For many in Australia, finding their people, their community, is harder now than it has ever been.

Studies show Australians have less social contact than ever before and are reporting increasing rates of loneliness.

And no, the culprit isn’t just technology. Longer work hours, the crippling cost of living and a decline in the number of friends we make are also driving our loneliness epidemic.

While it may sound obvious, finding people you connect with, who can help you navigate life’s ups and downs, is one important way to stem the tide of loneliness.

Byron Bay and its surrounds are home to a collection of eclectic communities — some small, some large, some not even in the physical world.

How do these villages help the people in them tackle life’s issues, subdue loneliness and give them a sense of belonging?

And is there anything the rest of the country can learn from this mix of friendships?

Communities on the fringe

While our communities may have changed over the decades — shaped by things like technology, urban sprawl and migration — the importance of being part of one hasn’t.

Mandy Hughes from Southern Cross University says finding your village of like-minded people is essential to thriving, but what form those relationships take will differ.

“For some, community will be on a micro-scale and might be made up of family or friends,” she says.

“For others, community is about connecting to a broader social movement, geographic area or like-minded group in person or online.

“Community is not fixed and we can belong to multiple communities at any given time.”

Professor Hughes also points out that for decades “community was about where you live, it was very much focused on geographic boundaries”.

Those words ring particularly true for the residents of perhaps the most recognisable town in the Byron area — Nimbin.

Nimbin was a town in decline when, in 1973, it hosted the inaugural Aquarius Festival. The event is considered the beginning of Nimbin’s transformation to its modern-day form, arms wide open to those seeking an alternative way of living.

Graeme Dunstan is one of the organisers of the event, which was also widely considered a key moment in Australia’s counter-culture movement.

“Nimbin found us,” he says, of the thousands of “radical hippies” and “student radicals” who made the trek to the northern NSW countryside for the event.

But Graeme says the festival was more than just an event; it brought “tribes” of people with shared values together.

The Nimbin that was created after the festival has continued to attract souls looking for a different way of life.

Michael Balderstone, who is the president of the Legalise Cannabis Australia Party, abandoned his career in finance and arrived in Nimbin in the mid-1980s in search of people who “saw it like I did”.

“Nimbin, it’s very tolerant, you don’t get judged, I think,” he says.

“I remember when I first saw hippies just thinking, that’s my tribe, I love these people.”

Nimbin local Jenny Cornish, who was 18 when she went to the Aquarius Festival, believes Nimbin has lasted the way it has because of the strong sense of community.

“It’s always easy to meet somebody on the street … there’s so much tolerance, there’s so much freedom,” she says.

“[We’re] able to do things in a way that suits people here.”

In the wake of the Aquarius Festival, others were drawn to Nimbin to live in “intentional communities” — plots of land that accommodated multiple houses, some with communal areas like veggie patches.

“The communities got together and … they’ve been going 50 years, some of these, so that there’s children, grandchildren [that still live there],” Jenny says.

The staying power of Nimbin and the joy many of its residents share, shows the power, for some, of actively seeking out their people.

In many cases that involved uprooting lives and changing jobs, all in the pursuit of belonging.

Ask Michael, Jenny or others and they’ll say it was worth the leap of faith.

Now almost as iconic as Byron’s fans of alternative living, at the other end of the spectrum are the growing number of influencers calling the region home.

Many are at the centre of communities in the thousands or even millions, but does size equal a greater sense of belonging?

Online villages

Influencers in Byron Bay are a relatively new addition to the region’s melting pot.

Jade Kevin Foster is one of them.

Yet despite the online following he’s amassed (over a million and counting), he describes it as more clinical than communal.

“What you see on my social media, and what you see on the shows that I do — yes, I am very flamboyant and I am extra, but at the same time, I actually am very alone,” Jade says.

“At the end of the day, I can only count a couple of my friends on one hand.

“It isn’t what everyone I think assumes or seems to be.

“It’s quite lonely.”

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It can be easy to look at the internet and social media as the ultimate cause of Jade, and others’, loneliness and lack of real-world connections.

But experts say it’s not that simple.

Social media’s role in our loneliness epidemic is still being understood, but recent research shows it’s not how much social media we use, but how we use it, that could be a problem. 

