PART ONE

The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
                                                                  Hunter S. Thompson
.

                                                                                              
It is often the little things we do that make the biggest difference. 

I stopped once at a roundabout in Byron Bay to pick up a hitchhiker and that simple act would change my life forever, change it in a way I could never have imagined. 

If a ‘junction’ is how the dictionary describes a roundabout then the one I tangled with on that sunny North Coast afternoon in September 1997 was just that; a junction. Metaphorically speaking. 

Earlier in the day something else happened that would also have life-changing consequences. I purchased a property in Suffolk Park, a beachside suburb five kilometres south of the village of Byron Bay. It was a capricious act. Believe me, I hadn’t woken up that morning planning to buy a piece of real estate. Not in Byron Bay or anywhere else. 

My spur-of-the-moment decision was done in the manic phase of the bi-polar illness that had plagued my life since childhood, but which had gone undiagnosed. It was due to the near-fatal psychotic episode I experienced in April 0f 1995 that the diagnoses was made.

Life felt large this day. Manic highs leave you no time for quiet contemplation. You feel indomitable. Unstoppable. In the manic phase, you are financially and sexually promiscuous. There is something wildly intoxicating about skimming the high peaks of mania. It’s as if the universe is with you all the way. As if you’re up there on Mount Olympus partying with the gods. Marian Faithful sang about it. The urge to fly through Paris with the warm wind in her hair––and then in one suicidal leap from a tall building, her wish is fulfilled. 

It’s no wonder the rise to Olympian heights is exhilarating. And precarious. The fall to earth can be profound.

The painful collapse of my thirty-two-year marriage was the trigger for the psychotic meltdown. What followed was a nightmare, including a serious suicide attempt––the paramedics defibrillating me three times on the way to Emergency; being scheduled twice under the NSW and then the Queensland Mental Health Acts; being locked up in psychiatric wards in both States; experiencing manic episodes that threatened mine and other people’s lives; extended periods in and out of clinics; an inability to get even a continuous hour’s sleep for nights on end; and the soul-wearying, debilitating effects of living with a malignant depression. 

All this, out of the blue, happening to a person used to being on top of her game, in charge of her life, useful to her children and grandchildren, able to run her busy PR consultancy, support her political spouse, and generally cope with life’s ups and downs with equanimity.

Then came April 11th, 1995, and boom!

My family was suddenly presented with a wife and parent in free-fall, and with no net to catch her. It was a time before the plethora of memoirs recounting the serious nature of depression had hit the bookshelves, before bi-polar entered the common lexicon, before Beyond Blue, before the Black Dog Institute, before anyone was disseminating professional information and well before politicians were campaigning on funding for mental health issues. In other words, it was a time before the stigma surrounding mental illness had lifted and light was allowed to shine in to illuminate the darkness. And it was a frightening time for all of us. 

Had I been hit by a car instead of a psychotic tsunami my children would have called an ambulance. But when suddenly confronted with a mother so ‘gone in the head’, acting so irrationally, my bewildered and panicking offspring were caught floundering. Unfortunately, what they did next, with all the best intentions, proved disastrous.

Good friends recommended a particular psychiatrist, and my children were able to secure an immediate consultation with him in his Macquarie Street rooms. It soon became evident, however, that the doctor was the problem, not the solution. Without asking if I were taking medication for any existing ailments––and after an interview that seemed uncomfortably fixated on my spouse, the Honourable John Brown, who had been the high-profile Minister for Arts, Sport, Environment and Tourism in the Hawke Government––the Macquarie Street man took out his pad and blithely proceeded to write out a prescription for Prozac.

And so it began, the nightmare. The medical profession––but obviously not this doctor––had become aware by now that the combination of steroids and SSRIs, in particular, Prozac, was a highly clinically significant one, and such a combination was to be avoided at all cost. The contra-indications were too dangerous, the risks considered not worth the benefits. 

On this day of my sudden collapse, the prescription ordered for me, and diligently administered by my adult children, would be a disastrous combo, initiating the phenomenon tagged ‘roid rage'. Had the man taken the trouble to enquire, he would have learned I’d been taking steroids for the past week, prescribed by a GP for a highly aggravating allergy rash covering my entire body. For days, I had been laying on my bed under a ceiling fan covered in cold wet towels to ease the pain and itch. 

The rash was apparent when I presented, and yet the specialist never enquired, but ordered my children to take his prescription for Prozac, get it filled immediately and start dosing me up. Oh, and see the receptionist on the way out.

It was the same treating psychiatrist who would admit me to the Sydney Clinic at Clovelly two weeks later, by which time my condition had deteriorated significantly, there having been serious psychotic episodes within days of commencing the Prozac; one involving my husband and a pair of scissors, the other an attempt to throw myself in front of a speeding car on Ocean Street, Woollahra. But the good doctor would eventually wake up to the problem he had helped create and begin prescribing new types of SSRIs, monitoring me closely as the mania subsided.

Unfortunately, the pendulum soon swung too far to the other extreme. I began sinking into a debilitating depression, compliant when the specialist arranged for my admission into the care of the professionals at Clovelly.

Mistakes would pile on however, and things would go from bad to worse. By the time a week in residence at the Sydney Clinic had passed, and I was almost comatose with drugs, the psychiatrist would be calling in the police and having me locked up and scheduled under Clause 10 of the NSW Mental Health Act. It was a brutal response to what was an insignificant act on the part of a very sick patient. I was in a darkly depressive state, harbouring suicidal thoughts, refusing food, my weight dropping dramatically, and the clinic people so concerned they were considering intravenous feeding.

It was late on the Sunday afternoon. Mothers’ Day. Although a special day, my eldest son, Jonathon, was the only one of my family allowed to visit me because I was in such a fragile state of health, physically and mentally. The idea was that this sensible––and sensitive––young man might be able to encourage his mother to eat something. A scone and a cup of coffee was the kindly nurse’s short-term goal that afternoon.

Mine was to be left alone. To lay in bed under the sheets and simply fade away. 

Although our desires were incompatible, the nurse was always going to win because I was too weak to resist and my son was/is a good talker. The nurse turned me out of bed, tidied me up and congratulated me on my valiant effort to co-operate. I might even enjoy the afternoon tea I was about to have with my son, she said. 

Nodding to her, Jon took my arm and helped me down the flight of stairs and in to the canteen.

Our timing was lousy. The canteen was empty and just closing up for the day. However, the woman behind the counter, another kindly soul, generously offered to make us coffees and to retrieve a couple of scones from out in the kitchen. We could sit here while she cleaned up. No worries, love, she said and Jon thanked her and led me to a table. It was then that a man’s head emerged from the kitchen, and the scone-maker abruptly ordered us out of his realm.

