The Road Always Led to Nimbin

I first found Nimbin by accident.

It was 2001. Penelope and I had just walked away from everything — a business destroyed by fraud, five years of work and savings gone overnight, and with it a way of life I no longer had any desire to rebuild. We needed to get out. Not a holiday. A genuine escape. So we bought a tent, sleeping bags, and backpacks, and a hop-on hop-off bus pass that would carry us up and down the east coast of Australia for as long as we needed to keep moving.

Nimbin was just one of the stops on the route. We had never heard of it. We decided to stay for a couple of nights.

We never really left.

The town hit us immediately. Coming from the corporate world — from black suits, silk ties, and the relentless forward motion of building something — Nimbin felt like stepping off a fast-moving train onto a quiet platform where everyone seemed to have been sitting in the sun for years, perfectly content, going nowhere in particular.

Every building on the main street was adorned with murals — vivid, hand-painted, full of colour and spirit. Musicians busked in front of shops. Artists worked in the open air. We wandered in and out of cafes, drank coffee, ate cakes from the local bakery, played chess with strangers, and laughed in a way I hadn’t laughed in a long time. The sun shone. It always seemed to shine.

We were staying at a local backpacker hostel, our tent pitched in the grounds alongside young travellers from all over the world. Every night was a campfire, a game of 8-ball, someone with a guitar, new people with new stories. After years of chasing something and losing it all, this felt like the most natural thing in the world.

It’s hard to explain, but from the very first days, Nimbin felt like home. Not familiar in the way of the place you grew up in. Something else — a sense of belonging I hadn’t felt anywhere before.

Eventually, Penelope had to return to work. We packed up and went back to Adelaide, and I took a job well below my abilities with a company that had once been a client of mine. I hated every day of it. I sat at that desk and thought about campfires and coffee and chess and the feeling of having nowhere to be.

So we made a plan. We spent a year working and saving, and then I bought a 1976 Land Rover Series II, built a simple bed in the back, wired in a dual battery system, bolted in a 12-volt fridge, and as soon as we could, we both quit and drove away.

Life on the road is its own education. We travelled without itinerary — sometimes we worked, picking fruit, taking odd jobs. I spent time as a cook on a yacht in the Whitsundays. We lived frugally and loved it. But every now and then, when the road wore thin, when we needed to stop and breathe, we would find ourselves heading back to Nimbin. It was always Nimbin. Even sleeping in the back of the Land Rover on a patch of grass, it felt like rest.

Then Penelope fell pregnant. In Nimbin, as it happened.

The prospect of a baby, no fixed address, and no reliable income sent us back to Adelaide once more. Our daughter was born, we rented a house in a quiet country town, settled for a while, made friends, and genuinely enjoyed that chapter. But the pull of the road never went away. When our daughter was five, we decided to head off again — this time with a small campervan and a plan to work as WWOOFers, travelling from farm to farm in exchange for food and accommodation.

Life has a way of giving you exactly what you most need, if you’re willing to move toward it.

Our first placement was on a small dairy farm just outside Nimbin. On our very first day back, Penelope received a call inviting her to interview for a position at Southern Cross University — the closest large campus to the town. She went. She was offered a twelve-month contract.

WWOOFing was no longer an option, but the farm where we’d intended to work had an empty house on the property. Fully furnished, sitting quietly in the paddock. The farmer offered it to us, and just like that, we were Nimbin residents.

We enrolled our daughter in the local school. Every morning I drove Penelope to the university, dropped our daughter at school, and then parked my campervan on top of a nearby mountain — the only place I could get a mobile signal — and spent the day building websites for small businesses. In the afternoons I walked into town, sat with people, became a local. For the first time in years, I stopped moving and simply arrived somewhere.

After three years on the farm, we were offered something I still find hard to fully describe.

A colleague of Penelope’s had a small off-grid residence on their property — abandoned, barely liveable, but in one of the most quietly extraordinary places I had ever stood. There was a studio built from light-earth construction, holes in the walls where cattle had pushed through. A handmade yurt with no walls. An open-air kitchen with no services. A composting toilet. A private valley below, a stream running through it, animals grazing across the hillside.

Most people would have taken one look and left. I looked at it and felt something settle in my chest.

Penelope, to her eternal credit, didn’t hesitate. We moved in.

Over the months that followed I patched the studio walls, hung net curtains on the yurt frame, fixed the kitchen, ran a garden hose from the neighbours’ water tank and rigged up a bath and outdoor shower. A year in, I added a micro solar system — enough for a fridge and a few lights. We had snakes in the ceiling and café blinds for walls and open timber decking for floors. We had no television, no news, no noise. What we had was silence, and the sound of the valley, and time.

Penelope and I took up flow arts. We learned to spin hula hoops, to move with fire, to perform. We joined a fire club, travelled to festivals, shared stages with other performers and lost ourselves in the rhythm of it. Something was opening up in me that had been closed for a long time.

With the space and the stillness came a hunger to learn things I had never had time for before.

I studied homeopathy. I completed Reiki training. I took a sabbatical to Chiang Mai and studied Thai massage at the Thai Massage School there. I travelled to Byron Bay to learn Lomi Lomi under Tina Featherheart, whose generosity as a teacher I will always carry with me. Each of these disciplines added a layer to something that was gradually becoming a practice, a way of working with people, a purpose.

Then one day at the Starlight Festival in Bangalow — an alternative health, wellness and yoga festival — I heard crystal singing bowls for the first time.

I don’t have a clinical way to describe what happened. The sound moved through me. Not metaphorically — I felt the vibrations physically, in my chest, in my hands, in the base of my spine. Something in that sound reached a part of me that nothing else had quite touched. I started attending every sound bath I could find. I read everything. I listened and listened and listened.

Around the same time, other things were shifting. I began to feel the energy radiating from people — something I had always sensed but never acknowledged or trusted. I could generate heat in my hands simply by directing my attention there. I started to see auras — around people, around animals, around the landscape itself. These were not sudden revelations. They arrived quietly, one after another, like lights coming on in a house you’ve lived in for years without fully knowing.

I joined the Healing Arts Collective, a small group of practitioners sharing a clinic in Nimbin’s community centre. I offered Reiki and massage from there, and in doing so began, properly, the work that would eventually become Healing Indulgence.

We lived in that off-grid home for seven years. I loved every one of them.

In 2019 my father, approaching eighty, was caring for his terminally ill wife and quietly told me he was frightened about what was coming. That was all I needed to hear. We packed up our life on the mountain, said goodbye to the valley and the stream and the animals and the yurt, and drove south.

I carry Nimbin with me. Not as a place I miss, though I do, but as the place where I became who I am. The stillness of those years, the community, the long slow education in energy and healing and the body’s own intelligence — none of that is gone. It comes with me into every session, every sound bath, every moment of working with someone who needs to feel held.

That’s what ten years in a small hippie town in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales will do to you, if you let it.

Trevor is a sound healer and Reiki practitioner. Together with Penelope, he offers sound baths, yoga, and energetic healing across South Australia and beyond. If you’d like to know more about their work, they’d love to hear from you.