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Friday, 7 September 2007

ON THE ROAD - travel & places...

Byron Bay Blues

The surf and the mountains - Byron Bay's iconic image of Mt Warning and the sea suggests the nature-based tourism that attracts so many visitors to the town. Locals say that Byron's party town reputation threatens this traditional tourism and the town's lifestyle values.

He was an optimistic type, extroverted, healthy and prosperous looking. For a real estate agent that was probably a good image to project. When I visited his office I noticed a number of ‘Osho’ books neatly lined up on his desk and wondered if they might account for his outgoing, self-assured personality. Osho became the preferred name adopted by the remnants of the Rajneesh sect after its ignomious self-destruction. It is a sect not unassociated with controversial real estate dealings in the Byron Bay region, though there was no suggestion of a link between that and this real estate salesman. Sannyasins, followers of Rajneesh, still exist in reasonable numbers in the area.

He might be have been right about finding work, though - if you are a real estate agent. Byron Bay has a disproportionate number of such businesses for so small a town thanks to the buoyancy of the local market and despite the 2006 interest rate rise. Housing prices remain high in Byron although lower than over a year ago. This little coastal town is second only to Sydney in housing prices, I was told.

That fact was verified by another real estate agent and, later, by a woman who has lived in the area for quite some time. She has had to reduce the price she is asking for her house from seven figures down to six. Also indicative of the state of the market was a contribution to the ‘letters’ pages of the funky local paper, The Echo. The writer, a resident who moved into town in the 1980s, lamented how his son would never be able to buy a home in Byron and would have to move to some other place. Prices are simply too high, he wrote.

I found the estate agent’s advice about jobs a little off as I got to know the place. The NSW North Coast region - despite a substantial population gain since surfers began moving there in the 1970s, to be followed in successive decades by alternatives, seachangers, retirees and assorted refugees from the city - retains a high level of unemployment and underemployment. The Lismore employment office, so I was informed, serves the most highly educated unemployed demographic in the country.

The employment situation was explained by a middle aged mother, whose family moved into the region 25 years ago. She told me how her son had been interested in the hospitality industry but had been forced to leave town to find a career. With Byron’s doubling of population of around 9000 every January holiday season (there are about 30,000 in the broader area) and the big tourist influxes of other times of the year, hospitality would seem a sure bet for a career. But, no. There are poorly-paid casual jobs but nothing that offered what her son sought.

Talk to local people and you quickly discover that this is a theme. Locals take what work they can find although there are success stories of people moving from the city to find satisfying employment in their usual work or by starting small businesses.

The surfing industry is a local success story. Board manufacturers and retailers found their niche when surfers became the first of the city crowd to reinhabit the place a few decades ago. In more recent years, a number of surfing schools have opened for business and they live primarily off the summer tourist influx, in particular the backpacker end of the tourism market. The prominence of the surfing industry explains why locals reacted negatively to recent criticism by a NSW government minister of the local high school for offering a subject in surfing studies. He was speaking to highlight his own political agenda, whatever that was, and had spoken without knowledge of the local economy, locals charged. Better that he had kept his mouth shut, some suggested.

Byron is a region of people doing work more menial than their education prepared them for. This is wasteful but is true across the country, however the way locals tell it the situation may be more acute in this region. The example of a middle aged man illustrates the problem. When he couldn’t find work in his usual field he applied repeatedly for administrative jobs with Byron Shire Council, jobs he could easily do, but failed to even get shortlisted. As someone explained to him later, there are more than enough people who do those jobs as their usual work.

It is due to lack of work that people who move to the area sometimes sell up and move out again, disappointed that there is no livelihood for them. When you talk to people in town this is the story you hear. They arrive full of hope of a new life, perhaps having spoken to people like that optimistic real estate agent, but find the reality to be different.

Demographer Bernard Salt (www.bernardsalt.com.au/) points out that there is a trend in moving to coastal areas. Many are retirees but others are potential first home buyers, young families unable to afford Sydney’s sky-high housing prices. On discovering the lack of employment opportunities, some keep on keep going through Byron to Brisbane, just two hours up the highway.

