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Away from the Melbourne winter to the Byron Bay Writers fest. Timing was good, as this has been their first fine weather since the bad storms early in the year left flood damage and many upturned trees. Some of the beaches and beachfront real estate still bear the scars, with huge stacks of rocks and sandbags being used to keep the sea at bay.

Further inland, areas of national parks including Mt. Warning are still closed. But for all that, we still reveled in a week in paradise. Friday Hut Rd, Paul Hogan’s old stamping ground, leading down to Bangalow, is as pretty as ever.

Along the ridge there may not be much commercial farming, but the land oozes tropical bounty, Out front of a few properties there are rows of crates of produce with honesty boxes for the passing traffic. Things like avocados, eggs, honey, grapefruit, tangelo, mandarin, pomelo, and such. Has anyone tried making Pomelo marmalade?

One of my recurring dreams involves flying. Not Superman style zooming, more vertical levitation with gentle moving about at will. Rather neat, but I usually have to be careful not to let people see me, because they either would not understand or would want me to give them lessons. Byron Bay is a dreaming sort of place with lots of paragliding, and so of course I had a flying dream. In this dream I didn’t bother to avoid being seen by people in the street, and no-one seemed to find my flying about all that unusual. In the morning when I was recalling the experience for Sweetiepie, she said “sounds very Byron Bay”.

Byron Bay and the garden of Eden hinterland generate an aura of “hippies with money”. These people are in an environment that encourages the indulgence of bizarre fantasies. Twenty five years ago Naren King was driving along one of the back roads when he happened on the site of the failed fantasy of someone else, which the locals had taken to calling “the castle”. The site fired his imagination and he set about getting finance to bankroll the creation of the famous, if not fabulous, Crystal Castle.

In other hands the whole undertaking could have been monumentally uber kitsch, such is the size of some of the geodes and crystals. But they are not really in bad taste nor garish, just very very big. Naren has been travelling the world since the start of the project, collecting what must be some of the most impressive examples in the world. There is no actual castle, but the grounds contain a labyrinth based on the famous Chartres maze, many deities of the Hindu pantheon, a Buddhist amphitheatre and a Stupa suggested and blessed by the Dalai Lama. Very Byron, very healing, very spiritual, very levitational.

Where Possum creek road meets Friday hut road is the century old Opossum Creek school house, which Greg and Joanne have recently reopened as the delightful Lilianas Café.

A copperplate register covering discipline in the early years of the school tells a different story from the current hands-off-no-touching-that-is-unacceptable-abuse regime. As to the sins? There was a lot of sulking – 2 or 4 strokes of the cane, reading in a slovenly manner – 1 stroke, willful wrong spelling – 1 stroke, disorderly conduct – 2 strokes, slow obedience – 1, impudence – 4, using bad language at school – 6 strokes. The offenders were mostly boys between 7 and 13 years of age. The only female offender was the 8 y.o. Susan Carpenter who was often beaten for disobedience, inattention and playing. Willful wrong spelling is obviously unforgivable, even in pre spell check days, but my heart goes out to dreamy little Susan who was clearly just a hippy a bit before her time.

And the writer’s fest was beyond good too. Covered a spectrum including biography, health, ageing, climate, China, economics, creativity, collaboration, the dark side of comedy, fiction and politics. Mungo MacCallum remembered going to China with the Gough Whitlam entourage. Peter Carey, with the aid of slides, described his mind as being like a sort of three dimensional ever-changing Mississippi swamp. George Megalogenis gave a clear picture of the world as it is. Robert Drewe talked about the horrors of the British atomic testing at Montebello in the 1950’s. Michael Leunig showed that it is possible to make a living by being confused. There were 20 years of memories from Lucio Galletto of the artists and writers who patronized his restaurant. Encouraged by Norman Swan, John Robison dramatically shared his adventures with Aspergers. Norman also chaired a constructive but lengthy session on aging, in which the first question was “if this session is on aging, why isn’t there a comfort break?” Paul Kelly and Archie Roach were happy to chat on with Lucky Oceans about collaborative creation, and illustrated the point with a few songs. Oh, and at another session with Lucky and Dave Graney, Justin Heazlewood improvised a bit of undressing. Video clip available on request – a 23 meg M4V file.