Back in the 1990s, there was a road safety TV advertisement where a bloke gets booked for driving under the influence and loses his licence. His partner looks at him accusingly and snarls: "There goes the trip to Byron!"
I always thought it odd that this woman, dating a loser who gets behind the wheel of a car while drunk, cares only about missing a holiday to the most overrated town on the eastern seaboard.
Surely, I'm not the only person in Sydney or Melbourne who doesn't understand the whole "travelling north" to Byron thing? For so many folks, Byron Bay is the ultimate Australian seachange destination. A land of endless sun, sand and sea, where everyone is chilled and it's always the Age of Aquarius.
Bullshit.
I'm reworking a phrase from Sam Harris here, but Byron is the mother lode of bad ideas. And by bad ideas I mean every kooky, wacky, unsubstantiated branch of pseudo-science mumbo jumbo concocted.
I'm afraid I'm just way too cynical to ever up-stumps from Sydney's inner city to live in a place where people believe that amethyst crystals can neutralise your negative state of mind, or that reiki will rid your body of an urge to vote for the Liberal-National Coalition.
Before falling for all the shamanic earth medicine and tantric alchemy malarky, consider this: according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Byron local government area has an unemployment rate of more than 8 per cent, and a non-domestic violence rate that is almost twice the NSW average. Seems there must be a blow-back from the "chilled-out vibe" when the mushrooms stop working.
Got kids? Better not put them in the local preschool unless you want them coming home looking like a walking petri dish. The area has the lowest immunisation rates in Australia, and in some parts, nearly one-third of all five-year-olds are not fully immunised.
Is there anything I like about Byron Bay, you ask? Yes, OK, I'll concede that the beaches are lovely in a sharky kind of way, and the hinterland is wonderfully green.
In fact, there's a reason the hinterland is that emerald colour: it's because it bloody rains all the time in Byron; 121 days each year, to be precise. And we're talking real gumboot-sloshing rain, 1737 millimetres of it per annum (to put this in perspective, Melbourne's annual rainfall is just 603 millimetres). So, you'll be spending a hell of a lot of your time indoors.
This means you'll need to buy a house. Good luck with that. The average price for a home in Byron Bay itself is edging closer to a million, at $938,000. This means you'll be so busy working to pay back the bank, in a job that probably doesn't exist in the area, that you won't have much time for all that self-discovery and personal transformation you've come searching for.
Then there's Schoolies Week. Every November, the town in overrun by pimply adolescents hell-bent on scoring some of that famous Byron weed and fondling each other in the sand dunes. The rest of the time the town is overrun by tourists, all of them in search of a nirvana that hasn't existed for the best part of 40 years, if it ever did at all. The result is a horrendous traffic jam that would do Parramatta Road proud.
My advice: forget the seachange to Byron. Stay put in the city, grow some dreadlocks and create your own cosmic vibrations at home.
