Letters Byron woes and yays I attempt to be positive and optimistic most of the time, offering alternatives to our present situations. Even to the point of steering the conversation away from the covid gossip and the cynicism of establishment agendas. But I have a few gripes to share. 1. Brunswick Heads, last Saturday, was in complete lockdown. Nowhere to park in the whole town, even well into residential areas in all directions. 2. Our new transport centre on the Byron bypass is sinfully ugly. With some barbed wire it could look like a gulag concentration area. The quaint old heritage railway centre now completely boarded up. What a shame. 3. A mature age woman who can no longer live in her car tried to rent accommodation from a real estate company and was told there were over 200 applicants for the two rentals. As reported in The Echo and Bay FM, business owners are renting accommodation for their service workers because there is no affordable accommodation in Byron Shire. Last week’s Echo had no rentals listed. Yet there are hundreds, if not thousands, available on Airbnb. I’ve read that approximately a third of Byron homes are now on Airbnb.
Guinea or Indonesia around September where it couples up and proceeds to harass local currawongs or magpies. This process involves the male bird diverting the hosts away from their nests whilst the female sneaks in and lays their own clutch in the smaller bird’s nest. Occasionally the female cuckoo will swallow the host’s eggs before laying her own, but not always. Either way the host’s own brood will seldom survive due to the oversized parasite fledgling nicking all the food. It does all seem rather harsh but nature has a way to balance out many of these anthropocentric concerns. The bird itself sits high in the fruit tree canopies amongst the fig birds and cuckoo shrikes, it is rarely seen but always heard. It is also known as the storm bird in the northern states of Australia owing to its migration period coinciding with the wet season. The channel-billed cuckoo is an amazing bird that has evolved and survived well, it is not in danger and currently seems to be thriving in the current climate. Peace. Kol Dimond The Pocket
It’s a matter of consideration for others Jason. What’s good and enjoyable for you and your friends may be quite distressing for many others. I hope this helps you understand. Either drum inside where the sound can be completely blocked, or find a venue where no-one will be affected by your choice of enjoyment. And I don’t mean the forest – there are many beings living in the forest. Bronwyn Sindel Mullumbimby
Sky terror Cartoon by Holly English www.hollyenglish.com My last housemate was approached by a friend to rent a home in Byron so she could turn it into a holiday let, as she could not rent any more homes because the real estate would not rent any more to her. So now Byron will have its first traffic light because traffic backed up on the motorway is too dangerous, with all the service workers coming in from other shires. So sad! 4. On my way home Sunday, I decided to go via Coolamon Scenic Drive to stop at the lookout at the very top, only to find it completely blocked off. Byron seems to be loved to death by a thousand
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cuts. Is it possible to save our lovely Shire, and planet, from too many people and overdevelopment? Maybe the 100k lightworkers who focused our love on Uluru on the planetary convergent solstice to energise the Pleiadian ‘Magic Box’ given to the Elders to fully open the age of Aquarius will have the desired effect? We shall see. Noah Yamore Mullumbimby
LĕëſƐȜƆ ë ǖ ƖƐƐĕſ I’ve just thought – is the Qld premier really just a coy lover, playing hard to get, and we, and the Qld public service, have been too insensitive to notice? Could it be that ‘shut the door!’ is really, in the language of lovers, ‘Je t’adore’? J Rose Mullumbimby
Boom, boom, bang Jason van Tol’s letter (December 30, 2020) poses the question as to what is the
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threat posed by the drumming circle? Thanks for asking Jason – I can only speak for myself; but I’m a very quiet person, live in a very quiet place by choice, and object strongly to having to listen to other people’s noise/music when I’m at home. The problem with drums is that, unless they are struck very gently, the sound they make travels for quite a distance; under the right conditions more than a kilometre. The sound of a drum has quite a different beat to the beat of my heart and my preferred rhythm. Why should I be subjected to someone else’s noise/music in the privacy of my own home? It’s more than annoying, it’s actually distressing. Do I have to turn on the radio to drown out the sound? That doesn’t seem fair. And if I’m this sensitive, how much must it affect the ground dwelling animals that are trying to rest while you play?
Unless you have been walking around for the last couple of months with ear plugs in, you would have noticed the sound of terror in the sky. It’s a noise I hadn’t had in my bushland retreat for some years, and I needed to record and search the sound on the internet to discover that it was in fact a channelbilled cuckoo Scythrops novaehollandiae. It is the largest brood parasite bird in the world, and the largest cuckoo. It also sounds like a baby being throttled whilst being thrown naked into a vat of burning oil (maybe just a mild tad of embellishment here but you get the point). The bird treks in from New
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