Lydia Kindred has lived in the Northern Rivers since 1993 and has strived for sustainable, community-centric and environmental solutions for our region, using her drive and vast creative, professional background to do so, along with just a little bit of the special magic the Hinterland Folk are known for. Read Lydia's story below.

"I was born in Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, as an only child. I grew up in Willoughby. I started in Berala living in a little house that my parents built.

Mum always wanted to go to the North Shore where her Mum lived. So we moved to a lovely old stone house in Willoughby, on French's road, and it ended up years later becoming an art gallery. It was so beautiful. It had this ornate, gorgeous fireplace, with metalwork. It was just a lovely old house".

"We were very working class. We didn't have a lot of money. I was actually born as a single child, but I always wanted to have a sister. So we adopted my sister, but it took 10 years to get the adoption through. So by the time we did, she was 17 months old, and I was 12. So it was sort of a bit of an age gap. We connect now, but in those days, she was very young, and I was on to the next thing sort of thing. But that was all part of the journey. Her name is Cynthia".

"I went to school at Willoughby, Infant School, primary school and high school, Willoughby Girls High. I was very unsporting. But it was a funny thing because I was quite popular. I actually got elected as the sports captain of the biggest sports team in the high school just because people liked me. Evonne Goolagong was in our sports team, she was a year ahead of me. And she was just wonderful. She voted for me and a whole bunch of other people and the girl who became the vice-captain really was resentful. Like how can you be the sports Captain, you don't even play sport. So I had to learn fast to play quite a few ball games and things."

"After school, I had an interesting time because my parents split up. When I left school, I moved in with my cousin and another friend for a while. But my parents split up right at that time and my Dad wanted to go back to where he originated from, and his family is in Bulgaria. So my mum said, You've got to take him over there. You know, you've got to go with him because he was had a bit of Dementia really by that time."

"We'd never gotten along very well. So I said, 'No, it's going to be a real drama'. She went on 'No, forget all that'. "

"But right from the beginning, it was a drama! It sounds terrible, but he was driving me crazy, after two weeks of travelling with him. He was threatening to kill people who were trying to help us. So I just said I've had enough. I'm just going to go back to Australia and leave you to your own devices."

"So he did find his way back to Bulgaria. I started traveling around, my mum sent me a bit of money to keep me going and then I got jobs here and there. I ended up staying in Europe for 17 months. Which was amazing. I left Australia when I was 18. And came back when I was 20. It was incredible."

"It was a wonderful eye-opening experience for me to actually see all the different ways of living. What really blew me away was that in Europe things which were taken for granted, like human rights sort of things, that in Australia were considered really radical and thought 'new' because we were very conservative, and really, very behind the rest of the world."

"I worked in Bavaria for almost six months, in a lovely old German building where I asked the owner not to speak to me in English because she spoke very good English. I wanted to improve my high school German. So I only spoke German to people for five and a half months, which was great, because at the end of it, I went to a wine bar one night and started speaking to a couple of local girls, and had talked to them for quite a few minutes, when they said, 'Where are you from?' And I said, 'Australia', and they said, 'We thought you were local!'

"I lived in Greece for six months, on and off in Corfu, and that was amazing. I broke my back, I fell off a moped and fell over a bridge and broke three bones in the base of my spine. So I had to recuperate there, that was a really interesting journey. Yeah, a lot of wonderful experiences."

"I did go back and see my father in Bulgaria. But that was quite a very extreme situation, where he said, 'Oh, you're here, you can stay forever,' I had dragged a Canadian girlfriend with me who I'd travelled with, and we were both stuck! because when you go in those days, back in the 70s, early 70s, all the money that you have to take in there gets changed immediately to Bulgarian money, and you can't change it back into other money from anywhere else. So we actually took off after being stuck there, for quite a while we took off on the train got down to Sofia, and they said, Oh, no, you can't use this money outside of Bulgaria. So we didn't have anything. We had used up all my money and most of hers, and, and it was like, Oh, no!"

"So then luckily, my Dad found this little traveller's chequebook in the bottom of his bag that he didn't realise he had, that he'd accidentally not given to them. So we actually had to go out to where we were living, staying with him, retrieve that and got out of there."

