A review of Valerie Morton's Blame it on the Rain: life around Byron Bay

"Northern New South Wales is a big, fat, subtropical, coconut - and turmeric - laced cliché of heavenliness.

Here in Northern New South Wales, people like to go about barefoot." 

At Christmas time I took some book vouchers and went across to Harry Hartog's to try to but some books with a connection to Northern New South Wales, my broader New England.  The pickings were very thin, the worst they had ever been. Even the second hand book section gave zero results. In the end, the only book I could find was Valerie Morton's Blame it on the Rain: Life around Byron Bay (:Red Flower Books, 2018).  

Lavishly illustrated with photos, the book is a series of vignettes about beach, bush but mainly locals - with a dash of cane toads, ticks and gold top mushrooms. Did you know that some people lick cane toads because the poison contains a powerful hallucinogenic? That was certainly news to me. 

While the book references  Northern New South Wales, it is actually about the Northern Rivers, more precisely still that part of it covered by the Byron Shire, even more precisely the town of Mullumbimby and surrounds. 

It is not clear to me when people started to call the Northern Rivers  Northern New South Wales. It seems to link to administrative naming  by the Sydney Government, most recently the decision to name the local health district covering the Northern Rivers the Northern New South Wales Local Health District. Whatever the cause, the misuse of names has become an absolute pain. It's not easy when naming conventions take away the identity of your entire area. 

Valerie moved to Byron Shire some twelve years ago and now lives in a rain forest near Mullumbimby. a very pretty town. Nearly everyone that features in her book is a new arrival. I could only identify one local born person. That reflects the changes that have swept across the North since the 1970s. 

Australian poet and artist Edwin Wilson's The Mullumbimby Kid: a portrait of the Poet as a Child (Woodbine Press, 1973) present a picture of life in the area  before the changes, as does Shirley Walker's Roundabout at Bangalow (University of Queensland Press 2015), . When I was at university, some of my friends came from Mullumbimby, following the path of Wilson and Warlker out into the broader world via education in Armidale. 

First the counterculture and then the sea change movements brought great changes, changes facilitated because the  decline in dairying made relatively cheap land available .A proper history of these changes remains to be written, but they were quite profound. 

This is reflected in Valerie's book. This is a very local world made up of people with particular view who seem to have very little linkage with the surrounding regions, more in common with the patterns of life in Australia's inner city areas. Except, perhaps, that those in Byron Shire have developed particular patterns linked to their local environment. They are the same, but different, with trends accentuated by .smaller size. According to Wikipedia, link above, Mullumbimby has the lowest vaccination rates in Australia.  

This is not a criticism of the book, simply a reflection on my reactions to it. The book is not high literature, although it's well and simply written. Rather, it presents a clear and interesting picture of a some ways unique life in a particular area at a particular point in  time. It's worth a read whether you are in Australia or elsewhere. .