Ayn Rand on a mid-length…
If New York City is the spiritual and actual home of VAL-lit, inspired, perhaps by Bill Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, then Byron Bay is it’s Mt Everest, Valhalla and Nirvana.
The apex of the peak for the lifestyle obsessed VAL.
A voluptuous lava flow from an ancient volcano protrudes further east into the tepid sub-tropical Pacific than any point on the Australian Mainland. The Bay it circumscribes is lavishly decorated with sand-bottom peelers. No other place on earth is so falsifiably mytho-poetically rhapsodized over by post-modern knowledge workers.
The see and repackage and sell on what they have read in the brochures and guide-books; what has been packaged up and sold to them.
I see a different side of the Bay.
Four am and the pharaohs stir softly in their modern-day pyramids, Hollywood scripts flit between neurons in the alpha state.
Barefoot dude wanders, staggers over to my car.
“Got a ciggy? I need a ciggy.”
“Can’t help you bruz, don’t smoke”
He leans against the car. Dangerous? Not sure.
Byron has the highest rates of violent and sexual assault outside of inner Sydney. This ain’t a peaceful place when drunk and drugged fuckers are wandering around outside closeing time.
“Can you tell me how far to Newy?” he asks.
“Newy’s about eight-hundred k’s that way.”
I point south into the bush, “You’re in Byron Bay, go this way.”
I point in the other direction, down the main street, “You’ll find a bakery open, someone to give you a ciggy”.
“I need money, a coffee, give me some money.”
I got no cash.
He’s looming over me now.
I hand him a coffee thermos.
“Take this, go drink it and when the sun comes up, go to the bus station and go home. Don’t bash or rape anyone. Good luck”.
It’s a monument to greed wearing a spiritual cloak. A glittering dream metastasized into a malignant nightmare. The bastard spawn of unhinged neoliberalism and grinning hippy capitalists running riot in an orgy of aimless consumption in the spiritual supermarket. Ayn Rand on a mid-length.
He’s only an hour from the first rush hour: the pre-dawn dawnie at The Pass. The bank is hero. The peelers addictive.
In this negative Utopia, like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, slaves are drip-fed peelers at the Pass, instead of Soma.
Six am and the carparks are packed.
Range Rover, Audis, idle in the carparks, the scent of diesel fumes wafts over the line-up. The serfs have had their hit, time to man and woman the cafes. Byron is Abu Dhabi with cafes and warm-water peelers instead of air-conditioned malls. Euro-babes and Brazilian studs do the coolie labour instead of South Asians.
It’s a monument to greed wearing a spiritual cloak. A glittering dream metastasized into a malignant nightmare. The bastard spawn of unhinged neoliberalism and grinning hippy capitalists running riot in an orgy of aimless consumption in the spiritual supermarket. Ayn Rand on a mid-length.
The Instagram Murfers went to ground after the Vanity Fair hit piece. A Darwinian struggle for brands and influence could not be healed by #blessed, at least not privately. Reading between the lines, it’s easy to see who threw who under the bus, who positioned for the inevitable backlash. Even being a Murfer, this Byron Bay lifestyle don’t come for free.
It does for my Pal, “Why Kick a Maz Cow”. I don’t know he ended up rejoicing in this moniker. Alls I know is he walks and wanders the streets and since he found the Lord maybe five years ago has managed to find work cleaning cars and does a very fine line in man on man street preaching.
I’ll make a very fine king, he tells me, when my soul is saved. Ascending to heaven with the full complement of angels and trumpets, he mentions virgins, but he may be poaching from a rival faith. More attractive, at least to me, than a sponnoed post about a thirty dollar vegan smoothie.
Many folks live in the paperbark grove behind the library. Their despair and suffering is writ large, unlike the hordes of achingly cool babes on logs who soothe their angst with prescription meds. There are only so many gigs for micro-influencers.
Mental health is, of course, fucked in this town.
My old pal DC lives behind the church on Ruskin St. He rolls a sleeping bag out every night and then slinks around the old Aboriginal tracks that criss-cross Byron Bay. An invisible man. Ruskin st is named after a victorian poet, John Ruskin, who emphasised the connection between nature, art and society. One of the original mytho-poetical rhapsodisers.
I wonder what he would think of the human being seeking shelter on the street named after him.
“How you fixed D?”
He shrugs.
Like always he seems to melting. Something is dripping off him. Not tears, not sweat. He is literally melting away.
“Tramps like us,” he tells me, “we were born to die”.
Byron is changing very fast.
And like writer AA Gill discovered about the rapid changes wrought on Dubai: “The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money”. It’s a town more status obsessed and class conscious than Victorian England, more wealth inequality exists than at any time since the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers strode the boardwalks of Manhattan.
Surfing is just the latest accoutrement. A kind of necessary flag to wave that shows peers that you are doing life right.
At The Pass, peelers are glittering and winking into the sun as it draws down into the twin peaks of Mt Chincogan. Sexual selection is rife. There are many more gals than guys, the ratio is like communist China, but reversed. A competent hipster who can cross step and control a leashless log can run a harem of Euro babes with little effort.
What little effort there is consists of blocking for waves, a push, an encouraging word. Swiss, Austrians, Italians, Spanish,Germans (especially Germans), they all feel free of the constraints of the Old World, fully self-actualised in this banquet where all wines flow and all hearts open.
A biologist interested in human behaviours could write many theses studying these sexual selections. They would never exhaust the material.
Covid has accelerated and enhanced the desire for Byron Bay.
Each new VAL adds their own flourishes to the myth. The old whore, it seems, will never want of pimps ready to apply a fresh coat of lipstick and send her out for another go round.
The fully realized VAL in Byron Bay becomes God-like, a digital reality with a purchase that has currency around the Globe.
Don’t get me wrong.
I love beautiful people, diamond studded peelers, perfect pop-ups and peaches on the beaches as much as the next mark.
It’s just… it’s just if we have VAL-lit, then we need an anti-VAL lit, otherwise the universe topples over.