Tourism - opportunity or plague?

If employment is an ongoing issue in town, then so is tourism. Tourism is a source of controversy both on account of the towns experience with proposed big developments and because of its impact on the town itself.

Townspeople opposed the proposal for an ‘educational facility’ near Broken Head in the late 1980s when members of Queensland’s ‘White Shoe Brigade’ co-opted Southern Cross University to join them in what was widely perceived not as a short course venue but as a thinly disguised tourism venture. Then, in the 1990s, Club Med’s plans for a big resort brought people onto the street. Club Med quit. The most recent fight has been against the Becton proposal for the Cape Byron Resort, though the state minister responsible has now given the go-ahead. The intervention of Macquarie Street will not go down well in Byron. Just before that, the Harvey Norman development near Suffolk Park caused local enmity, especially when the millionaire made strong criticism of Byron Shire Council.

The year 2005 brought ongoing resentment of tourism to a head, ironic that this seems for a town the livelihood of which relies mainly on visitors. Byron is not unlike other coastal towns in which locals develop a love/hate attitude to tourism. They find themselves in the bind of knowing that livelihoods and the local economy depend on the influx of visitors but that this influx changes the town around them. Talk to Byron residents and you hear comments about the town not being the place they moved to years ago, that it has changed and is now a “town for visitors, not locals”.

Anyone living in Byron since the 1980s will have noticed that Lawson Street, like other streets off Jonson, the main thoroughfare, has lost most of those old fibro, weatherboard and iron-roofed houses suggestive of Byron's past as an easy-going family holiday destination. Some of those old buildings had been converted into shops but now the entire block off Jonson has been rebuilt as cafes, coffee lounges, real estate agencies, surf shops and clothing stores. These are not tall buildings, few are over three levels, so compared to other places the town could be described as developed but not overdeveloped, though town opinion might vary on this.

The town itself must take some responsibility for its reputation as a party town, resented, though that image may be. Friday afternoons in summer, the single lane from the Pacific Highway into town is a kilometres-long traffic jam as weekend visitors flood in from the Gold Coast and Brisbane. Then there’s the annual January and Easter holidays that bring people in for a good time and two annual music festival - the Blues and Roots Festival and Splendor in the Grass.

Last New Year, council was forced to act on local resentment of the New Year eve street party. Locals had become fed up with new year tourist drunkenness and the way visitors left the town resembling a trash heap. This was an issue that had bubbled below the surface for some time. Citing resident suppport, council banned the street party and, instead, put on a family-oriented event and prohibited the drinking and the carrying of even unopened alcohol in the town centre. Byron, it seems, is trying to live down its reputation. That won’t be easy.

Too many too often

Local Greens state MP, Ian Cohen (www.iancohen.org.au/), is a surfer who moved to Broken Head, just 10 minutes drive south of Byron Bay, in the 1970s. He was a part of that influx of surfers who moved into the district during that decade and brought new life to the old holiday town. Cohen was motivated to preserve the strip of littoral rainforest at Broken Head that today serves as a reminder of what this coast must have been like. Through the 1980s and 1990s Cohen made a number of atttempts at election to local government but never quite got the numbers. He was later elected to the NSW Upper House, the Senate.

Cohen is a tall, imposing and athletic figure who, since becoming a politician, has lost the hard, argumentative edge he once had. That confrontational anger was exemplified by a story of how, in the late-80s, he was driving to town when he encountered local surfing identity, Rusty Miller, standing by his broken down car. Miller, who produces a Byron tourism guide (www.byron-bay-guide.com.au/) and offers private surfing lessons, featured in George Greenough’s surfing movies and was a champion US surfer in days gone by. The story goes that Cohen stopped his car and got out not to assist Miller but to abuse him for supposedly supporting the proposed Broken Head educational/tourism development, where he was said to have been going to teach surfing. That done, Cohen got into his van and drove off, leaving Miller stranded. That story may be apocryphal but it serves to show how controversy over tourism has split opinion in town.

