After the clusterfuck that was Resilience NSW in 2022, premier Dominic Parrottoe recognised the need to face up to the wet future, especially for the Archipelago of Byron Shire.
The premier-for-life, a fashion imported from China and accompanied by large men with guns, arranged for Buoyancy NSW to be set up for water-treading locals after all the viable real estate development opportunities had been shuffled off to Liberal Party mates.
The new government agency proved phenomenally successful, especially in providing swimming lessons to the accompaniment of disco beats. Private enterprise also played its part with, for example, the Mullumbimby Woolworths chaining up the nearby floating rescue pods to its supermarket yacht, and offering dispossessed residents a ten per cent discount on sliced cheese, brought all the way on wind-powered barges from the last remaining dairy farms in the Himalayas.
The former land-bound Byron Shire found itself with more money than it knew what to do with, apart from snorting some of it up in powder form on glass-top coffee tables in the Station Street compound. The new Archipelago required no roadmaking and no pothole-filling, and bin collection was arranged by dolphins that had some secretive underwater project in mind.
Councillor Duncan Dey, a man who knew about water and the fact it ran downhill, was appointed Chief Aquanaut. He introduced a cost-effective island-hopping ferry service and floating tennis courts, a pet hobby of his inspired by years of lobbing back and forth urgency and rescission motions among councillors chiefly interested in keeping their seats warm during torrential downpours.
Some of the famous Byron traditions continued in renewed forms. Airbnbs became Seabnbs. Drumming circles were performed in underwater capsules, much to the delight of residents who strangely had no interest in loud drumming. The Hemsworth Museum of Curiosities featured an exhibition of taxidermied unrestrained dogs that drowned in the deluge of 2023, and that was visited daily by relieved wallabies and nesting seabirds.
Up in what was once the hills, the last of the 1970s new settlers elaborated upon their conspiracy narratives and posted them to Wetbook, the social media platform that took over from the bankrupt Twitter and the Metaverse that disappeared up some cosmic rectum, not accounted for by the lyrical musings of Brian Cox. The NSW Police Marine Force decided not to investigate the settlers’ crops when they realised they were often guarded by meth-enhanced bull sharks.
Apart from the climate emergency and the welcome interventions by Buoyancy NSW, life in the Byron Archipelago continued much as it always had. People laughed, people cried, people danced, and others had scars on their hands from trying to open oysters with dodgy knives.
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