experiencing the most rapid development of any area in the nation.

One feature of contemporary Australian life is the marked movement of people, especially those of retirement age, out of the cities into smaller coastal towns and developments. It is predicted that next century a series of major urbanised coastal regions will emerge which will be more-or-less continuous conurbations with only limited stretches free from development. This pattern can already be seen between Tweed Heads and Noosa.

The environmental movement has intensified Australians' awareness of erosion of the landscape at the continent's perimeter, and for many awareness of erosion of the landscape at the continent's perimeter, and for many younger Australians the natural environment has become more important than any number of spectacular tourist resorts (maybe every nation needs one Surfers Paradise - but no more).

And so the conflict which has been inherent in Australia's development of the coast throughout this century becomes more and more obvious: do we want to keep the coast 'natural' or do we want to use it?

The latest manifestation are the ferals

'The coast', or 'the beach', as I have argued has become the utopia of the national imagination -and nobody wants utopia destroyed. Even if it exists only in the head.

One of the loveliest things about the coast, and the beach idiom which is its focus, is the way it continually gives rise to alternative cultures which are outside the Oz mainstream: communes, new settlers, alternative lifestylers, drop-outs, sanyasins, drug droogs, religious groups, mystic/Eastern/meditation cults, even the surfing culture itself. Many of these are descendants of the original hippie culture which have taken off in different directions even though their adherents may retain much of the symbolism (and ideology) of what was once termed, hopefully, the counter culture: long hair, beads, bare feet, flowing robes and dresses, lack of possessions, poverty, communal living, a determination to stay outside straight society. ,

The latest manifestation are the ferals, the young people who typically live in the hills and rural hinterland behind the coastal strips of northern New South Wales and Queensland and descend for folk festivals, music shows, moon dances and the like to the beachside resorts and then return to the bush again.

The creative spirit is alive an well in the youth community of Byron Bay. David Young, Photo.

Ferals, like the hippies before them, are often criticized for being 'dirty' or 'promiscuous' by the good burghers of the coastal towns; in fact the attempt to be (and look) wild and non conformist, as though you are simply living off the land in a mod European version of Aboriginal life, is central to the feral ethic and represents one of the first attempts by white Australians to achieve convergence between European and traditional Aboriginal ways of life which the poet Les Murray talks of Feral culture focuses upon a deliberate and conscious rejection of mainstream Australian culture and its concerns: consumerism, comfort, home-ownership, money, John Hewson's beloved ethic of competition.

The feral transcendence of these values may be short lived, but it is in the nature of these alternative cultures to evolve and transfigure themselves and for their members to move on. But the tradition, transmogrified, lives on.

And it is not an accident that this sort of experimental utopianism should thrive in the very regions which have themselves become emblems of utopia for everyday Australians. There's a bit of freedom around the beach.

For some reason or other, which I think is linked to the sheer extravagant beauty of the place, Byron Bay has become a symbol of Australian beach culture: it is sometimes compared to Noosa, in Queensland, but it is very different.

Whereas Noosa is rich, sophisticated, a designer-resort built with Melbourne money and good taste, Byron Bay is still a bit funky, down-at-heel, spread out all over the shop, the sort of town where you drive over the railway line, turn right down the main street, past the RSL and the youth hostel and the old Norco factory and you're out in the bush again before you know it.

Yet it has an extraordinary cultural mix: surfers, shopkeepers, farmers, tourists, ferals, musicians, Beautiful People, trendies, developers, dropouts, greenies and just plain ordinary Folk. Any place which has Paul Hogan and Fast Bucks, a would-be Club Med and the Pig Factory, the makers of Mad Dog (surfboards) and Sacred Sex (film), can't be all bad.

It also has some of the most stunning beaches and marinescapes on the entire continent; in fact it was the surfers who first 'discovered' Byron when it was still a working-class whaling and timber town, with the smell of the abattoirs drifting over the Norfolk Island pines and the railway bay and the only milk bar; they were followed by the alternative lifestyle people,and then the holiday makers, and then the real estate agents, and the developers, and the writers and artists and film stars, and the next thing Byron Bay is the place to be, and at Christmas, cars have to queue for a few kilometres to even get into the town.

Most of the people who live here want to keep it the way it is; preserve it, not destroy the very things that brought them here in the first place. And so many Byron people find themselves in precisely the dilemma which afflicts so much of the coastal experience; to share or not to share? How?

Sunset on Brunswick Heads River. David Young, Photo.

All this confronts Australia, and those whose responsibility it is to lead/govern/administer it, with a difficult problem because Australians basically have two contradictory impulses towards the coast: they want to preserve it, and they want to possess it.

They want to keep it unspoilt and beautiful, the wild-erness which they knew as kids or which they still seek out in national parks and forests and secluded beaches where they can strip off and get back to nature, to Thoreau's and Rosseau's Edenic life - and thus, consciously or un consciously, re-enact the life which Aboriginal people created here 40,000 years before the European invasion. (Though they have been so thoroughly dispossessed elsewhere, Aboriginal people still control almost one third of the continent's northern coastline.)

Yet Australians also want to use it: for holidays, for living, for entertainment, for tourism, for work. So they construct a Surfers Paradise or a Noosa, and carve up headlands for development sites, and build shacks on shifting coastal dunes, and drive their 4WD's through fragile fringe-zone vegetation, and develop fisheries and coastal farms and mariculture and a vast national and international tourist industryÐand so end up by threatening the very environment which brought them here in the first place. It's understandable.

I've always thought that the Australian coast is so precious and beguiling, and yet formidable, that it should not be the preserved of just a few; we all of us need some harbor of the heart to sustain us, and for many Australians the coast provides just that. It is both adventure and retreat. Yet if we continue as we are, and devour all that is natural about it even as we admire it, we will end up with a sour taste in the mouth and nothing left to inspire us and a crime on our hands for which future generations will never forgive us.

Ferals and other 'tribes' dance for Mother Nature and Gaia, longing for ancestral roots and deeper meaning...

So, somehow, a way has to be found to let Australians make use of what is still one of the most entrancing environments in the worldÐincluding, in their way, the sunstricken townships and caravan parks and surf lifesaving clubhouses and beachside parking lots which make up so much of the ambiance of Australian popular culture -and yet preserve the wilderness, the primitive, the unsullied seascape/landscape which a nation of city dwellers carries in their heads as an icon of Oz paradise even as they jump in the car with the kids for a holiday at a motel just a beer can's throw from the beach.

It's all done out of love, of course. Judith Wright has a marvelous poem about the strangler fig, the coastal parasite which wraps its fluid limbs around the tree which is its host, fonder and tighter, a smothering embrace, until eventually the tree dies. What Australians have to learn about the coast is how to hold on to what they desire without loving it to death.

Craig McGregor

Author, lecturer, music lover and surfer, Craig lent us these extracts from his essay published in The Abundant Culture, ed. David Headon/Joy Headon/ Donald Horne, Allen & Unwin, 1995.