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.
Needed to peruse the archive. Glad I read this.
Word! The writing is good. Funny thing is that I quite liked Byron.
I was on vacation, and not paying accommodation so I didn’t really mind the slightly overpriced food. It had an easy going vibe, in the heart of winter. Nice people, all around and very little crowds at the time. Worth a visit one day.
“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”. – How I wish I had the conviction and presence of mind to deliver such lines to strangers.
You know my story with The Bay my old friend. A chance family holiday visit in the 70’s turned into 15 years of regular visits but no more. Paid parking at The Pass ??? Gave it another shot about 4 years ago…..Got some nice little sliders at The Pass and got munched by bed bugs in a place that cost plenty and seemed pretty decent. That’s Byron….a few good experiences but then feasted on by parasites. Parasites of all shapes and sizes sucking each other to death. You nailed it to the wall Sheep.
A Saffa travelled
to OZ in ’95 and wondered what
the fuss was about.
the Eagles sang about this a long time ago.
She came from Providence
One in Rhode Island
Where the old world shadows hang
Heavy in the air
She packed her hopes and dreams
Like a refugee
Just as her father came across the sea
She heard about a place
People were smilin’
They spoke about the red man’s way
And how they loved the land
They came from everywhere
To the Great Divide
Seeking a place to stand
Or a place to hide
Down in the crowded bars
Out for a good time
Can’t wait to tell you all
What it’s like up there
And they called it paradise
I don’t know why
Somebody laid the mountains low
While the town got high
Then the chilly winds blew down
Across the desert
Through the canyons of the coast
To the Malibu
Where the pretty people play
Hungry for power
To light their neon way
Give them things to do
Some rich men came and raped the land
Nobody caught ’em
Put up a bunch of ugly boxes
And Jesus people bought ’em
They called it paradise
The place to be
They watched the hazy sun
Sinking in the sea
You can leave it all behind
Sail to Lahaina
Just like the missionaries did
So many years ago
They even brought a neon sign:
“Jesus is coming”
Brought the white man’s burden down
Brought the white man’s reign
Who will provide the grand design?
What is yours and what is mine?
‘Cause there is no more new frontier
We have got to make it here
We satisfy our endless needs
Justify our bloody deeds
In the name of destiny
And in the name of God
And you can see them there
On Sunday morning
Stand up and sing about
What it’s like up there
They call it paradise
I don’t know why
You call someplace paradise
Kiss it goodbye
Been done mate. First it was the Rajneeshis, and then every other sleazebag working an angle. The Rajneeshis cleaned up when the Bhagwan went offline. They had access to the bank account of teh Australian arm and bought up as much of the real estate in town they could. I knew quite a few people who had lived and worked in town who sold up when the NYE parties got out of hand in the mid 80s. But others would say the place was doomed the moment they put the first roundabout in front of Timperley’s Garage.
turn too far right and it’s polluted oil sludge freakshow gangsters who don’t have a clue . Oh the dilemma
I was at that rave.
… fuck! Steve, I wanna be your dog. (rooster / goat)
Below; one from ‘the outsider’ archives. I enjoyed this piece so much – I made a copy …
“On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence, through a strange reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence which is called upon to justify itself.” Camus.
I dropped my daughter off at school bright and early and headed north to the bright lights and seamy underbelly of the Gold Coast. The plan was to head to Burleigh, sniff around and talk to any eyewitnesses of the Flores/Garcia/Burleigh local beat down that went live and put surfing back on the glittering main stage where it belongs.
I had one main question to answer: how does a man assault another man in front of thousands of people, captured on camera, and walk away without being charged in a modern democratic country that professes to live by the rule of law?
A quick digression to set the emotional tone. I confess a deep and visceral loathing for what the Gold Coast has become. It is a soulless, desperate place covered over with a patchwork of cookie-cutter, middle class, legoland slums populated by carpetbaggers, hucksters, slumlords and real estate agents, heroin addicts turned born again Jesus freaks, scumbags, gimlet-eyed washed-up drunks, has-beens and never-weres, net porn addicts with bad B.O, leather-skinned whores walking into grim Soviet-style whorehouses, hock shops full of stolen goods, used car salesmen, deluded dreamers hawking some snake oil or other, obscenely wealthy plastic surgeons and lawyers who charge by the hour with epoxy SUP’s on gleaming new BMW X 5’s (baby seal white or jaguar black) and every other kind of stooge and dreg of human society.
The Gold Coast is proof positive that evolution does not always work in one direction, sometimes there is regression. In this case on a grand scale. The skyline is dotted with ugly high-rises whose lower floors contain retail stores flogging the worst kind of asian made junk and useless trinkets, as well as low rent supermarkets where several generations of semi-literate morbidly obese bogan families wallow in the aisles, blood flowing like turgid rivers through sclerotic arteries jammed with cheap margarine and other trans-fatty refuse. Great clots of ghoulish old people stagger like zombies through the promenades with chunks of dripping flesh protruding from bandages where plastic surgeons have carved out malignant skin cancers.
What’s that shipmates? You think I’m being too kind? I assure you the place is a monument to greed, short-sightedness, vapidity, vanity of every stripe and flavour, narrow fanaticism, monumental ignorance, idiocy, drunken and meaningless violence, local thuggery and faux spiritualism wearing the cloak of commerce; a vast, jumbled consumer wasteland created by pre-human or sub-human monsters in a delirium of greed. It is the very essence of the fake, the shallow, the meaningless and artificial. Even the very sand that lines the pointbreaks has been mechanically pumped over by great belching machines.
