Byron Bay

The bay and the headland are Arakwal country, part of the wider Bundjalung nation, and the Arakwal people fished, camped and held ceremonies along these beaches long before Europeans arrived. James Cook named Cape Byron in 1770 after the navigator John Byron, and the name later passed to the town that grew behind it, known first as Cavvanbah.

Cedar cutters worked the rivers of the Northern Rivers district from the middle of the 19th century, and when the big trees were gone the cleared land was turned over to dairy farming. Byron Bay became the district's port: a long jetty ran out into the surf, and butter from a co-operative factory, pigs, timber and sand were loaded onto ships from it. Rail arrived in the 1890s. In the 1950s a whaling station operated at the bay, closing in the early 1960s, and an abattoir and sand mining added to the industry until they too shut down.

By the 1970s the jetty was gone and the town was cheap and half-empty. Longboard surfers had begun arriving in the 1960s for the point breaks at The Pass and Wategos, and after the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin in 1973 alternative settlers moved into the hinterland around it. Guesthouses, markets and music festivals followed through the 1980s and 1990s, the railway closed in 2004, and in the decades since the town has become one of the most expensive places to live in regional Australia, with holiday letting, celebrity buyers and a severe shortage of housing for the people who work there.

Surfing is the town's oldest claim on the world. The long right-hand wave at The Pass suits longboards, and the informal, board-shorts style of the place — barefoot in the street, coffee before a morning swim — grew out of the surf culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside it sits a wellness and alternative scene of yoga studios, retreats, healers and vegan kitchens, an inheritance from the communes and co-operatives that settled the hinterland after the Aquarius Festival.

Music and writing hold the calendar together. Festivals on farmland outside the town drew large crowds from the 1990s, the Easter blues and roots festival being the best known until its organisers went into liquidation in 2026, and the writers festival each August still fills its sessions with authors and readers. Markets rotate around the shire's towns through the month, and buskers work the main street most evenings.

Environmental activism is part of local identity: protests in the hinterland rainforest at Terania Creek in 1979 helped stop logging there and led to the protection of the Nightcap ranges. The Arakwal people signed an agreement with the state in 2001 that created Arakwal National Park and gave them a role in managing their country, an arrangement often cited as a model. Residents are proud of the low-rise skyline and wary of the crowds and the attention, and the tension between a small town and a famous destination runs through most local argument.

About six thousand people live in the town itself and around thirty-six thousand in Byron Shire, the local government area that also takes in Mullumbimby, Bangalow and Brunswick Heads. Visitors far outnumber residents through the year, and the population of the centre swells enormously between Christmas and the end of January.

Tourism and hospitality are the main employers, together with wellness and creative businesses, small manufacturers in the Arts and Industry Estate, and farming in the hinterland — macadamias, coffee, avocados, cattle and tropical fruit. The shortage of housing is the dominant local issue: house prices and rents have risen far beyond local wages, many homes are let to holidaymakers rather than residents, and the balance between holiday letting and housing for residents is a long-running point of local argument. Workers commute in from Mullumbimby, Ballina and Lismore, and homelessness is visible for a town of this size.

The day starts early with swimmers, runners and surfers checking the point, and the working week is shaped by the tide, the swell and the weather. Traffic on the single main road, water restrictions in dry spells, and recovery from the 2022 floods that devastated parts of the Northern Rivers are constant subjects of conversation. Winter is the season residents like best, when the town returns to something like its own size.

The Northern Rivers is a productive corner of Australia, and the food in Byron Bay reflects it. Macadamias are native to this coast and grown in orchards just inland; coffee is grown on the plateau above the town; and avocados, bananas, custard apples, finger limes and macadamia oil all come from farms within an hour's drive. The weekly farmers market and the monthly community market are the places to see the range of it.

Café cooking dominates. Breakfast is a serious meal here — eggs, smashed avocado, banana bread, açaí bowls and cold-pressed juice — and the town has an unusually high number of vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free kitchens for its size, a legacy of the wellness scene. Bakeries sell sourdough and sausage rolls to queues of surfers, and fish and chips eaten on the grass above Main Beach is the standard early dinner.

Seafood comes from the trawlers at Ballina and Brunswick Heads: school prawns, mahi-mahi, snapper and mud crab. Native ingredients appear widely, with lemon myrtle, Davidson plum, wattleseed and finger lime used in both restaurant kitchens and market stalls. The town also brews: a brewery based in the town sells its pale ale across the country, and distilleries and small breweries in the estate and the hinterland make gin and beer from local fruit and grain.