The village

Where Billen sits, what's growing back, how people live here, and what needs doing. The honest version, including the parts that aren't postcard.

The country

Mt Warning is the eroded core of an ancient shield volcano. The caldera that surrounds it — one of the largest in the southern hemisphere — is a ring of escarpment about forty kilometres across. Billen Cliffs Village sits along the western rim, on the slopes that fall away towards the Richmond River.

This is Widjabal Bundjalung country, and has been for tens of thousands of years. Two possible meanings of Billen have been given by local Aboriginal people: flat top mountain, and the place where the parrot landed. The land was cleared for cattle in the nineteenth century, before Billen Cliffs was conceived a hundred years later.

Surrounding it are Border Ranges and Nightcap National Parks, fragments of world heritage rainforest, and stretches of state forest. Within the village, after four decades of regrowth on cleared paddock, there is mature wet sclerophyll, regenerating rainforest, dry ridge forest, and grassland. There are also foxes, wild dogs, cane toads, and weed species that arrived with European settlement and have not left. This is a working landscape with aspirations of becoming a sanctuary.

A wide view from Billen Cliffs Village across the surrounding country — bushland in the foreground, rolling forested ridges receding to higher ranges on the horizon under a pale sky.
Fig. 01 The country around Billen — bushland, ridges, ranges, the Border Ranges National Park to the west.

The village

The strata covers 800 acres. About 750 of those are mapped: 230 in 115 individually-titled lots of two acres each, 200 in hamlet common areas, 20 set aside for shared commercial use, and 300 in reafforestation and conservation zones. The remainder is roads, easements, water infrastructure, and the shared buildings.

Billen Cliffs Pty Ltd was formed in 1982 by a group of people interested in rural living, affordable owner-built housing, and putting trees back on cleared land. The strata title was established in 1990. The arts and crafts centre and community hall went up around 1996. Since then most of the lots have had houses built on them, owner-built in many cases. The variety is part of the character. Some lots are still bare.

The infrastructure that the village depends on — dams, water lines, roads, and the shared buildings — is now thirty to forty years old and showing it.

The Community Hall at Billen Cliffs — a long weatherboard building with corrugated iron roof, raised on stumps over a sloping site, with deep verandas and bushland behind.
Fig. 02 The Community Hall — one of the shared buildings, around thirty years old.

How people live here

About a hundred households live at Billen. Most homes run on solar power, although a small number are on the grid. Many residents grow vegetables, raise chickens, keep bees, build with timber from the property. The skills present in the village include carpentry, solar electrics, water systems, gardening, music-making, writing, teaching, and various healing practices.

People here drive slowly because the road is shared with wallabies and children. Many households grow without agricultural poisons. The village prefers that cats and dogs are left at home.

The village is not a commune. It is a strata title with 115 individual titles and shared common property, governed by an Owners Corporation under the Strata Schemes Management Act. Households disagree about plenty. Shared decision-making is sometimes useful and sometimes laborious. People mostly look out for each other, in the way of any village.

Three wallabies in a Billen garden — a mother wallaby with a joey in her pouch, and a second wallaby beside her, all looking toward the camera among ferns and shrubs.
Fig. 03 Wallabies in a garden at Billen.
An internal road at Billen in early summer — a dirt road curving away under a canopy of jacaranda in flower, violet blossoms scattered across the road, eucalypts and bushland on either side.
Fig. 04 An internal road at Billen in early summer, jacaranda flowering.
Sunset over the ranges west of Billen Cliffs Village — a fire-orange sky streaked with cloud, dark silhouetted ridges receding into the distance, and a leafless tree standing in the centre against the colour.
Fig. 05 Sunset looking west from the south valley.

The work

The land needs ongoing work. The regrowth needs weeding, planting, and time. The shared buildings — the Community Hall, the Social Space at the Coffee Club, the Arts & Crafts Centre, the Workshop, the Machinery Shed — need repairs and renovations. The dams are choked with weed and need clearing. The roads need maintenance. Some of this is done by residents. Some is paid for through strata levies and contracted out.

A programme is in development for visitors who want to spend a week or two contributing to this work, billeted with residents who know what they're doing. Skilled trades are particularly welcome. So are people willing to learn.

Continue

Seven more pages. History is the long version of how the village came to be. The map shows it spatially. Properties is the shopfront. Stay is for short cabin visits, Visit is the working programme. Bylaws and strata is reference material. Contact is a directory.