CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
18 months after leaving her hometown of Carlton for the pristine sands of Bondi Beach, local e-commerce professional, Delilah Abetz (31) is ready to finally make ‘the move’.
While she admits the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney was the best place she could have been located during the lockdown earlier this year, she knows that life isn’t all about juice bars and spin classes.
It’s time to decentralise, time to unplug.
That’s why she’s moving to Byron.
According to Google Maps, the ‘Byron’ region is no longer limited to the recovering-hippy township known as Byron Bay – it now includes a vast area of Hinterland and surrounding beaches.
From Lismore to pretty much the Gold Coast, this rapidly expanding catchment all started when music festival organisers decided that a giant paddock one hour north of the town should be titled ‘North Byron Parklands’.
But Delilah isn’t going to one of those povo towns, she wants be near the action.
“Yeah, it’s basically the new hub for online retailers. And most of my anklets get made in Bali so I can work from anywhere” she says.
When asked why she chose Byron, and not one of the thousands of other coastal towns located in less gentrified beaches right up the eastern seaboard, Delilah says there’s just something that she loves about Byron.
“It’s like, I used to hate going there for Splendour when I was younger. It was just full of bogans and heaps of people from out bush”
Of course, when Delilah says ‘Bogans and people from out bush’ she means working class Australian and Aboriginal people.
And when she says there’s just something she loves about Byron, she is subconsciously referring to the fact that this utopian paradise is mostly made up of white people.
Delilah says Byron is like the best bits of the city, with the best bits of the coast, which may be her way of describing a town made up of gentrifying corporate creatives like her, living in an affluent enclave with semi-tropical foliage.
“Everyone is chilled” she says.
However, reading below the surface, it seems Delilah might be subconsciously swapping out the word ‘caucasian’ with the much less white supremacist term ‘chilled’.
“Haha. Even like the people working at Woolies and hotel cleaners are surfers” she says, referring to the rapidly outpriced working class whites, who are apparently preferable to the Nepali and Filipino migrant underclass she is used to seeing in services roles in the big city.
“It’s just my vibe up there”
‘Vibe’ can also be loosely translated to ‘an Anglo-Celtic hold-out that centres Judeo-Christian values above the multiculturalism that has been forced upon me in the major cities”
MORE TO COME.
