ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the development, social and environmental impacts of festivals, come together and culminate in one town, Byron Bay, where festivals have been particularly large and conspicuous. Festivals have been one means through which Byron Bay's identity as cultural mecca and 'alternative' tourist destination in Australia has been created, yet it has paradoxically brought intense commercial pressures to bear on the town. Byron Bay cultivated a reputation as a weird freaky place where diversity and tolerance ruled, and festivals found a natural home: a town where festivals anchored the development of a nascent tourism industry, focused on surfing, backpackers, dance parties and beaches, a parallel to Goa in India and Koh Samui in Thailand. It concerns not just the impact of specific events, but the wider transition of a town from alternative haven to a fashionable place where people now worry about house prices and newcomers.
