Where I live, in Byron Bay, cleaners charge up to $70 an hour. My cleaner has just raised her rate to $50 an hour and about $60 seems quite normal.

To put this in context, a friend has just been offered a role in comms and research, hourly wage $40. Childcarers, $22 an hour.

I say this not to whinge – although my first instinct is to want to rail against it: look at how little childcarers are paid! And what about nurses! And teachers! – but I’m more chuffed for cleaners than I am slightly broken by how much I pay to dodge scrubbing my children’s grubby dirt ring from the bath.

It feels like a mostly unpleasant job is being recognised for what it is – hard and unsavoury work, very often done by women who are loaded with barriers to other career paths. Being a cleaner comes with a social stigma, and in a country where domestic help is rare beyond home cleaning, they are housemaids we choose not to label that way. Anyway, like waiters, whose wages go up and up, cleaners are almost as rare as hen’s teeth in a post-Covid, economically confused holiday town.

So, I report all this in observation but also in reverence for the verisimilitudes of a planet, a society, a culture in flux. For a Byron that, too, is newly attached to its real estate perversion (hence the cleaners) but also tightly tethered to something far deeper, a power that lives beyond the liminal, winding its way through the flows, currents and patterns, around the ebb and dance of nature’s rhymes.

The Bay I know is not the Bay you know. Nor is it the Bay your parents knew or the Bay your children will know. It’s is, like us, forever in motion, shifting like the sandbars that have come to flavour its current surfing fame – or perhaps that’s the fame that came before its celebrity infamy.

As Steve Shearer writes in his perspicacious review of Tricia Shantz’s Neverland, Byron has been many things since sedimentary layers at Broken Head were formed up to 405 million years ago. Mercurial primary produce prices saw a buttery and abattoir come and go and then come again – and whale hunting had its short, bloody and profitable moment in the Byron sun. Magically and improbably, its sand was heavily mined after it was found to contain minerals that the US needed in its space program. Stardust to stardust.

With each iteration of a place and a region – and a world – in neverending movement, the push and pull of celebration and detraction, of loss and love, of boom and bust, will forever shape our lives.

I read, in Clover Stroud’s brilliant book about motherhood, My Wild and Sleepless Nights, that nothing is set in stone, apart from the love she has for her children, which is carved into rock. I feel the same, and I’d add that respect for one another (be you animal, mineral, vegetable or sprite) has to be up there, close to that granite truth, too.

Cleaners will charge what they can now, which will not be what they are able to charge in the future. What can’t be negotiated and must be fought for, is the life force that exists far beyond us and our whims, far beyond all we see and all we judge. That, simply, is not for sale.