The faraway nearby
IT WAS 1978 and we were on the kind of assignment freelance journalists don’t get anymore. A magazine had given me a month to drive from Sydney to Cape York with a photographer to find the New Age hippie communes that had sprung up after 1973’s epoch-making Aquarius Festival in Nimbin.
We’d thrown surfboards into a campervan on top of sleeping gear, camera equipment and a portable typewriter, and had already surfed our way up the coast for two weeks, darting into the hinterland to document the hippies. We really had to make some miles towards Cairns.
But instead, we were driving along a corrugated, untarred road two hours outside a place called Agnes Water, which wasn’t on my map. All we knew was that it was on the coast, not far from the curiously named Town of 1770, which sounded just weird enough to attract hippies.
We pulled into the camping ground at Agnes, passing the general store with a lone petrol bowser out front, an hour before dark. Peacocks strutted past the row of tin-roof shacks that faced the beach, a communal barbecue pit smouldering outside. We rented a shack for $2 a night and quickly unpacked the boards. Beyond the sand we’d noticed an idyllic point break with shoulder-high waves peeling along its rocky rim…and no-one riding them.
The next three days saw us surfing the point with, at most, three or four others, sharing the catch and bottles of rum with the fishermen who were our shack neighbours. Never saw a hippie, never got to the Town of 1770, but Agnes owned a piece
