A powerhouse indie rock singer-songwriter, Hayley Mary continues to carve her own niche in Australia's alternative underground.
She has released two EPs in the past year ('The Drip' and 'Fall In Love'). However, finding her own sound as a solo artist was not an overnight discovery for Mary."You're just on that gradual burn; that gradual build-up, starting again from scratch pretty much," she told us last year.
"It's been really fun to start again – building up the live band, doing more writing, building up my sound.
"I was soul-searching for a long time – trying different things with different producers all around the world, stabbing in the dark and finding things that just weren't right.
"I had to really work to claw my way out of the box I'd been placed in."
Hayley will be part of the interstate contingent when she heads to Sunshine Coast's Offbeat Music Festival this month joining Holy Holy, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Emma Donovan & The Putbacks and others.
Offbeat brings together a vibrant community of musicians, artists and performers; and promises to be a little offbeat, a little quirky, a little off the beaten track, and a little bit of the unexpected.
Although now a full-time resident of Melbourne, Hayley grew up in the idyllic surrounds of Byron Bay long before the influencers, property developers and anti-vaxxers moved in.
"Not far from the Nimbin, drug capital of Australia, where a ten-year-old me was casually offered heroin in the street, lies idyllic Byron Bay, land of ever eroding beach, growing real-estate prices and A-list celebrity.
"But Byron, as we all know, wasn't always this way. I grew up there in a bygone age when anti-vax was considered a niche, entirely left wing movement.
"Byron was a vibrant town known for its quirky, harmless, conspiracy-touting locals.
"I mingled among many of them as a member of the town's dole-bludging underclass youth, and these are five of the more memorable amalgamated myths I heard (or partly witnessed) while smoking too much weed.
"For obvious reasons, I make no claims about the factual accuracy of most of this. As with all myths, there may be some crossover with some actual history, but you'll have to do 'your own research' to find out the 'truth', which is inevitably 'out there' or so they say.
"In no particular order, here are some of the things I heard."
1: You aren't meant to actually live in Byron
You're only meant to use it as a visiting or meeting place. If you stay too long, it can get weird. . . This idea of a 'meeting place' probably has roots in the site of Cavanbah being a 'meeting place' for Arakwal people and other Bundjalung Nation tribes.The extent to which this means you shouldn't live there, I admit, I was never sure. However, for reasons of its sublime beauty and otherworldliness, Byron has always attracted a mix of fascinated and occasionally lost souls.
It is common for visitors to fall in love with the place, move there and think it will fix their problems, then find the paradise is somehow tainted by their moving in.
I also put this phenomenon down to something that happens to the psyche when you live in paradise. Where do you go from there? What do you aspire to? Once you've had your fifth hungover bay kebab? Is this it?
2: Byron was a whaling town and is therefore cursed
It is true that in the '50s and '60s over 1,000 humpbacks were killed in Byron for meat and blubber used in various industries. The industry proved unsustainable as whales take so long to grow to maturity.The humpback population has since begun recovery, but there is a bad vibe around whaling towns, which, according to stoned (and non-stoned) locals, creates a 'darkness' over the town.
Some have blamed the whaling curse for the shipwrecks along Byron, one of which, 'The Wreck' of SS Wollongbar, is now a popular surfing and snorkelling site.
However, most of the shipwrecks were in the late 1800s before the lighthouse was built and predates whaling. So the curse isn't an explanation for the wrecks, but may explain the divorce rate, which is rumoured to be high.
3: Byron used to be really violent
This isn't entirely a rumour. Though the world in general used to be really violent, so may not be particular to Byron.There was a period in the late '90s/ early noughties where hundreds of youth aged 11 to 24 would seriously binge drink, take Es, speed and violently riot with each other. I recall blood-soaked boob tubes and torn baggy trousers clashing with taxis, as empty beer kegs were thrown in feuds between two groups 'homies' and 'skegs' (skaters and surfers, if you want a crude analogy).
It had a hyper-masculine coastal energy resembling 'Puberty Blues' by Kathy Lette. Rumours circulated that sexual attacks were frequent but were kept out of the news so as to not hurt the tourism industry. Without social media, these rumours would never get far.
4: Hardcore music grew there as a reaction to the hippy movement and drug culture
One theory for why this genre got so big in Byron is something like the children of hippies, who grew up in the '90s, became disillusioned by the messages of peace and love wafting across the town's cafes as it did not reflect their realities, especially non-property-owning welfare kids whose parents were passing on the cycle of addictions they'd developed in the '70s.This generation who moved away from the 'sex drugs and rock & roll' of their parents toward Washington DC movement of straight-edge (no sex, no drugs and rock & roll) turned the hippy image of Byron on its head for a while in the 2000s, which was surprisingly refreshing at the time.
5: A television personality known for kissing fish ended an era with a wedding brawl
When Rex Hunt's son's wedding sparked a brawl with Byron locals (involving a stiletto to the head) it became national news. This prompted footy heads from various surrounding towns to catch the train into Byron to fight straight-edge kids.It was rumoured for a while that the cops were going around arresting people for wearing black skinny jeans. After the wave of 'blow-in violence' got so bad it was apparently decided they would close down the railway, leaving no access for the footy heads to get in.
The reduction in transport also reduced liveability for the poorer locals who depended on the train to get around the region and was a catalyst in the irreversible process of gentrification and inaccessibility, which characterise the town today.
Hayley Mary 2022 Tour Dates
Sun 6 Mar - Sweetfest (Geelong)Sun 13 Mar - King Street Carnival (Sydney)
Sat 26 Mar - Offbeat Music Festival (Sunshine Coast)
Thu 19 May - Miami Laneway (Gold Coast)* supporting Holy Holy
Fri 20 May - The Fortitude Music Hall (Brisbane)* supporting Holy Holy
Sat 21 May - Festival Of The Sun (Port Macquarie)
Thu 26 May - Torquay Hotel* supporting Holy Holy
Fri 27 May - Pier Hotel (Frankston)* supporting Holy Holy
Sat 28 May - Forum Melbourne* supporting Holy Holy