Meekly, I began to apologize and tried to explain the special circumstance, that it was not my idea but the order of the nurse upstairs. 

I have had a significant hearing loss since childhood and did not hear his reply, but he snatched the plate of scones out of the woman’s hand and apparently berated her for offering to serve us at this time of day. He turned back to us then, and this time I did hear him. It was an uncompromising order to my son and me to leave the canteen.

His dammed scones had been the last thing I’d wanted, and having had to beg for them, and then been told off by the man? Well, suddenly it seemed to my sick brain that this was the ultimate indignity in what had been weeks of indignities. Despite being so ill, so zombie-like, thanks to the Largactil injections and whatever other drugs the Dispensary were dishing out to me upstairs every time the latch slid open and the little paper cup of pills was presented, I rallied from my torpor just long enough to arc up. 

I’m a Scorpio. The sting in the tail, okay? Either that, or my inherently keen highland Scottish sense of injustice, call it as you will, but I snapped. And I still remember how good it felt to let those weeks of pent up, turbulent emotions loose with a heartfelt ‘Fuck you!’ as I hurled my coffee mug across the room, smashing it against the far wall. As fragile as I was, I ran outside and kept running, back up the stairs to my room. Back under the sheets. Back to the dark place.

But I would be punished. And I did not have long to wait. The temper tantrum would be the immediate trigger for what was to come next, so unexpected and frightening in its rapidity.

The psychiatrist did not appreciate the call he received from the young clinic nurse who had been at the top of the stairs when her patient made it up and collapsed in her arms. After putting me to bed, she rang him, expecting he would wish to visit his highly disturbed patient, talk to her, maybe alter her medication. But he had been somewhat under the weather on this Mothers’ Day Sunday afternoon, tired and emotional, according to a senior nurse who knew him well. Irish whiskey was his drink of choice. He had apparently berated the staff for the interruption to his post-prandial siesta.

It happened without warning; the heavy boots on the staircase. Police hurrying down the hall.

The nurse had hardly hung up from her conversation with him and checked my condition when two uniformed policemen burst in and ordered nurses to pack my bag and sign me over. I have no argument with the police. They were simply following orders from a man who wished not to be disturbed, but to be allowed to slip back into his boozy Sunday afternoon oblivion. These days, such a response to attending a mentally ill patient would not be tolerated. At least, I hope it wouldn’t. I believe there have been government enquiries into the way mentally ill patients should––and should not––be taken into custody.

All the way down the stairs, Jon fought their attempt to take me away. He knew I was not only very ill, but that for all my life, I had suffered with a pathological claustrophobia. But despite his efforts, I found myself being bundled in to the back of a police paddy wagon. Even during my days of protest, marching in anti-Vietnam moratoria and other acts of subversion, I had squibbed at being carted off in a paddy wagon. And yet, on this Mothers’ Day, in my pathetic state of non-resistance, I was being driven off to God knows where in the back of one.

I still recall the terror. In panic, I beat on the doors, on the sides of the wagon and screamed for my son who had been made to sit up front in the cabin. 

The police pulled out from the Sydney Clinic’s driveway and turned, ironically, onto Murray Street. Not that I knew where we were going––in my state of high anxiety, I was envisaging jail, but in reality, we were on our way to the Prince of Wales Hospital at Randwick where, after further claustrophobic procedures, including being strapped into a wheelchair by a straight-jacket and kept in an air-lock, I would eventually be admitted to the acute psychiatric ward with its high walls, padded cells and the threat of ECT machines. All for smashing a chipped coffee mug and cursing an irritable chef’s stale scones. 

Happy Mothers’ Day.

After two weeks in lock-up, a period in my life in which I was subjected to great indignities, not least by the magistrate brought in to decide on my release or otherwise, I would be discharged and would continue to live another tumultuous year in Sydney, much of it in the loving care of my children and their partners. 

There would be periods of sanity where I could almost carry on a normal life but mostly I would swing dramatically between the highs and lows of Bi-polar One, voluntarily admitting myself to clinics when I was down or alternatively, intent on harming people when I was riding high.

It was an annus horribilis for our family and one dawn morning, at the end of a volatile period of sleepless nights, I decided I had to escape in order to give my kids a chance to carry on their lives without the burden of dealing with a mother’s acute mental illness. I understood deep down in my foggy brain that I would need to find a new way of living my life, of organizing the second half of it, a way that was divorced from the one I had been living up till now. No looking back.

Given that I come from Celtic stock––Irish and Scottish––this was always going to be a stretch. For me, the past has always been a place I wallpaper prettily with sentimental images; a never-never land in which I spend far too much time. George Bernard Shaw wisely said, “Talk to me only of the future because that is where I intend to spend the rest of my life.” Shaw was not a real Irishman, not your true Celt. It was always going to be a heartache for me to say goodbye.

I rose at dawn and, leaving a note behind, I departed the Woollahra terrace my family had been renting for me the past few months and drove through the night to our family’s Mermaid Beach apartment on the Gold Coast. 

It probably wasn’t a great idea. Poor darlings then had to handle my madness long-distance for the next couple of years, and I doubt the frequent flyer points they accrued did little to outweigh their distress.

~~~

On the day of the roundabout incident and the property purchase I rose just as the Mermaid Beach sun was beginning to burst over the horizon. Feeling agitated, I understood this day would be more dramatic than usual. The days, weeks, months, the almost two years of my self-imposed exile on the Gold Coast were over. 

It was time to move on. The endogenous depression I had been suffering for months had switched gears overnight, and the mind-revving mechanisms had kicked in, sending me soaring up through the universe. No way could I stay still, stay put.

With no idea where I was going or why on this Gold Coast purple and orange dawn, knowing only that I had to obey an imperative, I jammed everything important to me into the boot of my black turbo Golf and, after a moment’s deliberation spent wondering where to now, I decided to toss a coin.

Heads, I go up. Tails, I go down. 

North or south? 

I flicked the silver coin high, watching as it spun and circled in the air. And then it landed on the paving at my feet.

I let the token sit where it fell, fired up the Golf, and without so much as a glance in the rear-view mirror, left a year and a half of Mermaid Beach life behind me. Once again, I was on the move.

At the corner I made a left, turning south onto the highway and hit the peddle.

My heartbeat was accelerating. My breath was putrid. My mind was flying off in shards, and the “Voices” had arrived. It would have been obvious to a sensitive onlooker that I was now in the manic phase of my bi-polar condition, but there were no onlookers to witness my madness. 

It felt liberating to be free-wheeling down Life’s highway. No one could have put the brakes on me that day.