The surf is a clusterfuck of biblical proportions. Millions of tanned and tattooed rats tear each other to pieces to relieve the tension momentarily as they spazz their way over the wave they so viciously fought for. As a general rule of thumb I would rather take a jewess to Auschwitz on a date than take a surfboard to the Superbank. We note in fairness that the surf occasionally produces the most mind-numbingly perfect sand bottom tubes on the planet, with a water so perfectly blue and glowingly iridescent that it is capable of momentarily absolving the litany of sins and transgressions so far listed. There are surfers of sublime grace and casual skill fully capable of threading these blue caverns. History is clear on this fact.
Perched in the heavens atop this modern day Gomorrah, like the tower of Babel, stands the Surf Industry, with it’s glittering showrooms full of shiny merchandise via which means pliant surf magazine hacks can be gently persuaded to continue to propagate the almighty myth of the Gold Coast (amongst other money making myths). A dream which has quite clearly turned toxic and insane.
In the words of Captain Willard: “Yes Sir. Quite clearly insane.”
stunning writing, Steve. Made me check myself- my own greed, aspirations and idealisms. Sobered me up and made me feel better, thanks.
i once texted with chas smith! so thrilling.
If I ever meet Chris Hemsworth I’m going to tell him it’s appropriate he plays Thor God of Thunder because I believe he lives in Byron Bay and the most hellacious thunder and lightning storm I’ve ever witnessed was while camping at Byron Bay in 1980. It wasn’t flash – one alligator, two alligator, three alligator – BOOM! It was like the Gods had fistfuls of thunderbolts and were flinging them as fast and furious as they could.
Like a heavenly artillery barrage.
I was sleeping in a tent and I really thought I was gonna die.
The other day in Malibu a black homeless guy wandered up and actually said: “Hey can I have $15 for a pack of cigarettes?”
I told him: “My good man, when I was young you could get a CARTON of cigarettes for $6. And my brother played in the Ray Charles band and Ray told him it was easier to kick heroin than it was to quit cigarettes.”
I’ve heard a pack of cigarettes is like $30 in Australia, yes/no? But isn’t that like $6 American?
I’m helping a dude launch a new e-motorcycle that is launching tomorrow.
He wanted to do an Elon Musk-like presentation so I gave him a quote from Aldous Huxley: “Speed is the genuinely modern pleasure.”
And I also suggested he cut together classic motorcycle scenes from Hollywood movies: Lawrence of Arabia to Wild Bunch to Great Escape to Eric Von Zipper to Tron.
Not sure what he’s doing. It’s all classified and the launch is tomorrow.
This is one of the clips I found. Amazing how clean that black and white was in 1926 and amazing how rural the cliffs of Santa Monica were and amazing this guy didn’t snuff it.
The telephone wires saved him.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I think I know that storm. I was in Bangalow when it came over late in the afternoon. There was a weird front that had two overlapping lips of savagely black clouds rolling through. Everything went black and then it poured. This would have been 83 or 84.
No this was 1980 for sure.
It was the same year as the infamous underarm bowl by Trevor Chappell versus New Zealand.
It was really something.
An artillery barrage from the Gods.
And then the next morning it was glassy and there was no surf.
Well, to be fair, there have been a few storms in Byron.
I imagine so, but that was a humdinger. Drove through something similar in Calgary. Alberta, leaving town and heading north after stumbling into the Calgary Stampede. Ate buffalo steaks up on Scotchman’s Bluff and watch the chuck wagon’s race. Drove out that night in the middle of another thunder and lightning artillery barrage.
This is the warning article for what will become of Montauk on Long Island if we don’t get a handle on it. Who am I kidding, this is already Montauk on a larger scale. RIP
Montauk blocked turning the East Deck into a high end surf club right? and there’s way more money in Montauk than there will ever be in Byron.
Chas you missed the tie in for Kelly being bad for the environment. Gold courses use ungodly amounts of water and treat the fairways and greens with very toxic pesticides, which eventually run off and into the sea. Can’t be good for the reefs of Hawaii. F’ing Kelly!
Good read. Sad though. And it’s happening everywhere!!! Out of state plates are everywhere in Hanalei. The new dream is going to be to move to a real crappy place and blow it up on insta to lure the Val’s in and out of our lives so we can all get back to surfing.
No, People cared about the common good of everybody no matter how much money anybody had. Anybody can go visit the national parks. They saved our county from it becoming another Daly City. They were all democrats. What do you think about the slogan “keep the country country” you grew up on the north shore?
Longtom, I’m really glad you mentioned Brave New World. I went to the Bristol Scale Wavegarden in September and my first thought going through the gates was honestly that I’d been transported into that book and won the Alpha-Beta-Gamma lottery.
Yesterday was Obstacle Golf, today is soft-scoop shoulder-high on tap. Where do I sign?
But all that got me thinking – could it be a March of the Tanks that saves a place like Byron?
Well said. I feel like you’re preaching to the converted though. Put this up on the inertia and you’ll really ruffle some feathers.
A total visionary like Elvis, upon death if you evacuate your bowels it’s the most uncompromising position to be in.
i d not know why but i want an audi. fix me. why do i want a goddamn audi?
I want a Lexus.
perfect goat herders car?
why a lexus?