With all that Byron Bay has become, it's remarkable to think that the same town was once an industrial hub with a piggery, an abattoir, sand mining and a whaling station — until surfers came along.
abc.net.au/news/byron-bay-transformation-1970s-now/101343964"You climb up Highway 1 onto the hills that stare over the east coast … whip through the fast esses that snake along the ridge top … and suddenly there is Byron Bay… I've come to think of it as the most stunning seascape I've ever seen. See Naples and die; see Byron and open your mind."
A new book called Neverland charts the forces that created modern Byron Bay and it comes up with a few surprises."Byron Bay was never really a hippy town even though the media today still perpetuates the myth … surfers set the agenda for what Byron was to become." "The Americans were more entrepreneurial, but they had come to live a simpler life. They did not want to see what happened in California happen here," Shantz says.The second question is: how did these Americans know Byron Bay even existed? Well, as the book explains, we can thank filmmaker Bruce Brown and champion surfer Phil Edwards for that.
Edwards and Bruce Brown were about to get second shock. While they surfed Wategos another American was surfing The Pass just a few hundred metres away. That man was Bob Cooper. Back in the States he would also talk up the surf he'd found in Byron and later in the ‘60s he'd make the move to Australia for good, opening a string of successful surf shops.
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