~~~

A couple of hours later, with the sun still low on the horizon, on a sudden impulse, I would turn in off the Pacific Highway and head down Ewingsdale Road into Byron Bay, where, later in the morning––in thrall to yet another capricious impulse––I would purchase an ugly little run-down beach shack nestled in the dunes of a magnificently wild Byron surf beach.

And still acting on these manic impulses, by the late afternoon I would pull over and pick up a handsome stranger at a roundabout. They say a person’s fate can turn on a dime. What happened next would prove it.

And I shall have some peace there,
for peace comes dropping slow.
                           W.B. Yeats
 

I recall with fondness, but also with some cynicism, the Byron Bay I found waiting for me the morning in September 1997. It was still pretty much the old Byron. Although the genuine locals will give you an argument about that.

In the Nineties, however, it was still Byron; a hokey little village where you could walk down the street and bump into a friend. Still a town centre where you could find a parking spot out front of your bank. The Byron before parking meters. The Byron of old timber houses. The Byron of rainforests and green hills. Byron of the Blues and Roots festivals that still felt small and user-friendly. Byron before over-crowded and expensive writers’ festivals. Byron before traffic jams. Byron of the genuine eccentric. 

Byron when an impecunious writer could still afford to live there. In other words, it was Byron prior to rampant commercialism.

Byron Bay prior to the invasion.

Back in 1997 Ringo’s big friendly cafe in Jonson Street was still the beating heart of the small seaside village of surfers and New Age hippies, serving up its generous helpings of love, peace and harmony to all who felt at home within the faded glory of its walls. But sadly, Melbourne and Sydney money rode in to town one sunny day and tore down the iconic old cafe, leaving Byron Bay the poorer for it.

Ringo’s would be replaced by what would become just one more loud sportswear store among a plethora of other clothing stores and over-priced touristy food outlets. 

Thanks to rapacious development that even green councilors failed to reign in, today’s Byron Bay has lost its unique sense of place, the feeling it once had of a laid-back rural coastal community. The comfortably familiar and quirky now has to fight for its place amid prosaic commercial starkness.

I told you I was a sentimental fool. But, my God, I see Byron today and I weep. Old timber houses that once sat on large blocks hidden behind rampant rainforests have been bulldozed to make way for Five Star holiday resorts owned by vulgar capitalists, the palms growing there now complying with landscaping architecture lining white gravel driveways leading to Reception.

In the centre of the village, on high street and down sequestered lanes, offbeat little timber shops that sold equally offbeat merchandise––hand-made clothing, candles, incense and Balinese Buddhas––were replaced by ubiquitous franchise stores stacked with cheap Chinese sportswear with slogans in windows that try too hard to catch the ‘cool vibe’ of Byron Bay. There is an obviously desperate attempt to ride the reputation of the rainbow district.

The casual, friendly attitude that was once unique to Byron has given way to a commercial mindset intent on capitalizing on the hordes of holiday visitors who swarm into town, including not only the Gold Coast crowds availing themselves of a freeway that in fifty short minutes of straight highway these days can rockets them into yet another theme park, albeit a quaint one without wet rides, but also the masses of young backpackers, domestic and international, who flock to what is touted on the web, and by word-of-mouth, as the coolest party town in the universe.

It is ironic that these starry-eyed young backpackers––along with Gold Coast tourists and cashed-up middle class home owners who migrated to Byron Bay in search of a sea change dream––have managed to squeeze the marrow from a once magical little New Age place. Ironic, in so much as what these questers sought is the very thing their numbers and their money were bound to destroy.

But enough of the lamentations. 

On the morning in the mid-nineties when I found myself cruising into Byron village with not a clue why I was heading there other than the fact that a coffee and a walk along a beach seemed like a good idea, the iconic Ringo’s was still alive and well in all its shabby wonder and I believe it was the friendly embrace of Ringo’s Café that sold me on Byron Bay that morning. 

I can recall the warmth of its rough old timber floors, a knocked about platform for the mishmash of old tables and chairs. And at Ringo’s there were rows and rows of bookshelves lining the walls. From memory, I think the bookshop might have operated on a swap, buy or help-yourself basis but for sure, it seemed an Aladdin’s cave of long-forgotten literary treasures.

I took a seat. 

It might have been a booth. Not sure. Can’t remember. But I know as I looked around and took in the full ambience––the cork board on the far wall where colourful flyers spruiked yoga classes and rebirthing sessions at cut rates, where the art deco counter and hand-written menu stood beckoning, where the gallimaufry of old 1950’s crockery and cutlery beamed a message of welcome even to the discombobulated mental case I was that morning––it all felt enticingly homely and today, as you can see, I’m still grieving its passing.

As I sat there, waiting to be served, I noticed a faded floral curtain at the back of the shop and once I’d seen one or two Byronians going through the curtain, I followed and found a hallway lined with even more pre-loved books. 

With nothing to do and nowhere to be, I took my time flicking through dozens of yellowing pages of paperbacks, text books and once-fashionable coffee table books. 

Dusty. Mouldy. 

Tiny red mites scattering as I turned pages. Books smelling of other people’s houses, as if they’d had been locked up in an old suitcase in Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Alf’s back shed for decades. Romantic melancholy smells reminiscent of the many sweet wet Saturday afternoons I’d spent poking around in fusty second-hand bookshops in places like Paddington, Glebe, Brisbane and Balmain. 

Many of the books had underlining and margin notes made by readers long ago who must have seen significance in a word, in a line. I love such books and chose several before I walked back to my seat across timber floors that smelled of beeswax and sandy thongs. 

I was checking the menu when a freckle-faced girl with thick auburn braids and eyes the colour of expensive jade appeared at my side, notepad in hand and smiling down on me.

‘What’ll it be, then?’ said the young woman.

I studied the menu for a moment and decided to pass on Ringo’s special––a big country breakfast fry-up––delicious as it looked. 

This was Byron Bay. 

A brand-new day. 

‘You know what? I’m going to have a stab at that.’ I laid down the menu and indicated the blackboard menu. ‘Your organic muesli with berries ... and … ah … I like the look of your apple, carrot and ginger juice.’ So much for the evil fry-up. 

Welcome to Mung Bean World. I felt pleased with my choices. Virtuous.

‘Coffee?’ said the girl, flashing perfect white teeth and smiling green eyes that made even expensive jade seem ordinary by comparison.

‘Sure thing. Make it a long latte, could you?’

‘Soy?’

