CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
After 6 months of living in Byron Bay, the daughter of a prominent Brisbane legal practitioner is now using Aboriginal terms of reference to describe her extended family.
The 25-year-old Xavier Rudd enthusiast is not big on revealing too much about her privileged upbringing other than the fact that her family still live in the same place they always have. Ascot, QLD.
After landing a new a job selling Balinese-made jewellery at the weekend markets on Butler street, Chloe Clayfield-Smith was asked by a fellow employee what her ethnic background is.
“I couldn’t tell you. My mob are all up north, in Jagera country” she says, while not specifically staring that she is in no way of Aboriginal heritage.
When pressed on the topic, Chloe reveals that her family name is ‘mostly Irish convict’ and that who knows what else might be in there.
Like many Gen-Y lefties, Ms Clayfield-Smith takes pride in her ability to hold a conversation with Aboriginal people, while also unnecessarily burdening them with her contrived blackfella lingo.
“They a deadly mob up there” she reveals, while trying desperately to not reveal the role her dad has played in contributing to the skyrocketing incarceration rates of young men of colour in Queensland’s South-East corner.
Chloe is one of the many expatriated city youths that make up 60% percent of the Byron Bay population – and like most, she hasn’t relocated there for work.
She believes the faux-hippy lifestyle of tourists has created a damaging sense of entitlement in the community.
She says it upsets her as a resident who knows feels comfortable enough to call Byron home, after speaking to a ‘traditional owner’ man at the pub on Sunday – she now also is quite sceptical of modern medicine.
“People need to do their research,” she says, also failing to mention that both of her sisters are practising GPs.