"It was very scary at the time because everybody wore guns and uniforms. And it was everything was dark. There was not a single colourful thing in any shops or anything. The only pictures you saw were pictures of dead people. They'd have these regular postings of who died recently and they thought we were spies. It was very heavy. The propaganda was really over the top!"

"I'm seeing that with the current Russian situation. Now people go, oh, no, they're fine. I know, the propaganda was so rife, that my uncle and cousins, really believed a lot of stuff that was nonsense about the west, and things they were told about our life.

My cousin took us to a movie one night, that was an American movie, but what they did, (I ended up becoming a film editor, so I know what they did!) is that they cut every bit of humanity out of it and just stump cut all these really bad aspects of life in America of these young kids in a town in somewhere in America, where they were just doing really bad things. And when we came out of there, we knew that it was not true, because we know that life is not like that. You get some people a bit like that. But it's not the norm by any means."

"My cousin was just horrified. she said, 'you poor things, you've got to go back to that' and we said, 'No, it's not like that'. She said, 'Oh, you're just being brave. We know that. It's like that in the West. We're told that all the time that it's really horrific. And we're so lucky to be living here'.

Image Supplied: Lydia at 20 years old. This was taken in Vienna by a photographer friend

Another example was when my uncle said, 'you wouldn't know what this is. He grew some food of his own. This is a potato, and we know you don't have them over where you live. We're very lucky.'

It was that sort of incredible propaganda.

A young cousin had some jeans, you know that he'd saved up lots of money to get these pair of jeans. He told us all this stuff that we knew was not true, but I was afraid to tell him anything different because I thought, 'if he starts questioning, then he might get into real trouble'. So we had to sort of zip our lips and not say anything. So I know what propaganda can be like it can be very intense. It was scary. They were watching us all the time. We felt the eyes on us. We could have driven around in my dad's car, my dad had bought a car from my uncle".

"But they thought that we would do some nasty stuff so they wouldn't let us. So it's interesting, that part of the journey and then in the end, I saw my dad at least before he died, and that was okay. He found his place over there."

"So, then I came back to Australia, and I was a waitress for a year and a half or something. I landed back in Sydney and I thought, Oh, well, I haven't got a qualification, so I'll just work. And then I started going a bit crazy, because my mind was like, oh, no steak and eggs. You know, that's all I could think of, it was terrible. I knew I could do more than that!

"So I went to a vocational guidance person at a Sydney Tech at the time, threw myself at his feet basically said, please help me I need to find out what I should be doing in my life and he said, Okay, do a vocational guidance test. I went back a couple of weeks later, and it turned out it was creative things that I was supposed to be doing. And ironically, the first thing he said to me was, oh, you make a great type of secretary and he said, no, no, I'm joking, that's not your path. "

"But ironically, that's what I've done a lot in my life. It's weird. But anyway, he said, there were three options. So because I'd had quite an up and down childhood, growing up with my dad, who was quite intense. I didn't do as well at school as what I would have liked. He said you can go back and do another matriculation so you can go further in uni or whatever. Or you could do two courses. There's two courses that are available at the moment. One was in Interior Design.

"He knew that there were already hundreds of people who had applied and they had portfolios and so on. And the other one was in film and TV, and I was a TV addict. So I said, okay, that was my only chance. So I applied and I got in, which was amazing. So I really got into it. I got into North Sydney, Technical College to a Film and TV course there and it was wonderful."

"I had people like the man who did all of the camera work for The Hobbit and for The Lord of the Rings. A whole lot of great people, so that was a wonderful year. Then through that I got into the ABC film editing in Sydney. I worked there for five and a half years."

"My partner at the time wanted to do meteorology, and he wanted to go study, the only two places you could do it in Australia was in Hobart and in Adelaide. I didn't want to go to Hobart, I wanted my mum to be able to come and visit occasionally on the mainland. So I said, can we go to Adelaide, and it turned out his whole family lived in Adelaide and hadn't told me, so clearly we were meant to go there."

"Strangely, an incredible thing happened because I went to the head of TV in Sydney, my boss actually, and I said, would I be able to get a transfer to Adelaide? And he said, oh, I don't like your chances. You know, we've got like 55 Assistant film editors on higher duties, as I was doing. I was an assistant, but I was working as an editor at times on higher duties and he said, they've got like, five, you know, so there's very little chance he'll be able to slot into them. So he said, oh, well, I'll call and find out for you anyway.

