After founding Echo editor Nicholas Shand’s death in 1996 his business partners, David Lovejoy and Jeff Dawson, along with then editor Michael McDonald kept the fires and ideas burning along with the rest of the amazing, shell–shocked, Echo team. Michael, lovingly known as McDuck, continued as editor, keeping the community entertained with his brilliant wit and acerbic comment. He was succeeded by Hans Lovejoy, David and Wendy Lovejoy’s son, in 2010. Hans has kept the local council on their toes ever since, highlighting inconsistencies, outrages, incompetence, and victories over the years. He is now focussing on the online daily Echo.
For better or worse, I’ve stepped up to take a turn at the helm of the print edition and aim to keep the community’s voice, through The Echo, alive and strong.
The Echo was born in June 1986 out of an era of radical change – the youth of the 1960s and ‘70s were breaking away from traditional expectations, they were marching in the streets against the Vietnam War, they were creating communities in the cities and the hills around Byron Shire, they brought together the Aquarius Festival, they were asking for women’s rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, they were looking at ways to create a better world by creating better communities, more equal living conditions and looking to protect the environment for future generations.
With music, art, ideas, drugs, and fashion, they were turning their worlds upside down, inside out, and trying to work out how to live in peace and harmony.
Byron Bay, with its beautiful beaches and the surrounding hinterland, that had affordable land, became a mecca for people looking to create an alternative way of life. Large plots of land were being sold relatively cheaply by local farmers as the dairy industry had taken a downturn. Following the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in 1973 the Northern Rivers became known as the ‘rainbow region’ – a place of artists, musicians, alternative medical practice and wellness, acceptance, and a place to drop out and take drugs and expand your mind, or to drop in and try something different from the mainstream.
By the 1980s the hippies were starting to come out of the hills, they realised that to ensure that the local Council didn’t pave the way for rampant development, that Byron Bay didn’t become a bonanza of highrises, that the environment they knew was so vital to the future of humanity was protected, that Australia didn’t become an open uranium mine, they needed to stand up and get involved.
The drug raids in the early 1980s were also a rallying point after police with guns were strip-searching people on the side of the roads in Main Arm. There were claims that the police were ‘setting people up’ with plants, and shooting up people’s water tanks. The local media refused to report on the raids and it took three attempts to finally get the obudsman’s department to take action, with some local police finally being held to account for their behaviour.
The Echo was born of this crucible of events, ideas, and community.
The alternatives, or hippies, were creating their own political parties like United Shire, getting active in local organisations like the local fire brigades (Main Arm RFS refers to itself proudly as being made up of hillbillies and hippies!), starting up the Mullumbimby Neighbourhood Centre (thanks mum) and the Byron Community Centre (thanks Jan Dawkins). For Echo founding editor Nicholas Shand (my father) it was a matter of persuading David and Wendy Lovejoy to become partners, and then pounding the streets of the Shire for advertisers and stories to produce the first edition of the Brunswick Valley Echo, now the Byron Shire Echo, that came out on 11 June, 1986.
For the last 40 years The Echo has been the place where the community could debate ideas, a place they could campaign for appropriate development, a place for art, music, culture, and ideas to be shared. The pages of The Echo, both printed and online – it was one of the first newspapers to have an online presence – helped shape the Byron Shire and broader rainbow region into a place where people come to connect, to create community.
The Echo has been key to supporting reform when it came to important societal changes in relation to the environment, supporting the call to save Byron’s precious Paterson Hill, giving voice to the Bentley gas-free campaign, and fighting to stop logging state forests and turn them into national parks. The Echo has supported local organisations who have worked so hard to combat violence against women and homelessness – that has always been a key part of The Echo’s approach to community.
The Echo has always been a keen voice for drug reform and (more recently) challenging unthinking political tribalism, magnified by social media. Alternative energy, sustainability, countering harmful right-wing political extremist views, and fighting for equality are core issues historically for The Echo and in these areas it continues to raise its voice.
As Nicky once said to me, ‘If you can help the person with the least, you are helping lift everyone up’. We live in turbulent times and strong voices for the least privileged, for equality, for the environment, for drug reform, for peace are now vital. The Echo, with the community, will call for justice and peace, and for all communities to come together to create the world as a better place for the future as we celebrate 40 years of achievements and look to what we want to achieve as a community locally and globally in the next 40!
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