‘Why not?’ It was that kind of morning and I was in that kind of mood. I’d never tasted soy lattes but as I said to this pleasant young local who waited for my answer; why not?

‘Decaf?’

‘Okay.’ I was up for the new. And given my revving brain, it was possibly a wise choice.

There was no sugar pot on the table I had chosen. This, after all, was Byron Bay. Pure honey from the local bees left to graze on lotus blossom was possibly the sweetener of choice around these parts. 

‘You need the sugar?’ The green-eyed one said as she reached for a funny old-fashioned glass and silver sugar dispenser on a nearby table.

‘Uh-uh. No sugar. Pure white and deadly!’ I had reared my five kids on that mantra. 

The young Byronian––or maybe she was a backpacker from Tassie picking up a few holiday dollars––smiled her approval and with a wink, was on her way across the room to place my order and continue spreading the love.

A few minutes later I looked up from a dog-eared and much rubricated copy of Catcher in the Rye to see another young likely backpacker setting my decaffeinated soy latte down in front of me with a friendly smile. I thanked the tall, good-looking youth and asked where he suggested I go if I wanted to take a long, uninterrupted beach walk to clear my head.

‘You want to get away from the town?’ It was said with a European accent, so I guess I was right about the backpacker thing.

‘I think so.’ I’d had my look around the village, smiled and said hello to a dozen friendly locals. 

I knew a little of Byron Bay, firstly, from having come down from the Gold Coast during the previous year to help a colleague, Lionel Midford, with his PR launch of a disco-nightclub. Although it seems my Gold Coast time was defined by my mental state, including a serious suicide attempt, there must have been some reasonably lucid periods, albeit, while still poised on an emotional precipice.

For instance, not long after moving up to the Gold Coast I had received a call one day from Brian Walsh, someone I had known during my PR days in the Eighties. Back then, my public relations business, JMA, was booming, thanks to the various high-profile briefs we successfully––and often flamboyantly––handled. Consequently, we received more assignments than we could take on, and often we would flick some of the smaller accounts––the ones we called the ‘rats and mice’ accounts––to the more modest PR businesses being run by men such as Max Markson and Brian Walsh. By 1996, however, having graduated to the big league via his work with the NRL’s Grand Finals, Brian Walsh was now a powerful Foxtel programming executive.

And here he was, offering me a bone, a ‘rats and mice’ one-off guest appearance on his new program Beauty and the Beast.

What Brian was offering was a guest appearance, with fellow panelists Margaret Whitlam, Catherine Greiner and Senator Bronwyn Bishop. It was a parliamentary-type panel to go head-to-head with the host, Stan Zemanek. 

Funny, but the thing which sticks most vividly in my memory from my first day on Beauty and the Beast is of the four of us women in the dressing room, togging up for the show. Margaret kept making ironic quips. Catherine seemed aloof. Bronwyn wore a corset.

What comes around goes around. Foxtel, said Brian, would cough up for my travel expenses but from memory, I don’t believe there was an appearance fee offered. Negotiations of that nature would come later, after the producers realized I was good talent and offered me a binding contract as one of the show’s regular panelists.

The salient point here, however is this; I never for one moment let on to Brian that things had happened to my poor brain since our glory days in the Eighties. He knew me not only as a high-profile PR consultant who could handle herself in front of a camera, but also as the lippy wife of a Cabinet Minister who’d gone rogue, shocking the nation back in 1987 with her story of love-making with her ministerial spouse on his ministerial desk. Brian had no account of me as a mentally ill person who had recently been locked up in acute psychiatric wards in both NSW and Queensland, one who’d spent so many months in and out of clinics dealing with a serious bi-polar condition. 

I guess he thought the opinionated and often controversial Jan Murray he knew of old would be a good performer on his shiny new agony aunt show.

Poor Mr. Walsh. He went into the thing with blinkers on and would, in the future, have many Jan Murray headaches to deal with.

While my friend Lionel must have believed at the time that I was up to the task he’d asked of me, with hindsight I think he regretted the invitation to help him with his client’s nightclub promotion. 

And if you asked him today, I think he would admit that the memory of that weekend still pains him because whenever I mention Byron Bay, poor Lionel will rest his hands in his head and sigh deeply. His off-sider had behaved so unpredictably and erratically that weekend, doing the opposite of what a good publicist cozying up to the media is supposed to do.

Several foodie journalists had been flown in to cover the event and been accommodated at Strop’s Beach Hotel. I spotted several of them sitting poolside, sipping expensive cocktails on the morning of the Opening and figured they were getting in a little too early on the free ride. I lashed out in words that suggested they better earn their keep with positive reviews. 

It wouldn’t have happened in my professional PR days, accusing my journalists of exploiting the client’s hospitality. Bad, bad me, but perhaps I was letting go of the years of pent up frustrations, the groveling, having to keep schtum so often when I saw free-loading media types hoovering up every last one of my clients’ canapés and downing jeroboams of the expensive champagne––and then holding back on the love, holding back on the "ink" as we referred to press coverage in an age before social media.

Long before that disastrous weekend I had known Byron Bay. As a child, I’d been brought to the North Coast by my parents on our regular camping trips. That was a long time ago, in an era when instead of million-dollar acreage properties dotting the hills, you had great herds of black and white cattle roaming that same hinterland and giving up their milk to the Norco Butter Factory. Pigs were sent off to the meat works. And for a few years a whaling station plied its merciless bloody trade. 

It’s an era that’s passed and, thankfully, the meat works became a cinema and backpacker hostel and the whaling slaughterhouse was replaced by the thriving up-market Beach Hotel, owned up until recently by a man known throughout the nation as Strop, John Cornell of Paul Hogan Crocodile Dundee fame. These are the kind of displacement no one regrets.

After I’d eaten my Ringo Café breakfast, I started thinking about going off to some quiet place for thinking time before I got back on the highway. 

To where, who knew? I hadn’t mentioned my morning’s decampment from the Gold Coast to any of my children in Sydney. No one would have a clue where I was or know that I had hit the highway at dawn for places unknown.

Despite the decaf, the adrenalin was pumping and the Voices were persistent. 

There were always Voices in the manic phase of my bi-polar condition. 

I describe it as being like a CD-ROM––remember them? It played inside my skull. No let-up. Just frantic messaging from one Jan to the other Jan. A constant conversation with the self. And boy, did it get exhausting. So, I was up for a long walk on a quiet beach where I might make some attempt to calm my soul and sort out the next phase of my life.

There would be no going back north. I had left Mermaid Beach and the Gold Coast behind. 

