Photo courtesy Neverland
Isn’t it funny what images words can conjure up?
When we think of Santa Barbara, do we not picture a bluff-shaded Rincon fanning out with a winter north?
Does mention of the north shore not recall the seven-mile miracle: Haleiwa to Sunset and all the waves in between?
We associate these places, their names, with a sequence of images in our heads; even if we have never been to these places, we construct an impression of what we expect the region to be like.
The presence of these shared ideas and their strong commonality among a large group of people is what sociologist Emile Durkheim coined as the collective conscious.
However, our use of words and their symbolic meaning raise a question: would we create the same expectation of a place if the name were different?
Would the Hawaiian Islands recall themselves as they are if they had kept the name Cook left them?
Would we have the same idea about a Pipeline in the Sandwich Islands?
The answer is, well, probably.
“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare’s Juliet asked, “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell just as sweet.”
With this statement, the fated lover argues that names are arbitrary, that they are just words that we attach to things to identify them, and that the thing itself would still exist, still maintain its essence, even if we used a different sound to nominate it.
A rose would still smell like a rose if we called it a skunk, Pipeline would still toss if we called it Plumbers, and Rincon would still peel gracefully if we called it Bates Point.
The essence, the objective reality of a place, maintains.
Surfers, belonging to a subculture, possess a set of unique customs, arts, and collective ideas manifest of their specific lifestyle, their raison d’être.
Photo courtesy Albe Falzon
In certain places where there is a majority population of surfers, the collective ideas of the group surpass being the variant, minority beliefs, and find their way into the region’s majority, or dominant culture.
Regions in Hawaii, California, and Australia show evidence of this, and certain locations have come into vogue and been developed, altered over time, and eventually swallowed by the mainstream as a result of their values growing increasingly accepted and even celebrated.
I go on this tangent because of the ideas suggested reading Tricia Shantz’s recent book, Neverland, which provides a social history of Byron Bay, tracing its evolution from primary industry to alternative, back-to-nature living through the 60s and 70s.
The book, Tricia told me in an exchange, is not about surfing, but surfers - the Americans and Australians who made Byron their home.
The way we think of Byron, how we hold in in our collective consciousness, is directly influenced by these first surfers; the films of Paul Witzig and George Greenough, the early pictures of Lennox Heads, and the stories of the resulting enclave of early 70s surf culture all serve to shape our ideas of the town.
Think of the surf in Byron, and we all probably think of the same thing; an Australian country coastline, a long point, and green swell wrapping in with the uniform procession of a wave pool.
The fact that this is the image we see in our heads only further goes to show how much Byron has changed, and how much we owe our conceptions to the early surfers.
Byron Bay had its beginnings as an industrial town, described as “reeking from the stench originating from the piggery, meat works and whaling factories with their effluent coloring the sea and washing on the shore." Surfers, lured by the prospect of consistent surf and cheap living, soon set up shop, introducing the ideas that guided the town to where it stands today.
I had the pleasure of being able to ask Tricia, a Byron resident who runs the Byron Guide with her husband, Rusty Miller, a few questions about the state of things.
ASM: What is Byron like now compared to the way it was as depicted in Neverland? Is it a different place altogether or does it still bear a resemblance to its industry-to-counterculture beginnings?
Byron Bay is a constantly changing/evolving place. What it was in Neverland is different to what it is now. In the 1960s and ‘70s Byron was a working-class town with various primary industries: beach mining, whaling, an abattoir, commercial fishing, NORCO (a dairy cooperative and piggery).
There is no remnant of that left.
It was comprised of one main street as the business area which included single story houses that people lived in.
Today there are just a couple of houses still left on the main street, but most are gone and are being replaced with three story buildings. and non-locally owned businesses.
The surfers brought the change with their vegetarian cafes, making of surf films, surf shops, alternative clothing shop, creating an alternative newspaper.
It became a tourism town from the ‘90s onwards.
There is no heavy industry anymore. However, there is still a thriving arts/music, yoga countercultural atmosphere brought by the surfers which is why it has become a popular tourist destination. People are attracted to this.
And, of course, the big attraction, our surf beaches, are still as magnificent as ever.
What was your process in researching and writing Neverland? What was your favorite part?
The book took me seven years. Not full-time as I do other work. It had begun as a contemporary history of Byron Bay in the 1970s and 1980s.
When I had worked for a few years on it I realized that it was just too big and I made the decision to just focus on the surfers, mainly the American surfers.
I discovered that they had come so early (the first in 1959) so I changed the timeframe to the ‘60s and ‘70s.
My process was to interview people from that era.
I call my books social history. I’m documenting people’s stories. I conducted around 70 interviews for Neverland. I also researched the surf films of the era as they played an integral part. I immersed myself in the era.
My favourite part is talking/interviewing people, hearing their story and finding out something I didn’t know before. Writing the book was like a puzzle.
Finding the pieces and putting them together is joyous.
Do you have anything planned for the future? Anything readers can look forward to?
I do, I am working on a bit of a sequel, only this time it is the music/musicians that contributed to the cultural shift of Byron Bay/Shire.
I am picking up where Neverland left off in 1974 with American surfer/musician Dan Doeppel buying an old piggery in Byron Bay, with a dream to turn it into an ‘Arts Factory’.
The new book begins with another dreamer, an Australian, buying land in the Byron hinterland and building a music recording studio in the mid ‘70s.
Between this and the Arts Factory that opened in the early 1980s, all well-known bands of the era, nationally and some internationally, came and either recorded music and/or played live here.
Byron is rich in stories so there will be more books to come.
Neverland: American and Australian surfers in Byron Bay 1960s & 1970s is available from Hardie Grant Books here. Click here for the link to Tricia and Rusty’s Byron Guide.
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