THE BYRON SHIRE
Summer Daze
Volume 29 #30 Wednesday, January 7, 2015 Phone 02 6684 1777 Fax 02 6684 1719 editor@echo.net.au adcopy@echo.net.au www.echo.net.au 23,200 copies every week
CAB AUDIT
Inside S Sorrensen becomes a this week samurai – p11
p.12
W H I C H E V E R I N T E R P R E TAT I O N P R E VA I L S I S A F U N C T I O N OF POWER AND NOT TRUTH – NIETZSCHE
Health & Healing – p14–15
Get your social Falls Festival media fix with and Soul Street pics – p25 FuzzBox – p16
Cinema Classies reviews in print! – p33 – p26
Byron street festival brings in 2015
Byron Shire Council Notices Page 38
Wilsons Creek Road landslips – again Chris Dobney
Byron Shire Council’s aim to make Byron’s Jonson Street a family-friendly entertainment hub on New Years Eve worked a treat. No alcohol, very little rubbish and fun in spades ushered in 2015. Photo Jeff Dawson Eve Jeffery
Byron Bay might be losing its New Years Eve party town image after reports of a fairly incident-free night are anything to go by. Acting police inspector Adrian Telfer from the Tweed-Byron LAC said that to his knowledge there were no arrests in Byron Bay during the evening’s celebrations. He also said that the 30 to 40 po-
lice staff who were present in the town were not the only ones to have a quiet time, as it was in general a peaceful time across the state as similar reports had come from other precincts. The hospital still had a hectic night as is expected every year. ‘Byron District Hospital Emergency Department (ED) doctors and nurses had a busy new year period with a total of 153 presentations over New Years Eve and New Years Day’, said
a spokesperson for the Northern NSW Local Health District. As expected, many of the people presenting to the ED were affected by alcohol to some extent although they were all generally well behaved and respectful to staff. ‘Patients presented with a broad range of conditions and staff are congratulated for providing high quality of care in a timely manner.’ The Byron annex of the Falls
Festival was also very chilled by all accounts, despite a 26-year-old Brisbane man being found dead on the morning of December 31 at the festival campsite. A post mortem is yet to be released. Acting inspector Telfer said that there was an unconfirmed report that there were no sniffer-dogrelated arrests at the north Byron event. continued on page 2
Wilsons Creek residents woke up to an unwanted New Years present after flash floods in the early hours of January 1 caused a major landslip that once again blocked the only road in and out of the village. Repairs have only recently finished on two other landslip sites, the result of massive floods in early 2013. Traffic is down to one lane in each direction at the site. It is just a kilometre further up the road from the 2013 slip near the school, work on which was completed in October at a cost of $2.4 million. Byron Shire Council’s acting infrastructure services director, Phil Warner, said the slip had occurred on the upside of the hill, bringing trees down over the road; most have now been cleared. ‘As a precautionary measure, we have put traffic controls in place and it is currently single-lane access,’ he added. Wilsons Creek resident Michael Balson told The Echo that there was so much soil movement in the ‘massive slip’ that some of the trees blocking the road were ‘still standing’. The current slip is expected to cost $250,000 to repair but Mr Warner said Council would still need to go through the process of applying for emergency funding. ‘The whole process can take in the order of three months,’ he told ABC radio Friday morning.