I grew up in Byron Bay. It was nothing like you might imagine

April 23, 2026 — 5:00am

When I was 10 I faked a stomach ache to get out of school, took the acting a bit too far and ended up in Byron Bay Hospital getting a perfectly functioning appendix removed by our local surgeon.

As I lay in bed recovering – major organ extraction, it turns out, really hurts – my Year 5 teacher, Mrs Finter, brought my entire class with her to hospital to visit. Decades before Chris Hemsworth came to live here, I guess I was the most famous actor in Byron Bay.

It’s an odd thing to grow up in a place like Byron. Where you’re from might be the most interesting thing about you. When I first left town at 19 to try and do something with my life, I had to explain where Byron Bay was. Now anyone I meet – from all over the world – wants to know what it was like to be raised there.

I tell them, like I’ll tell you: it wasn’t anything like you imagine. Life was simple, and it was humble: Byron Bay was the epitome of small town, blue-collar Australia, albeit with very nice beaches. Houses on Marine Parade in Wategos Beach went for $180,000 (it’s now one of Australia’s most exclusive residential streets, with house prices averaging $16 million). Not that anyone had the money to buy them back then.

My family – a newly separated mother with four boys under 11 – rented a century-old farmhouse on the old road towards Bangalow from a generous farmer … for $5 a week. When my brother got a horse, he upped it to $10 (for the grass it ate).

We had carpet snakes in the ceiling – I could hear them slithering around at night as I lay in bed – and the house groaned and shifted when the winter south-westerlies blew hard. The XPT train from Sydney cut across the top of our property; my favourite driver used to blast Farmer In The Dell on the train horn when he passed (hey-ho, the derry-o, the farmer in the dell).

We had no telephone, but we did have a black-and-white TV with two channels, ABC and NRTV. On school holidays we’d all pile into Mum’s 1972 Kingswood station wagon and spend entire days at The Pass, Byron Bay’s best surfing beach. I learnt to ride at seven years old; most kids in Byron already could by then. Or else you were a ‘clubbie’ (surf lifesaver); dread the thought. Everyone was either surfer or clubbie; no one (that I knew) was neither.

Mum would stack the ‘family esky’ with food and we’d snap up pole position at a picnic table overlooking the waves. I reckon my brothers and I ate more honey and banana sandwiches than any other kids in Australia. I’d quietly envy the kids on holiday from Sydney who ordered sausage rolls at the kiosk.

But no-one had money in those days. These days Byron might be full of Hemsworths and Hemmeses, but back then the richest person I knew was my best friend Kirk, whose parents owned Foodland, the town’s supermarket. They had a jet-ski, and cans of Coke in their fridge, and jumbo-sized packets of Smarties in their pantry; even a big trampoline and pool in the backyard. They must’ve been trillionaires.

For the rest of us non-supermarket people, life couldn’t cost much. Sometimes we’d pack cardboard cartons from Foodland into the Kingswood and slide down the grassy slopes below the lighthouse on our stomachs (above Little Wategos Beach). In school holidays it felt like the whole town was there.

On Friday nights, we’d roller-skate at the old Seabreeze Dance Hall in the park by Main Beach across the road from what’s now The Beach Hotel. Back then it was The Top Pub: it was made of fibro and shed asbestos and was full of tattooed bikies; it was the only place in Byron I knew to stay clear of.

The beach never made it into the unsafe category, no matter how crazy conditions got. When the waves got too wild to surf, half the kids in town would gather at The Wreck (adjacent to The Top Pub) to bodysurf dumpers right onto the shore. How no-one ended up in a wheelchair, I’ll never know. When it was dead calm, we’d swim out to the first reef and take turns with a mask and snorkel to swim with the wobbegongs (sharks).

These days I live about 45 minutes’ drive north. I visit occasionally – I still have family there. There are a lot more tourists now, of course, and the mansions the later arrivals built make Kirk’s house with his trampoline in the backyard seem Lilliputian.

But how could Byron Bay ever stay a secret? It’s not mine – it never was. Though there are ghosts from that happy place in that happy time lurking all over town, I just have to remember how to look for them.

Any time I swim at Little Wategos, it’s still all mine, and when my brother got married on a sunny Saturday afternoon on the back beaches of Broken Head, it was as deserted as the time my uncle (who moved to Byron Bay in 1970) took us all to find ‘Secret Beach’ out there 45 years ago. The hippies of my childhood used to put stickers all over their cars: “Magic Happens Here”, they read. I think they were on to something.