‘You want to get away from the town?’ It was said with a European accent, so I guess I was right about the backpacker thing.
‘I think so.’ I’d had my look around the village, smiled and said hello to a dozen friendly locals.
I knew a little of Byron Bay, firstly, from having come down from the Gold Coast during the previous year to help a colleague, Lionel Midford, with his PR launch of a disco-nightclub. Although it seems my Gold Coast time was defined by my mental state, including a serious suicide attempt, there must have been some reasonably lucid periods, albeit, while still poised on an emotional precipice.
For instance, not long after moving up to the Gold Coast I had received a call one day from Brian Walsh, someone I had known during my PR days in the Eighties. Back then, my public relations business, JMA, was booming, thanks to the various high-profile briefs we successfully––and often flamboyantly––handled. Consequently, we received more assignments than we could take on, and often we would flick some of the smaller accounts––the ones we called the ‘rats and mice’ accounts––to the more modest PR businesses being run by men such as Max Markson and Brian Walsh. By 1996, however, having graduated to the big league via his work with the NRL’s Grand Finals, Brian Walsh was now a powerful Foxtel programming executive.
And here he was, offering me a bone, a ‘rats and mice’ one-off guest appearance on his new program Beauty and the Beast.
What Brian was offering was a guest appearance, with fellow panelists Margaret Whitlam, Catherine Greiner and Senator Bronwyn Bishop. It was a parliamentary-type panel to go head-to-head with the host, Stan Zemanek.
Funny, but the thing which sticks most vividly in my memory from my first day on Beauty and the Beast is of the four of us women in the dressing room, togging up for the show. Margaret kept making ironic quips. Catherine seemed aloof. Bronwyn wore a corset.
What comes around goes around. Foxtel, said Brian, would cough up for my travel expenses but from memory, I don’t believe there was an appearance fee offered. Negotiations of that nature would come later, after the producers realized I was good talent and offered me a binding contract as one of the show’s regular panelists.
The salient point here, however is this; I never for one moment let on to Brian that things had happened to my poor brain since our glory days in the Eighties. He knew me not only as a high-profile PR consultant who could handle herself in front of a camera, but also as the lippy wife of a Cabinet Minister who’d gone rogue, shocking the nation back in 1987 with her story of love-making with her ministerial spouse on his ministerial desk. Brian had no account of me as a mentally ill person who had recently been locked up in acute psychiatric wards in both NSW and Queensland, one who’d spent so many months in and out of clinics dealing with a serious bi-polar condition.
I guess he thought the opinionated and often controversial Jan Murray he knew of old would be a good performer on his shiny new agony aunt show.
Poor Mr. Walsh. He went into the thing with blinkers on and would, in the future, have many Jan Murray headaches to deal with.
While my friend Lionel must have believed at the time that I was up to the task he’d asked of me, with hindsight I think he regretted the invitation to help him with his client’s nightclub promotion.
And if you asked him today, I think he would admit that the memory of that weekend still pains him because whenever I mention Byron Bay, poor Lionel will rest his hands in his head and sigh deeply. His off-sider had behaved so unpredictably and erratically that weekend, doing the opposite of what a good publicist cozying up to the media is supposed to do.
Several foodie journalists had been flown in to cover the event and been accommodated at Strop’s Beach Hotel. I spotted several of them sitting poolside, sipping expensive cocktails on the morning of the Opening and figured they were getting in a little too early on the free ride. I lashed out in words that suggested they better earn their keep with positive reviews.
It wouldn’t have happened in my professional PR days, accusing my journalists of exploiting the client’s hospitality. Bad, bad me, but perhaps I was letting go of the years of pent up frustrations, the groveling, having to keep schtum so often when I saw free-loading media types hoovering up every last one of my clients’ canapés and downing jeroboams of the expensive champagne––and then holding back on the love, holding back on the "ink" as we referred to press coverage in an age before social media.
Long before that disastrous weekend I had known Byron Bay. As a child, I’d been brought to the North Coast by my parents on our regular camping trips. That was a long time ago, in an era when instead of million-dollar acreage properties dotting the hills, you had great herds of black and white cattle roaming that same hinterland and giving up their milk to the Norco Butter Factory. Pigs were sent off to the meat works. And for a few years a whaling station plied its merciless bloody trade.
It’s an era that’s passed and, thankfully, the meat works became a cinema and backpacker hostel and the whaling slaughterhouse was replaced by the thriving up-market Beach Hotel, owned up until recently by a man known throughout the nation as Strop, John Cornell of Paul Hogan Crocodile Dundee fame. These are the kind of displacement no one regrets.
After I’d eaten my Ringo Café breakfast, I started thinking about going off to some quiet place for thinking time before I got back on the highway.
To where, who knew? I hadn’t mentioned my morning’s decampment from the Gold Coast to any of my children in Sydney. No one would have a clue where I was or know that I had hit the highway at dawn for places unknown.
Despite the decaf, the adrenalin was pumping and the Voices were persistent.
There were always Voices in the manic phase of my bi-polar condition.
I describe it as being like a CD-ROM––remember them? It played inside my skull. No let-up. Just frantic messaging from one Jan to the other Jan. A constant conversation with the self. And boy, did it get exhausting. So, I was up for a long walk on a quiet beach where I might make some attempt to calm my soul and sort out the next phase of my life.
There would be no going back north. I had left Mermaid Beach and the Gold Coast behind.
I had also left behind a relationship with a sweet and gentle man called Robbie, a Vietnam veteran with a head and heart full of heaviness that in our companionable months together––part of which I spent living with him on his sailing boat Sutra in Southport harbour––I hadn’t been able to lighten. We had both been too emotionally fragile for the relationship to work. Robbie believed his ‘Nam’ experience hadn’t been all that bad. Hello? He had only had to drive the trucks that went out after the bombings and mine explosions to collect the dead, the almost dead and the strewn body parts of his mates! Poor man. If he is alive today I hope he has acknowledged his courage and that the post-traumatic stress arising out of that terrible and unnecessary war he had to endure has abated to some extent.
‘Go down Jonson, past the MITRE 10 till you get to the roundabout,’ said the green-eyed girl who had overheard my question to the youth and stopped, plate stacks in hand, and joined in. ‘Take the Bangalow Road exit out of town. It’s the other side of the lighthouse. Suffolk Park. You’ll walk forever without bumping into anyone down there. It’s just the best beach for some serious mindfulness, if that’s what you’re looking for. I go there, sometimes. Quite often, in fact.’ She shrugged. ‘Or there’s Main Beach, just up the road, here. Or Clarke’s further down.’
She looked deep into my eyes, possibly seeing the mania. ‘I’d go to Suffolk Park,’ she said, softly as she touched my shoulder with her free hand.
Suffolk Park. Mindfulness? A chance to put a sock in the Voices for a while? Okay, I thought. It sounded like a trip I could use.
I finished off my virtuous breakfast at Ringo’s Café and wandered outside, heading for the Golf. Its black bodywork had baked for an hour or so in the north coast morning sunshine and the little lady was a steaming hotbox. I wound down a couple