I had also left behind a relationship with a sweet and gentle man called Robbie, a Vietnam veteran with a head and heart full of heaviness that in our companionable months together––part of which I spent living with him on his sailing boat Sutra in Southport harbour––I hadn’t been able to lighten. We had both been too emotionally fragile for the relationship to work. Robbie believed his ‘Nam’ experience hadn’t been all that bad. Hello? He had only had to drive the trucks that went out after the bombings and mine explosions to collect the dead, the almost dead and the strewn body parts of his mates! Poor man. If he is alive today I hope he has acknowledged his courage and that the post-traumatic stress arising out of that terrible and unnecessary war he had to endure has abated to some extent.

‘Go down Jonson, past the MITRE 10 till you get to the roundabout,’ said the green-eyed girl who had overheard my question to the youth and stopped, plate stacks in hand, and joined in. ‘Take the Bangalow Road exit out of town. It’s the other side of the lighthouse. Suffolk Park. You’ll walk forever without bumping into anyone down there. It’s just the best beach for some serious mindfulness, if that’s what you’re looking for. I go there, sometimes. Quite often, in fact.’ She shrugged. ‘Or there’s Main Beach just up the road. Or Clarke’s further down.’ 

She looked deep into my eyes, possibly seeing the mania. ‘I’d go to Suffolk Park,’ she said, softly as she touched my shoulder with her free hand.

Suffolk Park. Mindfulness? A chance to put a sock in the Voices for a while? Okay, I thought. It sounded like a trip I could use.

I finished off my virtuous breakfast at Ringo’s Café and wandered outside, heading for the Golf. Its black bodywork had baked for an hour or so in the north coast morning sunshine and the little lady was a steaming hotbox. I wound down a couple of windows and while I waited for things to cool down, I followed my nose in the direction of the bakery.

Delicious aromas were wafting out of the tiny timber shop across the road. A feast of lovely pastries was displayed in the windows. I’m not a sweet tooth. Quite the reverse. I go for salty and sour over sweet and sickly every time. But on this odd morning of my flight to nowhere things were topsy-turvy. 

Lord make me virtuous but not right now, said St Augustine, a wily fellow. 

Mania feeds on excess. 

I opted for not one but two scrumptious-looking big fat almond and cream croissants dowsed in icing sugar, and was devouring the first treat, up to my ears in icing sugar and almond flakes, when I heard a croaky voice behind me.

‘G’day, love,’ said the tiny crone as she passed me on the pavement, hauling a couple of heavy string shopping bags, plus a pile of books, under each wing.

‘Hi, there. Let me help you. Where’s your car?’ I said.

‘Don’t have one, love. She’s okay. I can manage. This and a whole lot bloody more, I reckon. How y’doin, anyway?’ The old lady kept going while looking back over her shoulder at me. ‘It’s young Gloria, isn’t it, Mabel’s girl?’ she called out.

‘No. It’s Jan. I’m new around here. Just passing through,’ I said as I caught up to the woman I guessed to be well north of her eighties if crocodile skin was a pointer. ‘I love your skirt. Did you get it here ... in Byron?’

‘India,’ said the cheerful soul, handing over her load to me then, taking the sides of her hand-embroidered mirrored skirt, doing an agile swirl, flaring the skirt’s long hems out with a dainty kick of a sandaled foot. ‘You been there?’

‘To India?’

‘India, yep. Been there?’ By now she was relieving me of the bundles and starting to walk off again, expecting, I guess, that I keep up the pace alongside.

‘No. But one day I plan to.’

‘Good for you, love. Bye, bye for now. Might see y’round at the Rails, okay? Say hello to y’ mum for me won’t ya?’

‘Sure. See you. Bye.’ I stood for a moment, my eyes following her as she strode towards a pushbike leaning against a shop front. 

She dumped her load in the bike basket, tucked up the hem of her skirt and then this cheery little octogenarian, with all the eagerness of a horny back-seat teenager willing to give pleasure, straddled the bicycle. 

She turned to wave at me.

I smiled and waved back as she peddled off. I was bemused as I drove away, heading for the place the young waitress had advised. 

By the time I'd gone a short way I was lost. There were no signposts to Suffolk Park. Only to the Lighthouse. I pulled over. I was at Clarkes Beach.

‘A long walk through that rainforest path up there then a steep climb to get to it,’ said the elderly, slow-jogging gent who called out to me through the Golf’s passenger window. 

I hadn’t yet asked for directions, although I had leaned out the window and had been about to do so.

‘Sounds good,’ I said to the wiry old codger who seemed as if he were about to attack the climb himself. ‘Thanks.’  He had presumed I wanted to walk to the lighthouse. A reasonable presumption I would later learn. It’s a favourite nature and fitness trek of locals and tourists, alike.

‘That’s the lighthouse walk,’ he said, doubling back and jogging on the spot. ‘But if it’s solitude you’re after, love, then I’d give Clarkes a miss and keep heading down Bangalow Road. Turn off at the Suffolk Park pub. Clifford Street corner. Camping area at the bottom.... but turn left into Alcorn.  You’ve got a lovely long beach there. No one’s gonna bother you. You look the thoughtful type to me.’

‘Y’reckon? Thanks.’

Seems Suffolk Park wasn’t letting go of me this morning.

After kitting myself up with instructions from the Samaritan on how to proceed to Suffolk Park I took off and within a few short minutes down Bangalow Road I was making the left at the hotel, at the Clifford Street corner, driving almost to the end where I turned the Golf left onto Alcorn Street as directed, and thinking that I should have invited the friendly jogger to join me. Manic people reach out to the world. Depressives retreat.

Alcorn was a street of ordinary-looking homes, some brick, some fibro, some timber, but typically holiday houses on huge flat blocks of land lining both sides of the street. There was the odd vacant block covered in ferns and pandanus trees but mostly the landscape was unexceptional. The beach was hidden by the houses.  

At this point, I have to say, Suffolk Park seemed underwhelming. I was tempted to keep going. At the far end of the street I turned in to a shady cull-d-sac, parked the car and took the sandy track and steps down through the bushes to the beach.

Stunning!

The panorama took my breath away.

Laid out before me for as far as the eye could see were miles and miles of the whitest, purest beach fringed by sand hills and dune grasses and in all its aquamarine glory, a rolling, crashing surf. The magnificent Blue Pacific Ocean. 

Imagine this in Europe, I thought once I’d caught my breath. There’d be wall-to-wall deck chairs and touts hitting on sun bathers like botflies on a carcass, hawking their trays of kitsch souvenirs and over-priced sticky umbrella cocktails. The Rivieras, French and Italian, have to suffer over-crowded oily dirty pebbled stretches of the Mediterranean as an excuse for their beaches. And don’t get me started on California’s much flaunted golden shores. Oil pumps blot the horizon.

