Byron Bay NSW

I stayed at Byron Bay Caravan Park, $35 for an unpowered site, almost at the entrance to Byron Bay. From here I went to see the iconic Lighthouse on top of Byron Hill. Byron Bay is a coastal town located on the far-north coast of NSW, Australia. Home to Australia’s most easterly point and the Cape Byron lighthouse. The town is a busy crowded area, but the beaches are beautiful, and the Lighthouse on top of the hill was amazing. The hill is a magnet for fitness buffs who run up and down at Dawn and Dusk. I was happy to walk the track from where I parked my wheels to the lighthouse and back and view the spectacular scenery on both sides of the walk.

In 1770 Lieutenant James Cook found safe anchorage and re-named Cape Byron after a fellow sailor John Byron. Europeans moved into the area in the 1830s. The first industry in Byron was cedar logging from the Australian red cedar (Toona ciliata). The timber industry is the origin of the word “shoot” in many local names – Possum Shoot, Coopers Shoot and Skinners Shoot – where the timber-cutters would “shoot” the logs down the hills to be dragged to waiting ships. Timber getting became insignificant after World War I. As a result, many former timber workers became farmers.

Gold mining of the beaches was the next industry to occur. Gold was discovered in Byron Bay in 1870. Up to 20 mining leases set up on Tallow Beach to extract gold from the black sands around the 1870s.

The Cape Byron Lighthouse was built in 1901 at the most easterly point on the Australian mainland. Its construction destroyed a significant Arakwal men’s ceremonial ground. Longboard surfers arrived in the 1960s and used natural breaks at The Pass, Watego’s, and Cosy Corner. This was the beginning of Byron Bay as a travellers’ destination, and by 1973, when the Aquarius Festival was held in nearby Nimbin, its reputation as a hippy, happy, alternative town was established, although tourism facilities remained minimal. From the 1980s, tourism began to develop in earnest, with the cash-poor surfers and hippies supplemented, and to a degree supplanted, by cash-rich conspicuous consumers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Bay

Today, Byron Bay is one of the most up-market residential areas on the Australian east coast with the growth in multi-million dollar mansions now pushing the median value of house sales up…..with an  attraction to a diverse range of visitors including surfers, backpackers and general tourists interested in the natural attractions of the area, and also supports a healthy cross section of creative persons including artists, crafts persons and musicians, while its more recent hippy/new age past is reflected to a degree in a prevalence of alternative “new-age” shops, “spiritual” services such as meditation and yoga classes, and holistic healing/”wellness” retreats