The Godfather: Peter Corris on Byron Bay

Tags: Byron Bay/ Coochiemudlo/ Southern Cross University

In 1999 Jean and I found ourselves living in Byron Bay. It hadn’t been planned. We’d made our sea change from Sydney to the south coast some years before, but we’d taken it into our heads to go north – for a change, for the warmth.

Friends told us of a small sand island – Coochiemudlo in Moreton Bay. We went up to investigate and went through Byron, which impressed us favourably. But we were on our way to our island paradise.

We liked the island, which was no bigger than a dairy farm, had sandy beaches and limpid waters. Land was cheap; we sold up down south, bought an acre block and had a kit house built. We stayed on the island for three years but, with Jean having to travel up to the Sunshine Coast to teach and me tiring of the insularity, we were unsettled. The advertisement of a lectureship in Creative Writing at Southern Cross University in Lismore provided the opportunity for a change.

Jean got the lectureship and we had the enticing prospect of living in Byron Bay, a 40-minute drive from the Lismore campus on country roads. From the start, and for a number of years following, the experience was positive. With our goods in storage, we lived for a couple of weeks in a beach caravan-park cabin in perfect harmony – not an easy thing for a couple used to a fair level of comfort to do.

Following that, while the sale of our island house was negotiated, we rented. The house had a swimming pool. In Byron you can swim in a pool or the sea for eight months of the year. I became, as I thought, adept at swimming-pool maintenance, which, as owners know, involves quite a lot of work and some skill. Unhappily, I fell awkwardly while cleaning the pool and broke my ankle. This meant I missed the greeting of the new millennium from the high point where the lighthouse stands.

The town had most of the amenities that I required – a good library, a gym, several pubs and eateries and a golf course. The 18-hole Byron Bay golf course is the only full-length, par 72 layout where I ever broke a hundred and I only did it once.

I befriended historian Michael Pearson, then commuting from nearby Lennox Head to Sydney to teach at the University of New South Wales, and several fellow golfers. These included a surfer, a radio presenter, an ultra-light flyer who was sadly killed, and Keith Marshall, a single-figure handicapper whom I learned had been an outstanding district cricketer. Employed in a supervisory role by the Department of Education, he was married to Jill Eddington, Director of the Byron Bay Writers Festival and the Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre, and was unfailingly patient with my hacking around the course.

Of course we became involved in the festival and the Writers’ Centre (Jean was on the Committee), befriending Jill Eddington, now Director of Literature at the Australia Council, Chris Hanley, Chair of the Centre and a major sponsor of the festival, among others, and renewing a friendship with Marele Day. The festival itself reintroduced us to old friends like Patrick Cook, Don Watson, Gabrielle Lord, Michael Wilding and Frank Moorhouse.

Those luminaries came and went, but I’ve never forgotten being approached by a small, elderly woman in the library, who introduced herself as Thea Astley, recently moved to the area. We became friends with Thea, who smoked ferociously, drank enthusiastically and had a wicked tongue.

Byron was, and I suppose still is, a magnet to the connections of people who live there. In none of our other country locations – Gippsland, the Illawarra coast, Coochiemudlo – did we receive such frequent visits from both friends and family as at Byron.

I achieved my highest academic status – Adjunct Professor at Southern Cross – and we made enduring friendships with several of the academics. We bought a house and, with Jean on a lecturer’s salary and me churning out books, we had the funds to install a swimming pool. I remember lying in the sun on the grass at the edge of the pool and thinking, like Ray Winston in Sexy Beast (2000) ‘What have I done to deserve this?’

We left Byron after four years. The circumstances involved in our leaving are another story but my memories of the place are happy and tinged with nostalgia. I’ve sent Cliff Hardy there a couple of times in my stead.