A question that is increasingly facing residents of NSW coastal towns – what do you when a group of loud, sometimes intoxicated people come to holiday right outside your family home? Who use your front lawn as a solid-waste toilet, openly urinate in front of your children, litter the kerb and when they finally leave they are replaced by yet another set of noisy freeloaders.
Council or NPWS fines for camping on streets, in car parks or certain road rest areas, local parks, reserves, foreshores, or other Crown land appear to be barely stemming the influx in some areas.
In New South Wales illegal camping appears to attract a fine of between $1,000 to $5,500. However, I would be surprised if many of these ‘free spirits’ ever pay any fines they incur.
ABC News, 23 February 2021:
Those who flout strict camping regulations risk on-the-spot fines of up to $2,200.(Supplied: Alison Drover)
Edging through the logjam of traffic along Ewingsdale Road, a car horn offers an unlikely reprieve from the tedious hum of engines.
"Welcome to Byron Bay," reads a wooden sign in the distance. "Cheer up, slow down, chill out."
It is, in many ways, an apt reflection of the Byron dichotomy — a city both trapped and liberated by its own reputation.
With roots in the counterculture movement, the coastal paradise is renowned as a mecca for backpackers, the rich and famous and everyone in between.
A place, as one Vanity Fair writer offered, where "nomadic broods" come to "find their tribes on life's journey".
But with Byron's visitor numbers eclipsing its permanent population, the local community has found itself at a crossroads, struggling to reconcile this "free-living" ethos with the inexorable costs of tourism.
And as "van lifers" increasingly seep into the suburbs, it is ordinary residents who have suddenly found themselves bearing the brunt of tourism's ugly side: motorhomes lining residential streets, human waste on front lawns, and authorities trying in vain to keep it under control.
"As an area, we're too open to contradiction," muses Alison Drover, who has lived in Byron for 10 years.
"We're known as being free-spirited and open to everything, but it doesn't really serve us in some ways.
"We're being sort of trampled on."……
Full article here.
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