‘Hi, how y’going?’ The young man stopped sprinting and strolled up to me, his hands on his hips, bending in the middle and straightening up to gasp hungrily at the air around him. ‘Sensational, hey?’ he said, straightening up and throwing his arms out to emphasize his point.

‘And what do they call this ‘sensational’ part of the world?’ I enquired, making sure to keep my eyes modestly focused on his facial features rather than letting them slip to the Speedos.

‘You’re at the far end of Tallows Beach. Broken Head’s the next around the headland, and that pile of rocks you can see out there? That’s Julian Rocks. The Bunjalung call it Nguthungulli.’

‘Nguthungulli, hey? Thanks. It’s magic.’

‘They reckon. See you!’

‘Bye.’

Coming upon a jogger in yellow budgies, running along the lonely strip was one thing but I wasn’t prepared for the man in full business suit and shiny shoes I saw stepping out from the dunes a little way up from me. He carried a clipboard and had a camera hanging on his chest.

‘G’day,’ I said as I came up to him. ‘What’s happening’

‘We’ve got a property for sale in there.’

‘A beachfront, hey? I bet they don’t come up all that often.’

‘Sell to the first person who walks through the door with the cash. That’s the owner’s instruction.’

Why not check out what this young pup was selling, I figured?

‘He just up and left for good, this time. Shot through. Had enough of the place, I guess,’ the salesman informed me as I followed him through thick undergrowth, and he held bracken and bushes out of my way as I ducked the spiky stuff and wondered what I was going to find at the end of this jungle trek.

‘Had a bit of trouble of one kind or another, so he decided to sell. Found another wave, I guess. That’s what they’re like around here.’ He seemed embarrassed to be showing me the property before his people had had a chance to tidy it up.

‘Can’t imagine where he is now could be better than what’s out front, there.’ I pointed over my shoulder to the beach.

‘You won’t think much of the property. Be prepared.’

‘A magical mystery tour?’

‘You wanted to see it, right?’

‘Right.’ Not a lot of humour there. I took the business card he handed me.

‘I warn you, it’s a mess. You had surfies twenty, thirty years ago throwing up these shacks all along the best beach frontages,’ said the man I now understood hailed from First National Real Estate and who obviously thought he had a potential buyer while, at the same time wishing to make it clear he was not at one with Byron’s hippy surfie culture, particularly its impact on local real estate values. At any moment, I expected to be given a spiel about the attractive all mod cons, security lock-up cream brick townhouses he had on his books back at the office.

We broke through the last of the shoreline scrub into the clearing and straight away I knew I was home, knew I was looking at my future. No more than a dilapidated one-room beach shack, but yet a piece of magic nestled behind the dunes on the doorstep of that wild Pacific Ocean out there! 

The Voices were clamouring. Buy it! Buy it! It’s ours! It’s ours!

The little shack and its environment were beyond romantic, beyond any of the normal parameters one sets when contemplating a real estate purchase. 

It was a keeper. 

The agent was right, however. It was a mess. The owner had left behind the detritus of a surfer’s life in the rectangular little fibro hut with timber veranda. And, suspiciously, left it behind in a hurry. Apart from the two enormous surfboards I noticed sticking out from under the wide veranda, when I walked inside the shack the first thing I noticed was the old double mattress laying on the wooden floor down the far end. It had a faded pink cotton blanket crumpled across it.

‘Feels like he’s just gone down to the beach and will be back for breakfast,’ I said.

The agent shook his head. ‘He’s not coming back, I assure you.’

I walked across to the tiny kitchen, no more than a cornered-off section of the rectangle. Doors on the two timber cupboards had come off their hinges a long time ago and hung at an unhealthy angle to the uprights. Their dusty shelves displayed a motley collection of plastic plates and dishes as well as empty jam jars and stoneware coffee mugs, the type I hadn’t seen since the early Seventies. Sitting on the chipped green Formica kitchen bench were several more cups and plates haphazardly stacked, and on closer inspection it was clear they had been abandoned before the remains of the owner’s last meal had been scraped and rinsed from them. Two battered aluminium saucepans and a dirty fry pan similarly stained languished in the putrid sink. 

I shuddered, imagining the cockroach colonies that must be celebrating the abandonment of this hovel. 

The place had the look, feel and smell of a squat, of casual visitors coming and going and not bothering to clean up. A pile of dusty mosquito nets Methuselah might have slept under were piled in a corner of the room and all around the walls hung faded surfing posters. Globs of old Blue-tack adhered in some spots, evidence of other posters long discarded.

Outside again, and I noted the few sheets of corrugated iron thrown up at the northern end of the veranda and a net curtain strung across. Someone’s ad hoc attempt to accommodate overflow guests, no doubt. 

The place was hokey, but it worked, and I was in love with it. Except for the aluminium sliding doors and window frames, which were an affront to any right-thinking person’s sensibilities. But none of this mattered. It would be a challenge.

I felt an empathy with the neglected little shack nestled in behind the dunes. It was begging me to love it.

‘There’s more to see,’ said the young agent, stepping down from the veranda and walking me around to the front of the wide, deep property. 

We needed to beat through further undergrowth, lush green rainforest rather than the dryer, greyer dune vegetation this time.

We emerged onto a long front yard, overgrown with rapacious blue flowering vines that climbed up through the trees and ran along the fences then climbed back down to strangle a pile of old timber stacked against the fence. Creeper vine overwhelmed anything standing in its path. A huge four-car garage, grey splintery timber walls, a green iron roof and brown double roller doors stood at the side of the property, up front, at street level. Paspalum weeds grew around the base of the garage, and the two narrow windows facing onto the yard were boarded up. Unlike the cozy-but-grubby shack, there was nothing quaint about the garage. Possibly a fairly recent addition, utilitarian at best. It lacked charm but it would be useful for storage. 

It would only be later that I learned what had gone on in that huge garage with its boarded-up windows, rows and rows of shelves lining the interior walls and its extraordinary amount of overhead lighting.

‘The keys for this are back at the office. I could go get them if you’re interested?’

I shook my head. ‘Uh-uh. I’ve found what matters. It’s what’s back there, the shack and the beachfront.’

I left the young man and walked up the yard to the street. Parking earlier to go down to the beach, I’d tucked the Golf in a sandy cul-de-sac, somewhere along this stretch. Now I realized the car was on the other side of the high ti-tree fence and bushes.

