We started the day with a walk which didn’t quite turn out as planned. Maps without topographical information can be annoying and the walking map of O’Reilly’s is a case in point! Actually, given that we were aiming to walk down to the Blue Pool on Canungra Creek, I could easily have worked out that it is likely to be downhill all the way and whilst I did realise that, the descent and distance were more than expected and so we ran out of time before we got there. However, we still had a nice walk descending out of the cooler subtropical rainforest into the warmer and more open rainforest. We saw a lyrebird (very quickly – they are shy!), a male bush turkey building its nest and also pademelons. However, we didn’t see the blue pool, though given the fact it was raining much of the time (the clue is in the title – rain forest ….), it might not have been that blue.
So, once back to O’Reilly’s we headed back down to Canungra and then headed south east to Byron Bay. We arrived mid-afternoon to stay with Samantha and Dominic and had a lovely afternoon catching up. The evening would have been better if England had won the World Cup final, but …..
The name Byron probably brings to mind the well-known poet – Lord George Byron and clearly the early town planners of Byron Bay thought the town was named after him as many of the streets are named after various British poets (Wordsworth, Browning, Milton, Carlyle, Tennyson and Keats among others). However, given that Cape Byron was named by Captain Cook on a voyage past in 1770 and George Byron was not born until eighteen years later, this would have been quite prescient of him. The cape was actually named after a friend of Cook’s; Vice-Admiral John Byron who circumnavigated the world in HMS Dolphin between 1764 and 1766.
In later years the bay behind the cape became known as Byron Bay and the town officially took that name in 1894. Industry in Byron bay has an interesting history and was based around primary industries. The first industry was timber. The loggers focused mainly on Red Cedar and the industry is the origin of the word ‘shoot’ in many of the local names (Possum Shoot, Coopers Shoot and Skinners Shoot) as they used to ‘shoot’ the logs down the hillside for them to be collected by ships. They then moved on through various delightful other industries. the most glamorous was gold mining and the least glamorous included an abbatoir and whaling. In between they tried sand mining for monazite (zircon, uranium and thorium) adding to the delightful environmental mix of industry. This doesn’t seem an obvious history for hippies to move in, but they did. The 1960s saw the surfers arrive and by the early 1970s it had a reputation as an alternative hippy town.