On this, Mandy Hughes says labelling all social media as bad misses the ways it facilitates face-to-face communities, particularly by people who may feel too shy or anxious to strike up an initial conversation in person.

“A lot of people might actually come together in a physical community, but they may have made that connection through an online platform,” she says.

“Yes, in some ways, we do have an epidemic of loneliness, and people feel more socially disconnected, but at the same time, there are other ways that people can actually come together.”

Even Jade acknowledges that while he doesn’t feel like his followers amount to friends, his online village has led to professional opportunities he’d only dreamt of.

“I get to experience all of these wonderful things and they are amazing milestones that I will never forget for the rest of my life,” he says in ABC TV’s Miriam Margolyes’s Impossibly Australian.

So if it’s not just the emergence of the online world that’s contributing to our loneliness, what else is really playing a role?

For many in the Byron region, but also for many around the country, factors far beyond their control are separating them from their communities.

Disruption from disasters

While there is no universal contributor to our growing sense of disconnection and isolation, structural issues that displace people from their communities shouldn’t be underestimated.

In 2022 the Cabbage Tree Island Aboriginal community, which sits in the Richmond River south of Ballina, was inundated.

Houses flooded as the river, swollen with torrential rain, engulfed the land around it.

Along with thousands of others from the Northern Rivers region, the island’s residents were forced to flee to safety and temporary accommodation.

For many, it would be over a year until they saw their houses again. 

While the future of the community on the island is still unclear, a spokesperson for the NSW government says it’s in conversation with the Jali Local Aboriginal Council about “potential options”.

“A number of NSW government agencies … are involved in considering the future of residential housing on Cabbage Tree Island,” the spokesperson says.

“This includes balancing the need to respect the local community’s connection to country and right to make decisions about their own future, with the considerations of safety and flood risk.”

Residents say the community’s links to the land stretch back to the 1880s, and the cultural significance of it to many who lived there can’t be overstated.

Naomi Moran’s mother grew up on the island.

She says the displacement of the tight-knit community highlights the urgent need for governments to think about the broader social impacts of natural disasters.

“This has now been shut down as a community … our community can’t access the island anymore,” she says.

“I think this is part of a bigger issue and conversation about what happens after a natural disaster and what does that mean for Indigenous people who are still occupying their traditional lands.

“What does it mean for them?”

Naomi’s questions are big and speak to issues facing First Nations communities nationally, as their country changes with the climate around them.

At least one court case underway at the moment may provide some answers about what responsibility the federal government has to First Nations communities.

As well as displacing her family on Cabbage Tree Island, the floods up-ended Naomi’s working life as CEO of the Koori Mail newspaper.

“Unfortunately we lost all of our hard copies of the Koori Mail newspaper,” she says.

“After the waters receded we set up our flood hub here … and there were thousands of people. 

Mandy Hughes says despite the “massive” impact natural disasters have had on the communities in the region, the goodwill and generosity from others in their wake has shown the power of having a village around you.

“I think there can be lots of assumptions about what it’s like, and it might be, you know, everyone who lives there is a hippie or into an alternative lifestyle,” she says.

She also points out it’s not just Mother Nature that’s turned people’s lives upside down.

“I think although it’s an incredibly welcoming region, issues around inequality have certainly surfaced in recent times,” she says.

“But at the same time, the incredible community response [to the floods and housing crisis] has strengthened community.”

Byron Bay Shire holds the unenviable title of having the highest homelessness rate in NSW.

Like the rest of the country, people in the shire are struggling with the soaring cost of living, compounded by a lack of affordable housing and the yawning wealth inequality of the town.

Mark Cameron used to be a tradie but despite “earning quite good money” found himself unable to make his rent and he’s now sleeping rough.

“It’s a collapse of Byron Bay right now,” he says.

“It’s a really serious problem.

“There’ll be more homeless on the street than people owning houses.”

Mark is one of many who’ve turned to the welcoming village of people who support and run Fletcher Street Cottage; a service for those in need of everything from a warm meal to a hot shower, or help accessing services.

He says they’ve become like a family to him.

Mandy Hughes says for people feeling alone, or going through hardship, communities like Fletcher Street are “instrumental” in improving wellbeing by:

“Providing emotional and material support, and strengthening a sense of belonging,” she says.

“Social capital goes a long way by bringing together people with a shared identity.

“And this connectedness can positively impact wellbeing.”