The Industry Commission report on regional development I was carrying had bits chicken sandwich all over it.

There was probably chicken all over the fuselage as well. God, it was rough. Not being a great flier, I all but kissed the tarmac.

DOG

So, this is Lismore…

I returned in early 2002 to acquire a dog. We had been on a family holiday in nearby Ballina, one of our regular sojourns there.

Naturally, Lismore was in flood but we got through, picked up Missy and headed home to Sydney. Sadly, Missy didn’t make it past six. Killed by a car on the infamous Pennant Hills Road.

Then in 2006, we bought an investment property just around the corner from where we had collected the pup.

In 2018, having returned from some years working in New Zealand, we kicked out the wonderful tenant, a single father of five who had been the perfect custodian of the home that would quickly become my favourite place of all the dozens of places in which I have resided.

Lismore was meant to be a quick property reno and flip. But we stayed.

Shortly after I arrived, the Australian Conservatives wanted a candidate for the NSW election.

I put up my hand and had the corflutes done, appeared on ABC radio and garnered several hundred votes on a nil-campaign lasting three weeks.

Some numpty at The Sydney Morning Herald later described me as a “failed candidate”, during an attack on my Pell defence.

Well, failure and success are relative, and I counted as a success my and the Independent candidate’s non-preferencing of the defeated Nats man – a woke, limp bloke with a famous local father. My political objectives were highly specific. And met.

COVID and its tyrannies came and went. In Lismore, we were punished by the Perrottet Government for an extra month of lockdown for having dared to have a low clot-shot take-up rate.

Yes, the State injectables that (apparently) killed Shane Warne.

A COVID criminal, a film crew guy, who dared to travel to Byron Bay unvaxxed, ended up down the road at Lismore Base Hospital. If I remember correctly, some staff refused to treat him.

We should never, ever forget what these bastards did to the innocent during that time.

The waters of the angry Wilsons River infamously came for our house on February 28, 2022.

The first of two floods that struck within three weeks. Our beloved property escaped the floodwaters by twenty metres.

Little tinnies going off to rescue those stranded – including those left to their fates by the selectively active SES – were moored in the waters across the road from us.

We had spent the morning clearing the under-house of valuable books and such. The waters were coming up the street, a street never previously touched by Lismore’s many floods (like 1954 and 1974, the twin benchmarks).

GUSHING

They engulfed cars left parked there by owners who assumed they were safe. The waters were also gushing down the hill through the drain-easement that runs through our back yard. Early afternoon, it looked as though the two waters were going to meet, then engulf us.

But then the rain stopped.

Power was out for a week. We were boiling kettles and charging phones up at the community centre atop the hill, and also at the Carmelite Monastery.

All that remained to come were broken government promises, hideous bureaucracy, charges that those seeking redress were fraudsters trying to game the system, inaction on flood mitigation measures, endlessly slow processes for affected residents, and cute signs on road bridges proclaiming the climate catastrophe.

Family tragedy and now multiple real estate plays have meant that we haven’t spent much time in Lismore since early 2024.

And now it is time to leave our once intended forever home.

The house? An old-time, quirky Queenslander that catches the easterly breezes when on offer. Full of towering ceilings and deft, ornate touches. Tired but classy. Renovated out of the previous owner’s Italianate garishness. The kind of house you want to take with you, wherever you go.

What of the town, a stone’s throw from the Nimbin potheads, the Byron greenie-gazillionaires and the Mullum anti-vaxxers?

Born of timber and dairy, Lismore is now a centre of public sector jobs, mainly. So, a government town. The home of heat and ageing hippies. A rainbow magnet. Home of the Tropical Fruits Festival.

The refuge of the gay blades, especially up on Girard’s Hill, where properties often display, virtuously, signs that read: In this house, we believe in love over hate, hope over fear, truth over lies, science over fiction, democracy over fascism.

DIVERSITY

Well, who doesn’t? Definitions of specific content may differ, of course.

Another version has it: In this house, we believe science is science, love is love is love, no human is illegal, healthcare is a human right, black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, vaccines save lives, facts are non-negotiable, diversity makes us stronger.

Yes, Lismore has its share of low-information, self-important wankers.

Wankers who tick all the inevitable boxes, one by one, and who feel the need to share publicly their irrelevant ideological preferences. I won’t miss these.

I won’t miss our local member, the endless Janelle Saffin, who has been here and about since Moses was a baby in a basket among the reeds.

A former union gal and a talentless junior minister in the Minns Government. She once banned my comments from her Facebook page which challenged her COVID lies.

Ah, good old cancel culture to silence voices contrary to the direction of narrative travel.

We also have here the Deputy Leader of the Nationals (Kevin Hogan).

He seems a good bloke, though trapped in a legacy Party that once defended the regions against urban hegemony but these days simply pursues “funding funding funding” for local “projects” that no one except grant-troughers want. AKA pork barrelling, for which the Nats have traditionally been regarded as best-in-breed.

Yes, it is time to leave Lismore.