The Bundjalung people are the traditional owners of this Country, and archaeological evidence shows they have lived along the Richmond for at least 6,000 years. The town's name carries that history, though its exact root is debated. One reading traces Ballina to a Bundjalung word, often given as bullinah, meaning 'place of many oysters' - or, in other tellings, 'fighting ground', or a word for where the river meets the sea. It is also possible the name was settled by the largely Irish newcomers of the 1840s, after the Irish town of Ballina, Beal an Atha, 'mouth of the ford'. Two peoples, two languages, and a name that sits on the seam between them - a fitting emblem for a river-mouth town.

European Ballina began in the 1840s on the north shore of the Richmond, twenty kilometres south of Cape Byron, the most easterly point on the Australian mainland. HMS Rainbow under Captain Henry Rous had first crossed the river bar in 1828, and settlers followed - some overland from the Clarence, others by sea on the ship Sally in 1842, founding what is now East Ballina on Shaws Bay. For its first century the Richmond River was the region's highway, carrying timber and produce out and supplies in. The river still defines the town. Its estuaries teem with marine life, the beaches draw surfers and fishers, and Ballina has grown into the seat of its shire, an urban area of more than 46,000 people and a gateway to nearby Byron Bay.

Ballina has a habit of catching famous arrivals. In 1928 Charles Kingsford Smith's aircraft, the Southern Cross, crossed the coast over Ballina at the end of the first flight across the Pacific - a feat so celebrated the town later named a festival and a school for it. Then, in 1973, came an arrival from sea level: the Las Balsas expedition, three balsa-wood rafts that had drifted roughly 14,000 kilometres from Ecuador across the entire Pacific. Currents pushed them past their Queensland target, and local trawlers towed two of them up the Richmond to a heroes' welcome. One of those rafts survives today at the Ballina Naval & Maritime Museum, the relic of the longest raft voyage ever recorded - a journey nearly twice the length of the famous Kon-Tiki.

Ballina is one of the wettest towns on the New South Wales coast, soaking up around 1,765 millimetres of rain a year, most of it falling in the first half - March is the soggiest month of all. Blame the geography: jutting out near Cape Byron, the town stands squarely in the path of moisture-laden systems rolling off the Tasman Sea. That same coastal setting feeds the marine life, the surf and the subtropical green that draw visitors year-round. Once a river port, then a sugar-and-fishing town, Ballina has reinvented itself around tourism and its airport, the Ballina Byron Gateway, now the busy front door to the whole Byron hinterland. Through every change, the river mouth and that improbable concrete prawn remain - the practical and the playful sides of a town entirely at ease with both.