BELOW is a column I wrote for the Northern Star back in 2012 with the headline, ‘My Favourite Place in the World’. I don’t get there as often as I should these days, but it still inspires me. The reason I am posting it is to give me an excuse to display just some of the many photos of Wategos I have taken over the years.
WELL, yes. Thanks for asking. I do have a favourite place in the world. It’s called Wategos Beach.
It’s named after the Watego family who used to live there – before it became a playground for millionaires and celebrities – and as such, ‘Wategos’ should really carry an apostrophe ‘s’ as in ‘Watego’s’.
But the NSW Geographical Names Board apparently finds the use of apostrophes supernumerary to needs and generally bans them.
I had an ‘apostrophe’ discussion with a member of the Watego family some years ago who was pretty insistent I use the apostrophe whenever I wrote about the beach in the Byron News.
I explained I had to go with the flow so to speak and follow our house style, which ruled out the apostrophe.
Although oddly, today the sign in Lighthouse Road just before the lighthouse turn-off, has Wategos spelled with a suspiciously dodgy-looking apostrophe ‘s’.
It was almost 30 years ago that Wategos claimed a part of my soul.
It’s the beach where I learned to surf.
It’s a place where I watched my son and his mates in their teens develop their longboarding skills, reaching stylish levels of which I could only dream.
It’s a place where, despite my own limited and often clumsy surfing skills, I was among like-minded people in the water. My Byron Bay ‘tribe’.
It’s a place I return to again and again to clear my head – and occasionally to help others clear theirs as well.
That can be either in the water sitting on my board looking back at the magnificence of the cape and the lighthouse, or across the bay to Mt Warning.
While catching a few waves is a bonus, I’m just as happy floating and paddling around in the swell.
My top head-clearing, out-of-the-water spot used to be on the bend leading down to the beach where I would stop the car on the gravel next to the safety barrier, sit on the bonnet and soak it all up.
It was where spotters used to sit with binoculars when the mullet were running and when local fishos would net them at Clarks or Main Beach. But no longer.
It was a view I captured on a camera years ago and a desktop image that I saw every day on my work computer.
But like so many things in Byron Bay today, the Fun Police struck and put up No Stopping signs.
While the signs today may be invisible to some, I mostly abide by their message.
Which means my new best out-of-the water, head-clearing spot is one of those relatively new benches in Marine Parade just above the sand.
Early mornings are best for me and there is nearly always someone I know going past on the cape walk to say g’day to.
Just recently, the longboarding ‘tribe’ gathered at Wategos early on a Sunday morning to say farewell to a mate, Stu Wallace, who died after a battle with cancer.
He loved Wategos and was there most mornings at one of the picnic tables reading the paper and doing the crossword.
So it was fitting he be given what has now become a traditional surfers’ farewell.
With his wife, Judy and sons Dan and Ben and their partners in the centre, a large circle of surfers formed around them behind the break to pay him a final tribute.
After a few words from local longboarding legend, Max Pendergast, his ashes and flower petals were spread in the surf and three cheers were offered to a surfing mate.
And then more than a hundred surfers – mostly locals – turned and paddled to the point to catch a wave.
What else? Stu would have liked that.
