Sunday, July 21, 2019

Byron Bay: The coast of utopia surfer moms influencers

Last week I flew interstate and was lucky enough to sit next to a young mum with a baby and a toddler. The bloke assigned the seat had slid across the aisle into my seat, evidently terrified by a ...


From the looks of Instagram, Courtney Adamo and the surfing mamas of Byron Bay are living the dream. Can it be real?

For the clique of “midtier family lifestyle micro-influencers” based in Byron Bay, to have your life the subject of a Vanity Fair article would be an enticing prospect, but this article is damning.

Courtney Adamo center with Amanda Callan Aimee Winchester Mia Taninaka and Hana Taninaka on the beach
On first impression, Byron looks like beautiful but crowded beaches, high-end stores and cute cafés, quotidian spring breakers, tourist shops and Greyhound buses, linen at a startling array of price points, and nourishing grain bowls sprinkled with petals. The Byron of your digital and increasingly brand-sponsored imagination, however, is all that minus the bad stuff; a carefully curated bank of images designed to stoke your lifestyle longings. (If such are your dreams.) It’s a land of large, “nomadic” “broods” who “find their tribes” on life’s “journey.” Never mind that Australia’s policies on immigration and refugees are draconian bordering on vicious. In this young, mostly white, ahistorical, neoliberal utopia of the imagination, anyone can go anywhere. All you have to do is have a yard sale, hop in the gypsy caravan, point a finger at a map, and take up legal permanent residence anyplace that best showcases your lifestyle.

Joe Gagliese, cofounder of Viral Nation, an influencer marketing and talent agency based in Toronto, couldn’t think of another place like Byron Bay: a cross-tagging, cross-promoting, mutually amplifying, audience-sharing group of friends living, loving, working, and posting aspirational lifestyle content in a highly Instagrammable paradise. “I think that that place, that Byron place, is kind of like one of those unicorn locations,” he says, calling it an “example of the future—it’s either pretty scary or pretty cool, depending on how you look at it.”



Courtney Adamo’s minimalist, Shaker-style kitchen is gorgeous, but you already know that if you follow her. The house—one of the first built in the historic town of Bangalow, New South Wales—might just be the most overexposed house in Australia. With its clapboard cupboards, wooden stools, bulk dry goods in mason jars, Blanc Marble countertops (“slightly more expensive than the Carrara,” she explains in a blog post about her kitchen renovation, “but we are so happy with the decision”), Dunlin Chelsea Pendant Lights ($669 each), SMEG refrigerator ($2,870), Lacanche oven and stove (“range cooker of my dreams” and, at about $10,000, a “splurge”), the kitchen is like a scene out of Little House on the Trust Fund Prairie. Adamo (@courtneyadamo, 250K Instagram followers) is a midtier family lifestyle micro-influencer, which, if you don’t know, is a thing.

Adamo set up her Instagram account in 2011 to share pictures of the kids with her family. She didn’t know it was public until she got her first comment from a stranger. Now that she’s hit a quarter million followers, her settings remain unchanged. She still considers her feed her “personal thing,” but there’s something about the stream of photos—the uniform palette of beige and white, ochre and dusty rose, the coordinated clothes, the styled life, the sponsored content, the kids like modern-day Von Trapps—that looks like a massive ad campaign. But for what? Children? Good genes? Good taste? Good luck? In the comments, her fans want to know how she keeps the place so spotless with five kids in the house. (And it is spotless.) They want to know what product she uses in her hair. (Aveda is a partner.) They want to know where she got that dress, that paint color, those shoes, that life. They want to know her secret.
Byron Bay: The coast of utopia surfer moms influencers