Former Rural Meth Lab Begins New Life As Gorgeous AirBnb After Being Stumped And Trucked To Byron

CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT

If these walls could talk, they’d probably say thank you God.

Byron’s Hinterland is now home to another gorgeous Queenslander-style home – complete with the wide timber verandas, 9 foot ceilings and meticulously designed fretwork breeze panels above the internal bedroom doors.

It’s something you’d pay an experienced Brisbane builder nearly $1 million to knock up.

Or, you could just go to economically depressed regional Queensland town and pay 90 grand to have it stumped and trucked up into the hills.

This new dwelling has been named ‘Yawundah’ by it’s owners, which is a Bundjalung word for ‘Afternoon’ – and as the warm Northern Rivers sunshine pours through the Hoop Pine and Eucalyptus at sunset – it seems this yuppie appropriation of Indigenous language couldn’t be more fitting.

With a lick of white paint over every single surface in the house, and a couple of Aboriginal paintings bought from a carpet-bagging Darwin gallerist at the Byron markets – Yawundah has come a long way since the triple murder that left the walls coated in blood just a couple years back.

Built on a rural soldier’s settlement block in the early 1920s, the views haven’t always been this spectacular. Prior to being stumped it sat on the outskirts of a gradually less inspiring country town for 100 years.

When the price of wool crashed in the 1990s, the shearers that used to board in this 5-bedroom quarters never came back to town – and it then became a squat for meth cooks and blokes on the run.

After multiple lab explosions and full blown police raids, Yawundah is lucky to have not been burnt to the ground – or shot to pieces by the bikies and cops.

But ever since it got loaded on to that truck – it left the social issues and poverty of regional Australia behind. It’s now a multimillion dollar asset.

No more working girls lighting bongs off the gas stove, and no more bricks going through the windows. This is now a luxury hideaway, protected by a 500-year-old fig tree, nestled among the Bangalow palms and overlooking a flowing creek

The only similarities that remain is the hard drug use and transient occupants. As this former meth lab is now a short-stay rental for coked up Melbourne divorcees and destination wedding guests from Brisbane.

For just $500 dollars a night, this gorgeous cottage getaway – and the story of Yawundah – could be yours.