Cohen recently acknowledged the impact of tourism and its sometimes negative consequences when he referred to Byron’s “annual tourist invasion”. So too has Miller who, in an editorial on his website refers to tourism and the stresses it imposes on the town. “As the tides of visitors are streaming in we endeavour to keep this place a positive experience and benefit to both our guests and locals… People are drawn here and captivated because of the choices this community has made in its dynamic past. We are the guardians of Byron's legacy. And so are you. If you read the local papers you will see that much of the copy and dialogue concern our situation of over-inundation. Too many, too often”, he writes of tourists.

To see if tourism has physically reshaped the town centre as some allege, I took a walk from the Beach Hotel along Jonson Street. The hotel itself is a tourist watering hole but management seems to make the effort to keep holiday-time exuberance under control. Down the street, small businesses selling clothing, local arts and crafts, Asian trinkets, hamburgers and the work of a local landscape photographer make this a visually exciting and interesting short stretch.

Cross at the roundabout and make a return hike along Fletcher and there you find fashion and fast food franchises that might, as critics say, sell the same products that you would find in any of their stores in any other city. Few of their products are unique to the area. Back on Jonson Street, there’s surf shops, a bank, coffee shops and cafes – surely there are more coffee and dining venues than a town of this size could support were it not for that “over-inundation” of visitors Miller alludes to. At the end of the block is the Great Northern Hotel, one of the town’s live music venues. Cross the side street and you come to a string of travel and visitor service agencies catering more or less solely to Byron’s burgeoning backpacker tourist population.

Inside these shopfronts, banks of Internet terminals are packed with backpackers catching up on their email while, outside, staff hand out advertising leaflets and corner potential customers for the adventure activity businesses in town – skydiving, surfing schools, trips to the rainforest in the hills, bus trips to Nimbin. They are usually backpackers themselvest and it is interesting to observe how they discriminate in whom they approach and whom they avoid. If you look local then you are ignored – they look past you as if you don’t exist. Likewise, if you look over 30 you are similarly disregarded. Some locals see these businesses as a type of alien overlay on the authentic matrix of the town, their market the ephemeral one of the backpacker. It is as if two cultures are overlaid - the local one and the demimonde of the backpacker – two cultures that have little by way of mutual interest and even less in common.

It is true that this part of town has been transformed by the backpacker industry and you can understand how some locals believe that this has made Byron a town that caters mainly for tourists. But the backpacker accommodation businesses are aware of the controversial nature of what they do. It was in response to charges of late night noise, littering, rowdy and violent behaviour by its clients that the industry last year publicised their efforts to curb behavioural problems at the same time they drew attention to the income the industry brings into Byron.

At the same time, the issue of tourist noise in residential properties let for short term holiday accommodation came to a head. Council proposed intervention - yet another controversy in a small town. This stimulated efforts by the holiday letting industry to regulate the behaviour of its clients and there now exists an industry hotline to curb rowdy visitors.

Exacerbating the backpacker controversy is the sheer visibility of the backpackers and the industry that serves them. Backpackers, whether welcomed, criticised or simply accepted and ignored by locals – all three are true - are in such numbers that they are a dominant visible presence, adding to the perception that Byron is being overrun by outsiders.

Noise a persistent issue

Just as backpackers are resented by some, so too are the annual Blues and Roots and Splendor in the Grass multi-day music festivals. This became apparent in the letters pages of The Echo where people living adjacent to the festivals – they abutt residential areas - complain of being subjected to days and nights of noise while supporters counter with praise for the events, saying how they benefit the town culturally and economically. It’s the typs of issue that splits opinion and is so difficult to resolve because both sides have a ghood argument.

There’s no dispute that the events do bring considerable noise. When Splendor starts up, residents of Sunrise Estate anticipate an aural bombardment from late morning to late at night.

