Byron Bay

Byron Bay is where Australia's east coast comes to an end, and the fact of that geography — a headland jutting into the Pacific, catching swell from three directions — is the reason everything else followed. The first surfers arrived in the 1960s. The artists and musicians came in the 1970s. The yogis came in the 1980s. The developers arrived much later, and what they found was a town that had already built something worth protecting. The development code has kept it low-rise. The old abbatoir became a cultural centre. The lighthouse walk above the bay is still free. Byron is not trying to be anything — it became something specific a long time ago and most of what has arrived since has been shaped by what was already here.

The surf at The Pass is one of the longest right-hand point breaks on the east coast — a wave that peels for hundreds of metres when the conditions align, gentle enough for beginners in the early morning, serious enough to command respect when a real swell arrives. The yoga scene is older than most of the hotels — there are teachers working in Byron who have been practising for thirty years, studios that predate the current wave of wellness tourism by a decade. A morning here has a specific rhythm: water or mat at sunrise, coffee at one of the cafés on the main street that has been there since before the word artisan was invented, the afternoon spent in the water or in the hinterland. Byron is the rare Australian town where the lifestyle arrived before the infrastructure, and the infrastructure eventually built itself around the lifestyle.