IT was a case of time standing still when it came to the installation of the Byron Bay town clock that has been a fixture at the intersection of Jonson and Byron Streets for almost 30 years.
By mid-1992, the clock, costing $8500 and which was donated to Byron Council by the Byron Bay Rotary Club, had been sitting in a council storage shed for nearly four years waiting for an impasse over where it should be located to be resolved.
The Rotary club wanted the electric clock to be erected on the roundabout at the intersection of Jonson and Lawson Streets.
The club reckoned that in that location the four-faced clock would be seen from many parts of town.
It wasn’t an idea the council was too keen on, saying it would have been too costly to get power to the clock and it was also concerned the clock would possibly create a traffic hazard
Then there was the matter of who was going to pay for its installation.
While the clock sat gathering dust, the council looked at various sites to install it including the swimming pool and the Byron Bay Surf Club.
With no decision being made, there were rumblings from Rotary club members about asking the council to return the clock and giving it to someone ‘who really wants it.’
Rotarian Reg Miller, who came up with the clock idea as a result of people coming into his real estate office in town asking for the time, said the club hadn’t raised a cent for the clock until it had got the go-ahead from the council.
But he said once the council was given the clock, they didn’t know what to do with it.
That changed by late 1991 when the council nominated the Jonson and Byron Streets nature strip site and set aside $20,000 to do the job.
The council’s then works and services director, Greg Alderson, called for a landscape architect to draw up plans for the clock to be sited there – and of course, that’s where it went.
PICTURED in this photo in 1989 with the clock is Reg Miller, the Byron Bay Rotary Club member who came up with the clock idea.