How Byron Bay should be seen: With an Indigenous Elder

Heading to Nightcap National Park, Aunty Lois recites her Nyangbul Bunjalung lineage. Her great-grandmother Susan Cook was the last of the Brunswick River tribe and her great-grandfather Bubba Jack Cook was the last man to lead traditional ceremonies at Broken Head and Evans Head. One of their sons, a traditional spiritual practitioner, is Douglas Cook—Aunty Lois’s great uncle.

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“Look at this place. It’s abundance,” she says. Heaped entanglements of rainforest fringe the road. “Because of the abundance, we were not nomadic—we had villages and houses built. When the Europeans came, they destroyed everything. There were six people per kilometer before white people came.”

The region’s two million annual visitors couldn’t know this from its Lonely Planet summary.

Aunty Lois is petite, but strides in black boots towards Minyon Falls Lookout. Water plunges 100 meters into a shadowy pool over a huge rhyolite wall. Minyon Falls’ three-hour hike is a true must-do, but I’m given a new layer: “This is a women’s birthing site, see down the bottom.”

In a local Dreamtime story, a pregnant goanna (monitor lizard) chased a snake through the Bundjalung Nation. Dreamtime animals are of colossal proportions, forming the land as they move through it.

“Colonization makes it hard for many people to remember who they are. If they remember who they are, they can be telling their stories too… We need access to the land for our cultural practices, but our land is being sold for astronomical prices. Inheritance was stolen off us.”

- Aunty Lois

Aunty Lois points ahead: Nimbin Rocks, where the chase began. The snake slithered through the Nightcap Ranges. The goanna climbed over this escarpment, brushing its breasts against the rocks leaving the breast milk that is Minyon Falls.

They reached north of Byron Bay, flattening the coastal plains as they fought. They traveled south, forming the hills, coastal escarpment, gullies, creeks, and estuaries of Suffolk Park, Broken Head and Teven. The goanna laid its eggs at Boulder Beach and drowned while sleeping when the tide rose. To this day, the snake waits there for the goanna’s return. This creation trail is what we’ll follow.

The precious space in between: Car conversations. People say there’s something magical about this land, I tell her. What is that? Her answer feels neither romantic nor cosmic. It’s said with such matter-of-factness, a word she repeats today: “Abundance”.

Aunty Lois acknowledges the explosion of online sole-trading in recent decades: growers, crafts makers, content creators, healers. And what of this ‘Bali-like Byron’?

“It’s interesting, it’s exciting. I think Aboriginal people could also be healers,” says Aunty Lois. “But colonization makes it hard for many people to remember who they are. If they remember who they are, they can be telling their stories too. But not all of us have the capacity to remember what our old people talked about. We need access to the land for our cultural practices, but our land is being sold for astronomical prices. Inheritance was stolen off us. We didn’t have a start.”

At St. Helena Lookout, sightseers hold phone cameras over grassy slopes under a sliver of ocean horizon. Aunty Lois draws a line across the fields: “Songlines”.

“Everything we wanted was in our community,” she says. “We didn’t necessarily trade with other groups unless it was a festival time—the Songlines would be open for passage to share the abundance of our food. That would be done once a year.”

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These ancient routes are part of an intricate network across the entire continent and were used for much more than navigating. Songlines could mirror the stars, they shaped the land, and held rich stories: sharing knowledge, rituals, ceremonies, hunting, tribe borders. Many Songlines are now Australia’s highways—until now, I had never seen our roads as sacred.

Driving towards the coast, Aunty Lois explains how hairy grubs crossing the road meant mullets spawning. And oysters, crustaceans and pippies on the beach meant spring. Twisting out pippies with her feet at Patchs Beach is a favorite pastime (throw them in a stir-fry—delicious). Spring’s coming when I start sneezing, I tell her.

This next stop may not look special—a pocket park? Aunty Lois snaps off a bushy tea tree branch and sweeps it over me head-to-toe for a “brush down”, an act of purifying my spirit before entering.

But this isn’t just another way to experience Byron Bay. It’s how we should be approaching all travel in Australia, and other colonized countries across the globe. To get two sides of history: guide books and Aunty Lois.

I instinctively lift my arms to cover more area—I had been ‘saged’ on multiple occasions in women’s circles before and it suddenly occurs to me that I have never been cleansed by an Indigenous Australian on this land. I recall only one woman of Indigenous American descent, where white sage rituals originate.

We reach a large circular patch of ground dented in. Aunty Lois brings it to life, playfully tapping her feet over it—“trampled in from dancing!” It’s a bora ring, an ancient ceremonial place where boys were initiated into manhood. Today, the history is wedged between Lennox Head’s residential properties. There are 14 bora rings between here and Ballina, she tells me.

Down south at Boulder Beach, blackish basalt rocks pepper the shores. Her grandfather liked to swim here. “See that pole? So fishermen can hang onto it,” she says. “Freak wave comes in—it’s the snake bite.”

Around the headland, we find larger basalt shooting out from the shores—the goanna’s eggs—and at last, the snake, its face outlined on the cliff.

If it wasn’t for Aunty Lois, I wouldn’t have noticed the significance of what I was walking in: mystical tea tree lakes, plants for weaving, former fishing traps, remnants of a “midden” (rubbish tip) with shells, bones and tools invaluable to archaeological study, a boardwalk. I wonder whether dog-walkers know they’re passing massacre sites.

I grab my journal: everything around us carries stories, I write. Aunty Lois has generously uncovered it for me. To heal here, we should connect with the land and its people through a traditional cultural advisor. My boutique hotel feels incongruous to the last seven hours.

But this isn’t just another way to experience Byron Bay. It’s how we should be approaching all travel in Australia, and other colonized countries across the globe. To get two sides of history: guide books and Aunty Lois.

Earlier today, I asked Aunty Lois: “How do we celebrate something beautiful, while honoring its dark past?”

“I think you’re doing it,” she said. “Learning about country.”