‘Serendipity,’ I whispered.

‘Sorry. What did you say?’ The agent had come up behind me.

‘Nothing. Just getting a little carried away,’ I said with a smile.

The fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

 Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 1, Sc 1  

Fate, Serendipity, Kismet, Destiny. 

Whatever. Here I was. From the moment of packing up and pulling out from the Mermaid Beach house this morning I had been heading for this place. Why else such coincidence; being twice directed to Suffolk Park and then being on the spot the very moment the agent was emerging from behind the dunes.

Talk about sliding doors and choices! Had I lingered a few minutes longer in Ringo's; had I ignored the friendly little soul on her bicycle; had my hunger for an almond croissant not sent me into the aromatic bakery ... and on and on it goes. The randomness of life is an impenetrable phenomenon. I have five beautiful children–––and fourteen adorable grandchildren who fill my life with joy––all because of a serendipitous meeting one night a long time ago. And this is what excites me about writing my life. It brings Fate into focus, becomes food for thought.

And it scares me. Who would I be today had I not won the battle with a strict mother in March 1959 to allow her precocious sixteen-year-old daughter to go to a 50-50 cabaret dance in Strathfield? Who would I be now had I not made a snap decision to turn in off the highway and head into Byron Bay that day in 1997?

Eight hundred square meters of land with prime beachfront. Three hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars. Ten per cent deposit. Immediate settlement. 

Too easy. 

I had some modest savings, mostly from my days running my PR business and, post-divorce I’d had a generous Family Court settlement paid monthly that would amply cover the repayments. Not that my crazy mind was paying much heed to financial practicalities. I had fallen in love. End of story. No nickel-and-diming Mr. Real Estate. I would sign on the dotted line for my enchanted dwelling, aware that had I not been directed towards Suffolk Park by the angels of Fate I might have been in the Golf by now and driving aimlessly down the Pacific Highway to an uncertain future.

Instead, I had found heaven in a homely old café, stepped onto the beach and serendipitously bumped into a real estate agent taking pictures of an orphaned property, one for which he had no heart, one he needed to flog to the first interested party. It was meant to happen. We were a couple, that little shack and me.

Too impulsive, perhaps, I hear you ask?

Join my conveyancing lawyer. It seemed my fertile imagination had thrown a rainbow around everything. At least that was hinted at by the city slicker from the law firm who had handled my divorce. To give him his due, he was aware of my mental condition, thanks to the two AVOs taken out against me by my estranged spouse during the turbulent early stages of my illness.

I responded that I didn’t believe so. Where better to ring in the changes than in magical, mystical, legendary Byron Bay. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme; time for Love, Peace and Harmony. My new life would take shape in a coastal village of surfers and hippies, where the ambiance of the Nimbin Aquarius Festival of two decades ago still hung over the landscape, hung over its hinterland, hung over the lush green rainforests, over the white crystal sands, the gloriously unstoppable surf, the golden sunrises that spring up out of clear aqua seas to kiss the lighthouse up on the headland before the rest of Australia stirs. 

Rainbow-colored country. 

Yes. 

Take a chance on me, it whispered. 

And I was ready to do just that. The maniac does not entertain the nay-sayer, and that morning in September 1997, I was certainly in the manic phase of my condition.

Easing the Golf into a spot out front of the First National Real Estate office near the bakery where I had earlier scooped up the devilish croissants I dug the second pastry out of my bag and hungrily devoured it. The carbs would centre me, calm the thumping great excitement beginning to manifest itself as sweaty palms and white lights before the eyes. A major adrenalin rush. A grand high. I wanted to dial up the world and tell it what I was doing. Me, buying my first house.

I, me, myself, personally.

Sad really, because there was no world out there waiting on my call. Just me, Jan Murray. Divorced middle-aged woman. Here, alone. Solista. About to make her monumental passage from one life into another. About to decide that the dilapidated little beach hut in the dunes, a long way from family and friends, would be her destiny. No going back. All the money I had, or possibly would ever have, going to purchase a wild piece of real estate. Over three decades of marriage and years of abundant motherhood, more years at university as a mature-age student, a working life as a gun public relations executive, my whole life lived around the suburbs of Sydney; all about to be put behind me, all about to be relegated to the past.

With the almond croissant devoured, I wiped the evidence from my face with the back of my arm and looked about. Everything seemed wonderful to me on this glorious morning.

It felt like the first morning of the earth and only for a moment, as I entered the agency, did I stop to consider how all this would play in the years ahead. Woman. Alone. Woman making her own way in life. No fallback position. No husband props. No nearby adult kids or friends to call on. Just me, Jan Murray, fifty-five years old, by all accounts an emotional basket case, about to sign up for my first ever piece of wholly owned real estate. 

Could I manage it?

I took in several deep breathes.

That was when I decided to make a call to a woman I knew who had been living for some years in Byron Bay. One moment of caution, a slight hiatus in the manic high before I signed the cheque. 

Di Morrissey, author of several successful books, took my call. She had a mutual friend with her, she said. They were both sitting outside on her verandah enjoying the view. I had visited Di in her home the year before when I’d been down here helping Lionel Midford with his restaurant launch. Di’s home was a cute, very pretty feminine abode on a hillside south of Byron which looked down into a rainforest valley. 

Di knew Byron. So did advertising and moviemaking man Wayne Young, our mutual friend sitting with Di on her veranda.

Wayne’s company, YoungHeart, had been instrumental in getting Rodney Adler to invest in YoungHeart’s animated film project, Fernguly, the Last Rainforest in the Eighties after Wayne had walked a party of thirty-six Australian and American animators, script writers and potential film financiers through the Byron Bay rainforest, which was, like so much of the beautiful region, coming under threat from rapacious developers.

The rainforest track the movie people would have walked that day would have been much wilder, much closer to nature than it is presently, where the walk leading up to the lighthouse through the rainforest is now serviced by a suspended walkway and is beloved by locals and tourists alike. Wayne wanted to produce a big budget international film, and funds for environmentally sound children’s animated films would not have been easy to come by in those early days of environmental protection. He needed to demonstrate the fragility of the rainforest and the imminent threat. He did, I believe. And the result is a beautiful, poignant children’s movie that soon became a favourite electronic babysitter.

Once Adler had invested his many millions––I believe it was around $20 million––and the movie was made, Wayne invited me to New York to do the PR launch in the Grand Hall of the United Nations on Earth Day. Diplomats and their prettily dressed children filled the place for the premiere. It was an amazing experience. To top it all off, we camped for the week in Rodney Adler’s very posh apartment overlooking Central Park.

