Darren Butcher is a fifth-generation Nimbinite who recently sold the Nimbin Bakery after 13 years. Darren sat down with Lilly Harmon to talk about his life in Nimbin, Lismore, a love of sport, banking, sales and baking.

I was born in Lismore Base Hospital and grew up in Nimbin. When I was around six months old, we moved out to a dairy farm on Gungas Road that my grandparents had owned. It had ceased dairying along with many of the other dairies in Nimbin, but my parents continued to farm it while both working other jobs.

Mum was a nurse at Nimbin Hospital and Dad spent many years as a domestic at Lismore Base Hospital.

I had the best cricket pitch among my friends on an old tennis court beside the house. My mates and I were never bored as we had bikes to ride, trees to climb and Mulgum Creek to swim in.

Growing up I was very much into sport. I’d played soccer since I was 10 for Nimbin Soccer Club. I kept playing into seniors except for one year, 1987, I played with Lismore Workers Club in the U19 regional league side. In 1984 I obtained my soccer referee ticket - I was one of the first junior referees in the area.

I went to Nimbin Central School for my primary years, then came into Lismore and did high school at Richmond River High School. Apart from always getting report card comments “Could always do a little better” in my final year I received the Student of the Year award.

I had great dreams of being a policeman and after finishing school. I was sitting in the police station going to a recruiting interview when I read on the pamphlet that you had to be eighteen and nine months old! At that time I wasn't quite eighteen and didn’t want to embarrass myself, so I hopped up and left the station before the interview. I found out later that was the age you needed to be on entering the academy, so in hindsight I would have been fine.

But instead with my resume in hand, I walked across Browns Creek Car Park to the ANZ Bank. I asked if they had any jobs going, and started there a week later. I spent the first years of my working life in the ANZ Bank. I went from Lismore to Tamworth, back to Casino and then Inverell, and did relief in many other branches as well. I enjoyed my work in the bank.

I started dating Tricia Nugent, my now wife, in 1990. Tricia is the daughter of long-term Nimbin locals Bill and Nancy Nugent. When I got out to Inverell in the bank, I guess I missed her, so I went to find her a job as well and she moved to Inverell about three months later and we’ve been together ever since.

In 1993 I made the decision to leave the bank and I had my first venture into small business. I started a sports shop from scratch, a business called New England Sports Warehouse. Inverell is a very sporty town, and still is. I saw a need for greater access to sporting gear in the town. I had never done small business before, but I decided to give that a good crack. We opened the business and then in that same year got married in October 1993.

I had good friends who helped and looked after the shop. We didn't have much of a honeymoon as we had to get back to the shop.

My first venture into small business taught me a lot about the importance of relationships.

In 1994 Tricia got a job managing Stefans back in Lismore, so that was the catalyst for us to move back toward home. It took a couple of months before I sold the business and wound that up.

Upon return to Lismore, I started working for my brother's business North Coast Drinks and Snacks in sales. Tricia & I bought our first house in Lismore Heights in 1995.

I was able to get back into playing soccer and refereeing which I enjoyed very much. I was part of the management committee for Football Far North Coast referees for many years.

In 1997 my brother Jeff decided he was going to sell North Coast Drinks and Snacks so I started looking for another job. He sold in September 1997 at the same time I secured another sales job with Norco in the milk section, and at the same time, our first son Dylan was born.

Our daughter Erika was born in August 2000.

I continued to work with Norco Pauls Milk right up until the Joint Venture split in June 2006. At that time I made a decision to join the Parmalat side of the business.

I continued with Parmalat until 2008 when I was made redundant along with about 20 other middle managers from across the business. Redundancy was definitely a life changing moment because I had engrossed myself so much in trying to make success in the Parmalat business that I hadn’t realised how much of my life I probably missed out on. It was time for a reality check.

I had a couple of weeks off, and then I started working bizarrely enough back with North Coast Drinks and Snacks again with the new owners. It was the same company my brother had sold, but they were now doing more than drinks and snacks. In fact, they were selling milk as well which I was clearly familiar with.

Then an opportunity arose at the end of 2010.

The bakery in Nimbin had recently closed, and my friend was buying the freehold building. He asked me if I would be interested in starting up the bakery if he couldn’t find another tenant? In reality, I was his fallback plan. In February he contacted me and asked if I would reopen the bakery. I was ready for a change so we gave it a crack.

We spent three weeks cleaning the building and had it reopened by Easter of that year with the most basic stuff to get the doors open.

We grew from there – year on year working on making quality products and providing great customer service to the Nimbin community and surrounds. I hope that is what people can remember the bakery for.

Just in the months before Covid hit, we’d kind of gotten to the point where we thought we'd probably done as much as we could do and so we listed the business for sale. Then about three months after we listed it, the pandemic started. I didn't hold much hope of a sale while the pandemic was on.

We had good support from the government and amazing support from the local community in Nimbin during Covid. We were lucky that we were an essential business so we were able to keep trading and government support helped us pay all the staff and keep the doors open.

We learned some very important stuff in Covid, but we most importantly learned how to do things a bit more efficiently. We learnt that we weren’t really a cafe so we didn't need as many seats for people to sit down because we were more a fast food place. We had some basic seating but we didn’t have the floor space or the footpaths to work with.

We came out the other side of it. A couple of months ago, Tiarra who used to work for me approached me and said they wanted to buy the bakery. Not only did she have experience from working with us, but her husband Clinton had worked in the bakery side at Woolworths for many years. We officially handed it over on the first of March 2024, and now I hope that they’re able to enjoy running this business I love so much.

Trish’s parents as well, Bill and Nancy, should be definitely acknowledged because they were an amazing help with us.

Bill, despite being retired, would always help us out with slicing the bread every morning and checking in on everything from time to time. Despite him once being the owner, he never put too much pressure on us. He was an amazing presence, but only fully retired two years ago from being a bus driver.

We wanted to support the community as well with as many charity things and looking after people following the floods. Whenever there was a decent flood, the community gets isolated. We’d make up bread for everyone and keep the community fed.

During the bushfires in 2019 too we supported a lot of people who were losing houses, particularly in the communes up in the hills near where we were. We were feeding the RFS for a good period as well.

Nimbin is a great community and we have very much enjoyed our time there.

I’m not sure what is next, but I am very much looking forward to visiting our son Dylan in London in July this year.