It was suggested last year that Blues and Roots would be better off out of town. The organisers responded that they might move well out of town, perhaps as far as Queensland. Someone wrote to The Echo to suggest this would be a good idea; others wrote in support of retaining the festival. When the idea that council might develop an out-of-town facility for such events, perhaps just north of Byron near Tyagarah, locals living nearby quickly said no, they can already hear the deep base boom of Splendor even though they are kilometres away. The situation remains in slatemate.

Controversy in paradise

It seems ironic that, despite those long, beautiful beaches, the blue-green waters and the forested hills that are the background to this idyllic-seeming little town, there persists all these controversies.

They go beyond music festivals and tourism. In 2005 I attended a public meeting called by Byron Council to hear grievances about the emission of foul odours from the chicken factory near Ewingsdale, on Byron’s northern edge. Something had malfunctioned at the factory and a very strong, obnoxious stench had enveloped the Sunrise Estate area. This exacerbated existing displeasure with the factory. Sometimes, especially at night, locals experience a musty, bad smell from the processing plant, a cloying odour that hangs in the air. One person at the meeting described how, whenever they drive past the factory, they hold their breath until well clear of it.

Emotions at the meeting became heated and furious verbal exchanges took place between vociferous locals and chicken management. When Green's Mayor Jan Barham got into a shouting match with a verbose and hostile member of the factory’s management, it was clear just how seriously these things are taken in town.

There have also been complaints of noise from the Arts and Industry Estate that adjoins Sunrise. Night noise is reported from the ice factory, from Hanson’s cement works (a Boral company) where heavy vehicles are occasionally operated outside the company’s voluntary agreement of a 7am start, and from other sources. Ironically, housing was allowed to be build around the estate without the erection of a sound wall, surely a condemnation of Byron Council’s planning processes. Council fobs off noise complaints to the Department of Conservation and Environment, yet, ironically, council at the same time threatens action on noise from holidaymakers. Some see council buck passing and a double standard at work and say this is ironic for a council in which Greens are supposedly so influential.

Town with a complex

It is said that Byron Bay suffers from an ‘insiders and outsiders’, an ‘us and them’ complex. There is some truth to this and it may be more pronounced than in other seaside tourist towns because of the sheer number of holiday season visitors and the visibility of backpacker tourists.

When visitors criticise the town, locals get upset. Last year, television personality Rex Hunt, his son and female companions were involved in a fracas outside the Beach Hotel. Hunt made scathing remarks about Byron, even describing it as a place 'about to erupt', something locals consider laughable. They, including some workers at the hotel, tell a different story, that it was Hunt’s reaction to local youth who wanted his autograph that was the cause of the violence. Their comments about the man have been anything but kind. The reaction is in some ways akin to that which followed Harvey Norman’s criticism of council, which was seen as a case of a rich outsider trying to tell locals what to do.

And so - the future?

So, what’s the future for this town with all its controversies? How will residents negotiate a détente between the economic need for tourism and the equally valid need for quality of life and a sense of control over the town they live in?

To look back to the late 1980s and forward to the present, a pattern of determined opposition to big tourism development is apparent at the same time that development on a modest scale has been accepted. Council now tries to restrict tourism development to the town core. Here, the new buildings adjacent to the surf club at Main Beach and the planned works for the Great Northern Hotel in town illustrate how council’s policy of containment can rebuild and change the feel of a town. The old town centre buildings of weatherboard, fibro and iron roofs? Gone for good.

But what about those jobs that real estate agent spoke of? Where are they? Well, for the most part, they aren’t. It seems, like that woman’s son who sought a career in hospitality, that young people will have to look north to Brisbane or south to Sydney for their life work.

The benefit of Byron Bay’s sometimes torrid experience is that, if Bernard Salt is right in his prediction of a distinct coastal culture emerging with the drift to seaside towns, Byron Bay gives those towns a glimpse of the sorts of challenges they may face.