Rainbow-colored country.
Yes.
Take a chance on me, it whispered.
And I was ready to do just that. The maniac does not entertain the nay-sayer, and that morning in September 1997, I was certainly in the manic phase of my condition.
Easing the Golf into a spot out front of the First National Real Estate office near the bakery where I had earlier scooped up the devilish croissants I dug the second pastry out of my bag and hungrily devoured it. The carbs would centre me, calm the thumping great excitement beginning to manifest itself as sweaty palms and white lights before the eyes. A major adrenalin rush. A grand high. I wanted to dial up the world and tell it what I was doing. Me, buying my first house.
I, me, myself, personally.
Sad really, because there was no world out there waiting on my call. Just me, Jan Murray. Divorced middle-aged woman. Here, alone. Solista. About to make her monumental passage from one life into another. About to decide that the dilapidated little beach hut in the dunes, a long way from family and friends, would be her destiny. No going back. All the money I had, or possibly would ever have, going to purchase a wild piece of real estate. Over three decades of marriage and years of abundant motherhood, more years at university as a mature-age student, a working life as a gun public relations executive, my whole life lived around the suburbs of Sydney; all about to be put behind me, all about to be relegated to the past.
With the almond croissant devoured, I wiped the evidence from my face with the back of my arm and looked about. Everything seemed wonderful to me on this glorious morning.
It felt like the first morning of the earth and only for a moment, as I entered the agency, did I stop to consider how all this would play in the years ahead. Woman. Alone. Woman making her own way in life. No fallback position. No husband props. No nearby adult kids or friends to call on. Just me, Jan Murray, fifty-five years old, by all accounts an emotional basket case, about to sign up for my first ever piece of wholly owned real estate.
Could I manage it?
I took in several deep breathes.
That was when I decided to make a call to a woman I knew who had been living for some years in Byron Bay. One moment of caution, a slight hiatus in the manic high before I signed the cheque.
Di Morrissey, author of several successful books, took my call. She had a mutual friend with her, she said. They were both sitting outside on her verandah enjoying the view. I had visited Di in her home the year before when I’d been down here helping Lionel Midford with his restaurant launch. Di’s home was a cute, very pretty feminine abode on a hillside south of Byron which looked down into a rainforest valley.
Di knew Byron. So did advertising and moviemaking man Wayne Young, our mutual friend sitting with Di on her veranda.
Wayne’s company, YoungHeart, had been instrumental in getting Rodney Adler to invest in YoungHeart’s animated film project, Fernguly, the Last Rainforest in the Eighties after Wayne had walked a party of thirty-six Australian and American animators, script writers and potential film financiers through the Byron Bay rainforest, which was, like so much of the beautiful region, coming under threat from rapacious developers.
The rainforest track the movie people would have walked that day would have been much wilder, much closer to nature than it is presently, where the walk leading up to the lighthouse through the rainforest is now serviced by a suspended walkway and is beloved by locals and tourists alike. Wayne wanted to produce a big budget international film, and funds for environmentally sound children’s animated films would not have been easy to come by in those early days of environmental protection. He needed to demonstrate the fragility of the rainforest and the imminent threat. He did, I believe. And the result is a beautiful, poignant children’s movie that soon became a favourite electronic babysitter.
Once Adler had invested, I believe it was around $20 million, and the movie was made, Wayne invited me to New York to do the PR launch in the Grand Hall of the United Nations on Earth Day. Diplomats and their prettily dressed children filled the place for the premiere. It was an amazing experience. To top it all off, we camped for the week in Rodney Adler’s very posh apartment overlooking Central Park.
Wayne and I had also worked together on the massive First Fleet Re-enactment Voyage project for Australia’s 1988 Bicentenary, and not long after that I had secured a $100,000 sponsorship from American Express for YoungHeart to produce a save-the-planet rock concert in Centennial Park starring friends of Wayne’s such as environmental crusader Olivier Newton John, et al.
The fact the production, plagued with problems, never got off the ground would be a personal embarrassment for me, having used my reputation for honesty and my friendship with Alberto Modulo, the CEO of American Express, to convince the man to drop in a $100,000 sponsorship––$AU187,000 in 2017 terms––to kick off the concert. I had not had any further dealings with Wayne by the time I encountered him on the end of the line at Di Morrissey’s home.
‘Suffolk Park?’ I enquired. ‘What do you reckon, guys?’
‘Sufferer’s Park!’ came the dismissive response from the lean, green Wayne.
I knew Wayne and his family had been, in addition to his much-loved rainforested Wategos Beach, a long-time part of the artsy Belongil community at the other end of Byron Bay. Belongil’s coterie of stars included Paul Hogan and John Cornell and was considered the trendy part of Byron. A few years earlier, the friends of Belongil had successfully repelled Club Med’s plans to ruin the place with an international Club Med resort.
Suffolk Park, five kilometres south of all this trendiness, was Nowheresville. Sufferers Park.
Not a big rap.
A moment of panic seized me. I had an urge to run back to the car, jump inside its comforting space and head out of Byron Bay at full throttle. Mr. Real Estate Agent would be disappointed that the woman on the beach was a ‘no-show’ but so what? It would be written down in the annuls of First National Real Estate as just one more crazy female who acted too rashly, who fell in love with Byron and then cooled down and fled the precinct.
I needed time.
My heart was yelling a resounding ‘Yes, yes!’ but my head was now asking questions, thanks to the negative responses.
And then something happened that smashed all the negatives. Crazy, I know, but just as I was about to turn and do a runner the friendly crone I’d spoken with earlier in the morning came peddling past on her pushbike. I waved but she didn’t see me. Yet, I felt it was an omen. A Somewhere Over the Rainbow kind of omen, as if I were standing in the middle of the Yellow Brick Road. I can grow old here like her, I thought. I can be a cheerful, healthy octogenarian one day who peddles her bike like a teenager around beautiful Byron Bay, proud to show off her Indian skirt to a stranger––even if the stranger is mistaken for Mabel’s daughter, Gloria.
~~~
Sitting in the reception area of the real estate office, waiting for young Mr. First National to call me in, I thought about the prices my few saleable assets back in Sydney would bring at auction should I need to find more cash in order to make the shack habitable. Mentally, I thanked the little Laylas and Fadils, the Dariuses and the Deebas, the ghosts of all the children floating somewhere over old Persia who probably went blind weaving the two antique rugs I could sell to put towards my dream shack.
‘Honey?’
‘Uh? Oh, no, thanks.’ A pretty person in Bali pants and a white Bond’s singlet had just set down a cup of steaming chamomile tea in front of me.
‘Thanks, that’s great.’ I brought the cup to my lips, holding it under my nose to savour the aromatic herbs. I wondered about the Ugg boots in this tropical climate. It all felt so special; the shack, the beach, the dunes, this fragrant brew, Ringo’s, the G’days, the bicycle lady, the Rainbow shop down the road where I'd purchased some incense and a Magic Happens sticker for the Golf. And