In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook sailed past the headland and named it for a fellow officer: Commodore John Byron, a circumnavigator of the globe so dogged by storms that the navy nicknamed him "Foul-Weather Jack." He was grandfather to the poet Lord Byron, though the cape carries no literary intent, only a sailor's nod to a sailor. European settlers arrived in the 1830s, and the history that followed was not gentle. A massacre took place in the 1850s near where the quarry stands today, south of Suffolk Park, one of many violent ruptures across the frontier that the town's later reinventions can obscure but should not erase.

For a long time, Byron Bay smelled terrible. This was a working port built on slaughter and processing: dairy factories, abattoirs, a meatworks, and from 1954 a whaling station that took its first humpback that July and killed more than eleven hundred whales before it closed in October 1962. Carcasses were towed to the jetty, hauled onto rail wagons, and rendered down within sight of town. Sand miners stripped the beaches for monazite between the world wars. A petrol locomotive nicknamed the Green Frog shunted whales, livestock, and mineral sands along the waterfront for decades. The poet Brunton Stephens had once admired cattle grazing the "mossy plains" of the cape, but by the 1950s the romance had curdled into stench.

Longboard surfers found the breaks at The Pass and Wategos in the 1960s, and the town began to change shape. When the Aquarius Festival gathered the counterculture at nearby Nimbin in May 1973 - Australia's answer to Woodstock - Byron's reputation as a happy, alternative haven was sealed. The cash-poor hippies and surfers came first; the cash-rich came after, and the median house price climbed past staggering numbers as multi-million-dollar mansions crowded the headland. Roughly five thousand people live here, while some two million visitors arrive each year. The lighthouse, automated since 1989, still throws Australia's most powerful beam out over a town forever negotiating between its grit and its glamour.

In 1994, Arakwal Elders Lorna Kelly, Linda Vidler, and Yvonne Graham lodged a native title claim. After seven years of negotiation, the Bundjalung of Byron Bay (Arakwal) signed an Indigenous Land Use Agreement with the State of New South Wales in 2001 - the first of its kind in Australia and a model for agreements that followed across the country. It recognised the Arakwal as traditional owners of nearly three hundred hectares of Crown land and led to the creation of Arakwal National Park, the first national park established through such an agreement. In 2003 the agreement won an international conservation award, recognition that the meeting place had become a place where, finally, the original custodians were met as well.

Geologically, Byron Bay is the eroded eastern flank of an ancient shield volcano - the Tweed, or Mount Warning volcano, which last erupted around 23 million years ago. Offshore lie Julian Rocks, where temperate and tropical waters mingle and divers share the sea with creatures from both. Migrating humpbacks now pass close enough to watch from the headland, an industry of wonder where there was once an industry of death. Subtropical rainforest crowds the hinterland, and Minyon Falls in nearby Nightcap National Park drops a hundred metres into it. The town that smelled of whale oil now sells yoga, wellness, and the simple fact of being the first place in the country to greet the day.