Wayne and I had also worked together on the massive First Fleet Re-enactment Voyage project for Australia’s 1988 Bicentenary, and not long after that I had secured a $100,000 sponsorship from American Express for YoungHeart to produce a save-the-planet rock concert in Centennial Park starring friends of Wayne’s such as environmental crusader Olivier Newton John, et al. 

The fact the production, plagued with problems, never got off the ground would be a personal embarrassment for me, having used my reputation for honesty and my friendship with Alberto Modulo, the CEO of American Express, to convince the man to drop in a $100,000 sponsorship––$AU187,000 in 2017 terms––to kick off the concert. I had not had any further dealings with Wayne by the time I encountered him on the end of the line at Di Morrissey’s home.

‘Suffolk Park?’ I enquired. ‘What do you reckon, guys?’

‘Sufferer’s Park!’ came the dismissive response from the lean, green Wayne.

I knew Wayne and his family had been, in addition to his much-loved rainforested Wategos Beach, a long-time part of the artsy Belongil community at the other end of Byron Bay. Belongil’s coterie of stars included Paul Hogan and John Cornell and was considered the trendy part of Byron. A few years earlier, the friends of Belongil had successfully repelled Club Med’s plans to ruin the place with an international Club Med resort.

Suffolk Park, five kilometres south of all this trendiness, was Nowheresville. Sufferers Park. 

Not a big rap. 

A moment of panic seized me. I had an urge to run back to the car, jump inside its comforting space and head out of Byron Bay at full throttle. Mr. Real Estate Agent would be disappointed that the woman on the beach was a ‘no-show’ but so what? It would be written down in the annuls of First National Real Estate as just one more crazy female who acted too rashly, who fell in love with Byron and then cooled down and fled the precinct.

I needed time. 

My heart was yelling a resounding ‘Yes, yes!’ but my head was now asking questions, thanks to the negative responses.

And then something happened that smashed all the negatives. Crazy, I know, but just as I was about to turn and do a runner the friendly crone I’d spoken with earlier in the morning came peddling past on her pushbike. I waved but she didn’t see me. Yet, I felt it was an omen. A Somewhere Over the Rainbow kind of omen, as if I were standing in the middle of the Yellow Brick Road. I can grow old here like her, I thought. I can be a cheerful, healthy octogenarian one day who peddles her bike like a teenager around beautiful Byron Bay, proud to show off her Indian skirt to a stranger––even if the stranger is mistaken for Mabel’s daughter, Gloria.

~~~

Sitting in the reception area of the real estate office, waiting for young Mr. First National to call me in, I thought about the prices my few saleable assets back in Sydney would bring at auction should I need to find more cash in order to make the shack habitable. Mentally, I thanked the little Laylas and Fadils, the Dariuses and the Deebas, the ghosts of all the children floating somewhere over old Persia who probably went blind weaving the two antique rugs I could sell to put towards my dream shack.

‘Honey?’

‘Uh? Oh, no, thanks.’ A pretty person in Bali pants and a white Bond’s singlet had just set down a cup of steaming chamomile tea in front of me.

‘Thanks, that’s great.’ I brought the cup to my lips, holding it under my nose to savour the aromatic herbs. I wondered about the Ugg boots in this tropical climate. It all felt so special; the shack, the beach, the dunes, this fragrant brew, Ringo’s, the G’days, the bicycle lady, the Rainbow shop down the road where I'd purchased some incense and a Magic Happens sticker for the Golf. And these cool white timber walls of the First National office, a tiny timber cottage, its exterior painted grey with red trim window frames nestled in the main street. Like Ringo’s, another country. For the time being, at least. But don’t get me started.

I thought again about my precious rugs back in Sydney. It would hurt to surrender them but I had never been able to appreciate those rugs without pangs of guilt. Oriental carpets are a moral issue, the trade turning on the exploitation of children. The West has had its long love affair with them, a never-ending supply coming out of the Middle East. We tend to ignore the history in favour of the elegance they provide in our homes and offices; ignore the hardships that lie behind the exquisitely woven patterns that must take a terrible toll on the weaver’s eyesight, the damage the vegetable dyes must cause, dyes that create the a-brash which the serious collector values; that tiny flaw the weavers still weave into their rugs to remind them––and us––that only God is perfect.

I vowed I’d use the profits of their labours to make my new home a place of mindfulness and good karma, with no inkling of what was awaiting me.

~~~

Life is never dull for the maniacally high. Two and a half hours after first sighting the little shack, having contacted my bank and the conveyancing lawyer and having soaked up more Ringo’s Cafe offerings, I walked out of the First National Real Estate office as the proud new owner of an Alcorn Street, Suffolk Park beach hut.  

Who’d have thought?

‘Move in anytime,’ the young agent said as he handed me the keys. I had the feeling he was glad to have the disreputable property off his books.

‘You mean even before––’

‘We’re different ‘round here.’ He smiled and clasped my hand with both of his, a genuinely warm handshake. ‘May as well, it’s empty.’

And waiting for me, I reasoned.

Stepping out into Byron Bay’s brilliant morning sunshine, I stared up at the sky, at the universe to which I had just surrendered myself. I looked back over my shoulder. The agent stood in the doorway, waving me off.

‘Enjoy!’ he called to me.

‘I intend to!’

~~~

It was Day One of my new life and I had an ungainly little shack to rescue, meaning that by mid-afternoon I was up to my eye balls in chaos. No waiting for help. Not in my frame of mind that day. Now meant now!

I had been going hard at it for hours, stopping only to dash around to the local shops in Clifford Street to grab a bag of fruit and a mineral water for lunch and then back in to the cleanup, and if occasionally I pinched myself to prove it was all real, this new home of mine, this adventure I had launched myself on this morning, I did so while taking a break from my frantic activities in order to watch the mosquito nets go into the flames, the ancient piles of gauze disintegrating, shriveling to a soft grey film of ash Pompeii-like across what had gone before.

And what had gone before were the faded Billabong and Quicksilver posters I’d yanked off the walls, a heap of fossilized groceries, random bits of lumber, several threadbare beach towels and a crate of surfing magazines, which I regret now having committed to the flames. They would be a treasure trove today. In my frenzy, I considered ripping out the busted kitchen, booting up the flames and hurling it all on the pyre, but then decided against it.

Common sense made a belated appearance. 

I would need a handyman, someone with the tools to help me demolish and rebuild the tiny kitchen and bathroom, to pull down the sheets of rusty corrugated iron from the veranda and, above all replace the ugly aluminium windows and door frames with timber ones.

Onwards to the roundabout.