Byron sand runs down my drain

and asscrack

Driving through Byron Hinterland after dark, there is nothing but night outside the car, tall pillars of trees ready to consume us should we slow down. In the backseat I turn and look out the back window and am met only with black, like a wall, the red tail lights illuminating nothing. The sound of cicadas and other creepy crawlies bite at the air as they zoom past, or sit sentry by the side of the road, lit for a flashing moment in headlights. They are the only indication as to where we are. I’m thinking of how soon after you see the curve of the road, do we curve the car with it. I’m thinking of how tiny we are in the pupil of god or whatever you want to call this black spot of night. We are not even ten minutes from a town full of people and I am being existential. I’m thinking of how steep the ravines are either side of the road. I’m also thinking of the Belgian backpacker who went missing in Byron in 2019, last seen leaving a bar at night and even after exhaustive and extensive search efforts, was never seen again. As my mind conjures him up on these dark roads, part of me wonders if he will call to me. I’m attracted to the idea like I am all ghostly things, but I fear it too, and what it would do to me.

In Byron’s Hinterland at our country accommodation, I haven’t felt the need to pick up my phone, I haven’t felt panic or urgency. My mind has been quiet also of the need to write voraciously, though still I record many things on my phone camera, in fear of forgetting. I feel that the city, in a way, infantilises you. All of these cheap expensive distractions, all of these task drivers and slave wagers. The need to be surveilled, sold things, so distracted from yourself and your body that you have to ask where to put it and when, just to get through the hours. The country, the rainforest, the beach all in close succession like blended watercolours, feels like escaping the matrix. The sign at the town border instructs me gently to “Cheer up slow down chill out”. I don’t even try to listen, it just happens involuntarily.

The first thing that surprises me about Byron, sitting close to the upper border of NSW, is the colour of the dirt - reddish brown. Large black ants make their fragile homes in mounds that spot the grass in many of the places we visit. I try not to step on them.

The second thing is cows. I don’t know what about “cows” being in the country was surprising to me. Maybe how dependable and mollifying their presence would be, sentinels not just over our villa, calves galavanting after their mothers on the hills in the distance, but also along roads, grazing behind barbed wire at intersections. What a joy to come across a cow. I hope they’re happy and treated well (by that I mean allowed to be cows, allowed to live).

It’s the same world but different; it’s tropical, humid, prone to palms, ferns, and banana trees, hippie vans and free love, and increasingly, tourists and A-list celebrities, the wealthy - the gentrified. Byron is crawling with resort-style accommodation, it is probably also crawling with quasi-influencers, but it still doesn’t feel pretentious. The locals are somehow none the wiser, missing the big city brainwash that is required to be able to tell one type of camera-wielding tourist from another. While not the commune it once was it still feels communal. We spot the same people multiple times in one day: a girl on the same plane as us from Sydney, then again in town as we drive towards the lighthouse, then again in Woolies at 8pm, which is somehow just as busy then as during the day.

Our first day in Byron is also one day after Trump is announced as the president again. It’s strange to be in a beautiful, unfamiliar place as the world goes to shit. Can the apocalypse be avoided? No, it’s already happening - was happening long before I was born and will go on regardless of who is in the Oval Office. Only the wealthy have the luxury of ignoring it. Is this true of Byron? Will its wellness retreats and spas and $30 acai bowls ensure that it survives long after the trees and rolling hills are covered by water and the cows come home?

But even on the resorts, past colonial grass, its still Bundjalung country. The big black ants march out of their auburn nests and across the tiled floors of the villa. Commelina Cyanea pokes out between blades of grass, and all manner of bugs and beetles knock against the windows at night. For the Arakwal people, the apocalypse has already occurred. First it looked like white men cutting down 99% of the Big Scrub rainforest, then it looked like whales being harpooned off the cove, and now it looks like a big fuck-off resort sitting on a hill, overlooking 125 acres of land. Still, trees older than we can imagine watch over this place, some densely packed in colonies of paperbark or acacia, some stolidly standing alone, wizened and stoic, untouched. What does it mean for an entire subtropical rainforest - the largest one in Australia - to be cut down almost completely? What does it mean for the 1% left, and those less ancient, but all-important other trees to be allowed to grow and live to that size and presence? In Sydney, trees are a luxury reserved for the most affluent suburbs. Where I live, southwest of Sydney, they’re cut down haphazardly, barely granted a chance in the scheme of arbory. The saplings that are bought from nurseries - the kind that local councils plant in parks, are fed on the plant equivalent of soft drinks to promote fast growth. But they are destined to live short lives - perhaps to outlive us, but fall short of their wild-grown counterparts. In a park near my house a tree was planted, standing less than a metre tall. The next day someone had snapped its delicate stem in half, leaving painful splinters pointing into the sky. The tree has slowly, gruellingly mended itself and grown back over the last few years, always to be snapped in half again, forever denied its short life by human hands. In my suburb, I need only think about how much I love a certain tree for it to be cut down the next week. In Byron, the trees don’t need to fight for relevancy like that. They are the landscape, they’re the fine line between beach, town, and country. The tropics would be unliveable if not for the trees. Everywhere will be unliveable as soon as the trees disappear.

Just ask the birds, who all have something to say all at once. There are birds that sound like whips - the Eastern Whipbird, birds that sound like falling missiles - White Throated Gerygones. Even the kookaburra pales in this landscape where he is no longer the most interesting guy at the party.

Byron Bay is what you think it is; the picture of it is everywhere - everyone blond and curly-haired, barefoot, in the back of a kombi van or toting a longboard. There are none of the traditional fast food chains here thanks to a campaign run by locals since the 1990s called ‘No Mackin’ Way in Byron Bay’. There is a three-story height limit to the buildings in town. It’s a nod to shared ideals whether you’ve lived there forever, whether you’ve fallen in love and opened your own beachside business, whether you are passing through and want to experience that diminishing ideal of nature-first.

Travel to the easternmost point of Australia and you will find yourself at the lighthouse in Byron, staring out into nothing but ocean, some small islands and eventually South America. No wonder so many people stop here when they arrive. It’s not just that there’s nowhere else to go - Australia is little else but coastline and desert - it’s that there is no reason to be anywhere else.

The road to Ballina airport is lined with honesty systems - flowers, fruit, and firewood. A marshal on the tarmac waves at us as the plane taxis away. The system of Australia passes below; mines and mountain ranges, and Sydney, which is grey and promises chaos. Byron sand is still stuck to my shins. I press it into my skin.