CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
An exhausted frontline worker on the main street of Byron Bay has today treated her anxious valium and linen-riddled customers with a couple silver linings.
“Yeah it’s great to still work in the town I grew up in” says the bubbly but visibly exhausted local check-out chick, Shirley Parkway (29).
With dark rings under her eyes, this daughter of the old local newsagent goes on to explain how she’s had to improvise after being priced out of her hometown by the well-heeled elites of Toorak and Bellevue Hill – who moved to this place purely because of the warm and fuzzy feeling they get when actually having a conversation with a real person like Shirley.
“It’s only an hour and 40 or so minutes from Logan on a good run in” she says.
“Logans good too. The people are nice and it’s easier to find a place to rent”
The rapid social cleansing of Byron Bay has been visible for many years now, as Australia’s rich become rich enough to work remotely – or not work at all.
After the disastrous gentrification of Sydney’s inner west and Melbourne’s north, their sights were soon set on turning their favourite holiday towns into a sunnier version of of the soulless places they are fleeing.
Much like the market manipulators that control the rest of the country, the new land-banking and wealth hoarding classes of Byron Bay argue that the intentionally exclusive Byron property and rental markets is not the fault of the people who were lucky enough to have a trust fund to tip into a $200,000 housing deposit.
Instead, it’s a ‘SuPpLy IsSuE’ – and one that can only be solved by building 30,000 more $1.5m townhouses that will be flipped into Airbnbs within nanoseconds of being connecting to the overwhelmed local sewerage system.
According to Google Maps, the ‘Byron’ region is no longer limited to the once jovial township of stoned hippies and drunken whalers known as Byron Bay – it now includes a vast area of Hinterland and surrounding beaches.
From Lismore to pretty much the Gold Coast, this rapidly expanding catchment all started when music festival organisers decided that a giant paddock one hour north of the town should be titled ‘North Byron Parklands’.
As the billionaires replace the millionaires who replaced people like Shirley, Byron is marketed to the Southern elite as ‘a combination of the the best bits of the city, with the best bits of the coast’ – which is a real estate agents way of describing a town made up of gentrifying corporate tree-changers and ambitious property developers living in a exclusive enclave with semi-tropical foliage.
Also, the fact that the town is made up of mostly white people also makes them feel a little bit more comfy, now that the capital city golf clubs have started hiring Nepalis in the kitchen.
But for the working class that keeps Byron and surrounds running, the only option is to move two hours away to the ghetto outskirts of Brisbane and the Gold Coast,
“At least everyone there says hello to you at the shops in Logan” says Shirley, to the prescription-numbed and Venroy-cloaked grocery store customers whose problems have only followed them to paradise.
