Tallow Beach.
The locals call it 'The Back Beach”. It runs from south under The Byron Bay Lighthouse, past Suffolk Park and ending down at Broken Head. How long that stretch is I couldn't tell you. I suppose I could look it up, but I’d rather not. I want to write about my memories of the beach, not of an image that is adulterated by another's perspectives. You can look it up, if you like. If you need to know. It's a long way. It runs a long way.
Most mornings, after cooking and serving up a rustically gourmet morning meal to the guests of the Bed and Breakfast we were running, I’d jump on the rusted mountain bike and head for the sand. The side streets around our place curved and ran schizophrenically in and around eachother. It was always a little mission to find the path through the dunes – one I never felt a growing confidence in finding, despite the more and more times I rode out there. Eventually, I’d find the opening and wheel the bike over the loose, mix of soil and sand and through the overgrown greenery. At that northern part of the beach, the shrubbery between the foreshore and the 'beach-proper', grew thick over a large area. The path through it, was probably two to three hundred meters. To my memory of it.
I’d hear the roaring, white noise sounds of swelling waters and blowing sea breezes as I wound my way along that path. Tallow Beach got it's name from a shipwreck off its coast in the 1800's. The ship was carrying large casks of tallow – rendered beef fat – which washed ashore and lay strewn like dead soldiers across the sand. If you can look past the somewhat 'stomach-sensitive' image of casks of animal fat lying all around the place, I think this naming story is quite romantic.
Those that earn their keep and define their lives with a career on the seas, always do so knowing the dangers fraught in such days. They know more than most, the tenuous grip we have on our time here and how much of that is ultimately decided by fate. They are human like the rest of us, so this dictates certain fears. But they surrender to this. They surrender to their fears and fate and do not judge it with bias beforehand or differently with hindsight afterward. That is romantic. That is the essence of romance – to acknowledge whatever fears you might have of it and then surrender to the fate of the damn thing. You need to work at and for it with a healthy dose of fatalism. Otherwise, all you end up doing is protecting yourself from your best self. Depriving yourself of your best self.
The other thing about the story of Tallows' name, is that it also gives you the perfect introduction to the beach itself. (And that apostrophe is in the right place, for the locals also call Tallow Beach 'Tallows' – Australians love giving multiple nicknames to people and things)
The main beach in Byron – imaginatively called 'Main Beach' - runs from east to west across the northern front of town and is everything you'd imagine a subtropical beach to look like. There are palm trees hanging over a wide stretch of fine white sand, that runs up to a calm body of aqua-green water. Gentle waves of water so clear that you swear you can see straight through them, roll in all day. Most days, dolphins frolic in out of those waves and once, whilst very (very,very) drunk at the pub on its edge, we saw a couple of massive Humpback Whales swim across, only a hundred meters or so out. I can never never remember a day on that beach when conditions were ever less than 'pleasant' and I can remember a whole lot that were euphorically still.
Tallows is the opposite - a sort of wicked sibling. It has to do with the topography of the beach. The way it faces out east into The Pacific, open to the ocean's roar without protection of a land mass or reef. The way it runs for quite the long distance (again - look it up if you must) and this leaves it with more of a wide open feel. The way it is exposed to the winds swirling over from the dunes out the back, that mingle and fight with the forceful, crisp sea gales that blow in straight from over the choppy waters beyond. The way the tide runs so far up, that when it recedes back it leaves a brown pavement of firm, slightly wet sand that is as wide as a 6-lane freeway. The way how the whole strip across the foreshore is a protected National Park, with no building allowed, so no structures provide shelter from behind.
Like Main Beach, Tallows is laid with this most specific, fine, sweet sand. Unlike Main beach, however, the chaos of the winds blowing around, lifts a thin mist of this sand through the air. It hits sharply across your face and your bare arms, causing a light, permanent sting that I miss more than love I have lost along the way. It's a feeling I cannot describe to you, for it is all underlined by a smell that has no comparison and is both welcoming and transporting at the same time. This is the first part of Tallows you experience and despite its other addictive charms, I’m sure this is the part that made folk like me want to come back every day.
Some days, in that way that the seas can be totally inexplicable, I’d finally step out of from the dunes, and the ocean and the beach would be still and silent. Those days, the water felt warmer, the air quieter, the smell of the sea saltier, the distances seemed shorter and time was a hell of a lot slower. I remember those days vividly and they were great and I loved them, but only for their point of difference. More than a couple of these idyllic type days every few months and I would have grown to expect them. Grown to look for them. Grown to plan for them. This wasn't what I needed Tallow to be. I needed it to remind me of the fatalism it's entire existence was and is wrapped up in and to then show me the joys once one surrenders to this. Its romance wasn't in its perfections or its idealisms – it was in its complexities and difficulties and in its variances.
Not that you had to strive to make Tallows show you its love. It was as real and easily tangible as the sand grains biting your red cheeks. I’d wheel the bike over to the firm road left by the tide, getting as close to the waterline as possible and ride the shorter distance up to the northern end. Here, under the looming shadows of that famous lighthouse, I’d sit down for a while and watch the surfers. That break is a fairly famous one in the world of surfing and on any given day, they'd be no shortage of riders who really knew how to throw their boards around. You could tell which days a famous surfer or two was out there, for the beach would be lined with photographers, wielding long, black tripods and even longer, white lenses.
After a while, my skin would adjust to the temperature and I’d get back on the bike for a steady roll all the way down to the Broken Heads at the southern end. This was long before the first iPod, so the only sounds I had was Tallows and some internal dialogue. I’d pass joggers, walkers, other bike riders and fishermen standing in the water, just beyond its edge. They fling huge, tall fishing rods and never seemed to catch anything at all. I’m sure they did. They must have caught something, otherwise why would they return every day. Unless, just like me, they were there for what Tallows gave up in the moment and not for what you could take home from it. Maybe, like me with that bike, the mechanics of the fishing and the rod and the bait and the hooks, was just a way to participate. Being involved without true need for the practical.
I mean, those bike rides were my only exercise. They must have kept me fit and I remember losing weight because of them (I always remember that which looses the weight and forget that which gains it.). But that wasn't what those morning where about. They were about being there. About being on Tallows – being in Tallows. I must have known at the time that I would need those memories. I moved up to Byron to found out who I was. I had restarted as someone else and at even at that young age, I knew I needed a new place to go along with that. Somewhere no one knew me. Somewhere that the search of new strangers to freshly define me, would also help find my own definitions. And this did work. It does work.
But also, you gotta find yourself away from the perspectives of others. Tallows took me away. Took me away alone. Took me to where I could always go back to in my mind and to where, one day, I can take my body back to as well.
Then, I can measure it for you. So you can know exactly how long it is.