So he phoned the head of ABC TV in Adelaide and said, 'Look, I've got this young woman, Lydia, who's worked with us for five and a half years' on higher duties, who said she'd like to transfer to Adelaide. And the man on the other end went, oh, that's amazing. I've got a woman called Trisha, who has worked on higher duties for five and a half years, and she wants to move to Sydney. So that was meant to be!

Within two weeks, I'd moved there and she'd moved to Sydney and it was fantastic. I was able to buy a beautiful house there because it was so much cheaper. I bought a house for $32.5k, a beautiful four-bedroom house up in the hills, a gorgeous place. So this was in '75.

I ended up having an unhappy relationship down there. I went travelling in the meantime to Indonesia and Thailand and lived over there for a while in Thailand on Koh Phangan and Koh Samui.

I worked all together for about eight and a half, nine years. I actually did a Communication Studies course towards the end, I asked my boss if I can do it and they said, yes. So I went off into that, but it was a strange thing because I did this course, but when I came back, everybody thought I was a bit too big for my boots because I'd done it.

They were really grassroots you know, you got to work it, you know, you don't go off and try and do some, you know, directors course or something. But ironically they wanted to train me up to be a director, me and a guy that was working there. But at that time I had friends who were all off having a great old time, and here was me slogging it out, you know, late hours working on the news. It was just very late, it finished at nine o'clock at night. And it was a bit of a challenge, you know, and I just blew the whole thing. They said, if you want to be a director, you'll have to do three years of solid religion and sports and at the time, they were the most boring shows you can imagine.

I felt the walls started closing in on me. You know, my Mum was shocked when I said I'd left the BBC. But that's in the end, what I did. Then I got together with a partner that I was with for a couple of years, we went travelling all around Australia and as I said, Indonesia and Thailand.

That was an amazing experience, but then all sorts of dramas happened after that. His brother committed suicide, all sorts of dramatic things happened. In the end, it was sort of like a whole change. I realised I couldn't stay in Adelaide forever because the energy was changed for me. So I sold up, and I moved up here. In '87 I started looking around up here and I eventually moved up here fully in 1989.

When I moved, I was living in my car for a year and a half. I had an old ambulance from Adelaide that was just fantastic, an old EQ Holden.

I decked it out so I could live inside it, travelled all around to try and find my place. I started a thing called the Promised Earth Rainbow Land Co-Operative as a means of getting land with a whole bunch of other people, we went searching around the area but that didn't pan out. We had a whole bunch of lovely young people who really were idealistic. But right at the end, this guy came along with guns and dogs and he totally freaked everybody out, and they all just dispersed. So that didn't happen.

So I went travelling for a while, I went to Ayers Rock because I had a bit of money from selling my place. Came back. Yeah, all these different things happened. Ever since then I've been involved with one other person particularly, who has the same vision of the Sustainability Research Institute, which we set up to buy land and create a model for living more sustainably on the planet."

1993 was a massive year for me, I had an amazing experience. I'd been with a partner since '89 to '93 then we split up, as it was just not right. Then in this year, I set up a thing called the Big Picture Show where we had 2000 people come through, it was a vision for the future of the Byron Shire because I was living in Byron. It was great.

I worked with four other guys, me a filmmaker and editor, a wonderful engineer and architect, organic farmer and someone who ended up becoming a Byron Shire Councillor. At that time I was videoing all the council meetings because I felt I'd gone along to some and had been shocked by the lazy behaviour and apathy.

There were two amazing women on Byron Shire Council, Anne Wentworth and Rhonda Ellis who has worked here at the uni and who lives here in Lismore. Anne Moody's passed away. They were both incredible women who looked at all the papers that had to be looked at all the environmental aspects and would stand up and say you can't do that because of this, this and this, they knew their stuff."

"But all the guys were hopeless. It was really frustrating and I thought I'm gonna video this to show people what is going on. It really changed the way that they were, once they felt that they were being watched. They did pull up their bootstraps, but we were really a bit frightened because these guys were very pro-development, very happy to go Gold Coast to ruin The Bay just go mega you know, have high rises everywhere and really change the whole feel of Byron.

