Belongil Beach Dreaming The bush was dew-drenched, tinselled with spiders’ webs and ringing with euphonic birdsong. My cheerful anticipation was well-founded, for the morning produced some rich encounters. During the mere hour I spent tramping through the wetlands, I came by willy wagtails, whimbrels, galahs, a grey-tail tatler, pied oyster catchers and pied stilts, heaps of seagulls, wattle birds and the ubiquitous miners, a little egret, a striated pardalote, a scarlet honeyeater, two fig birds, a flock of barred godwit (recently arrived from Siberia), black spoonbills (looking like can-can dancers with their feathers ruffled), elegant white-faced heron, pelicans, eastern curlews, little black cormorants, a mangrove gerygone, Lewin’s honeyeaters, bar-shouldered doves, a grey fantail, a variegated wren, white-cheeked honeyeaters, brown honeyeaters, a pied butcherbird (with its flute-like notes, one of my favourite songsters), a southern fig bird, and a consternation of crows... [More]

On Tallow Beach Going down to my local beach always reminds me of being born. I’ve been cocooned, writing for ages on the “inside”, when suddenly I hear the roar of the breaking waters, the contractions begin and the big push to get out into the wider world is on. The birth canal is the path cut through the big entrance dune, which I enter through a shady tunnel of tuckeroo trees... [More]

To The Lake Once More Near where I live is a ti-tree lake, known in local Aboriginal lore as the women’s lake. It’s believed that before white settlement the lake was frequented by the Indigenous women, the Arakwal clan of the Bunjalung nation. In particular, it’s said that the pregnant women bathed in it because of the therapeutic properties of the ti-tree oil... [More]

Green Ink : EXACTLY when I became an addict, I can't say, for the compulsion to green your own ground, like the spur of necessity to write, can creep up on you. But somewhere, somehow, several seasons back I became a compulsive planter... [More]

The Weather and Us : Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It's a beautiful night for a raindance. Yet I wonder: Do we really, at the levels where it most matters, believe that we can manifest the weather?.. [More]

Holistic Healing and Funny Peculiar Signs of the Times : In India, they say that if you drop a pebble off any building, it will land on a philosopher. In Byron Bay, a more appropriate claim is that if you shake any tree, a hundred healers will fall from its branches... [More]

Regional Chic and the Power of Place : When I first moved to Byron Bay, some city contemporaries thought I was copping out, dropping out or having a very premature midlife crisis. In those days, it had not yet become hip to downscale, de-escalate and go back-to-nature... [More]

The Way We Were : Recently, ...a friend and I decided to stroll around town until our stomachs settled. This perambulation suited me fine for a secondary reason -- I wanted to reminisce with him about the way The Bay used to look and be more than a decade ago... [More]

Living In The Byron Bubble : It is possible to fall as passionately in love with a place as with a person. Both types of love affairs follow the same psychological lines of unfoldment... [More]

Life's a Stretch and Then You Fly : Back in the 80s when I was still a city slicker, when work was my raison d'etre, and stilettos, silk stockings and shoulder pads my daily dress code, I had more money in the bank, but I also had hunched shoulders, tight hamstrings and very shallow breathing... [More]

Byron Times : It is almost impossible to parody the New Age and alternative lifestylers in Byron Bay because our ordinary daily existence is frequently so "far out" (to coin a psychedelic phrase still popular in this territory), that it defies exaggerated mimicry... [More]