"We did have about 80 or 90 locals who got together at Broken Head Hall one day and asked, what can we do to improve the situation because we don't want it to go that way.

So we came up with three basic ideas, one was my idea with the Big Picture Show,

My friend Dudley, who I've been working with, with the Sustainability Research Institute, suggested that they have regular meetings all around the Shire, in all the halls, where people could come and put their ideas in or work together to actually manifest positive things locally.

The third thing was a thing called the Champagne Campaign at the time, which became turned into Shire SOS, which then turned into Community Action Network, over years, and it was a means of, setting up a template where you advertise in the local papers, which were the Councillor Candidates who stand for these principles: open and accountable government, sustainable development, ecologically sustainable, you know, the ways of using the land, all these different principles, and what we're going to do is look at everyone who's running as a candidate for the next council elections, and we're going to let you know if we think they stand by those principles, and if they would uphold them if they get elected.

So it was really helpful and in the end, we didn't say anything negative about the ones that didn't go that way. But we actually would say out of these 30 people running, we think this 15 you should vote for, to skew the vote more towards a more sustainable future for Byron Shire."

"It worked quite well, we got a lot of good people in and that was a process that we did ongoing for many elections after that. I ended up taking it to Ballina Shire as well and Lismore Shire. So we ended up helping it move in that direction."

I'm actually the Secretary of Northern Rivers Rail Limited, which we established and registered almost two years ago now to bring rail services back to the Northern Rivers. So, what I did was actually set up a questionnaire for all the people running all along the rail line in each council area, to see who would support the rail coming back. That was very interesting.

We published the outcomes of what the candidates responded, some didn't respond, and others had various ideas because the bike trail, the rail trail, is very strong in this region as well and some people feel very strongly they want that.

Now we're open to that as part of our constitution, we're definitely advocating to have both. We believe that the rail corridor is a minimum of 32 meters wide and a maximum of 100 meters wide like in Byron, where there's plenty of room to have both, plus cafes and whatever, you know, we can make it work for everyone.

What has now sadly happened in both Richmond Valley Council (from Casino to Bentley) and Tweed Shire Council (between Murwillimbah and Crabbes Creek) have pulled up their tracks. We now only have Lismore Shire and Byron Shire who are still hanging in there and still have their tracks."

"Now anyway, we did do that process and it did help to a certain degree, people did vote because we know that's a very strong feeling to bring rail services back to our region. So, we did manage to get the numbers to a certain degree on both councils, Lismore and Byron. Richmond Valley forget it, sadly, that was lost and Tweed we missed out by one person. If we'd had one more person, we could have potentially had the rail trail on the side of the tracks and retain the tracks but we didn't quite get that fourth person. So anyway, this is my journey at the moment."

Image Supplied: Speaking with young people attending Splendour in the Grass this year about bringing rail services back to our region.

In that exceptional year of 1993, I actually worked on two other projects. A vision brochure that I created, which was fantastic, because it all fitted together with the Future Byron event we had. BECON created this fantastic 32-page book about the outcomes of this workshop that was done that day. It was great, except it was really big and I thought no one's going to read this and you know, people who are concerned and know about it, of course, they'll read it. They said if you want to do something else that people will read, go ahead.

So I thought, okay, I've got to create a brochure. So everything once again, fit into place.

I approached Jan Barham, who later became the Mayor of the Byron Shire, she didn't know anything about politics at the time. She lived in Marvell Street, and she was a dress designer. I asked her because I knew her and I said, could we use your lounge room to put up butcher's paper with all the ideas that had come out and sort out this booklet. She said, yeah, sure okay, so a whole bunch of us got together and wrote up all the good bits that we wanted to include in a brochure, but we realized it was too much, too many words. It had to be visual.

It was amazing. Because at the time I had this realisation, it's got to be visual. Back then I only knew a few artists, but the one that I thought would be really good, lived out of town. I phoned him up and he said, I only come in once every two weeks, but I'm coming in tomorrow. So it was fantastic. I gave him all these ideas and he drew this fantastic Urban Vision and the Rural Vision. It's a fold-out thing with all the visuals of what could happen in an alternative, you know, wind power, all local. We didn't sadly include the rail, which was a bit sad, but at the time, it was still going. So it wasn't part of the concern. Anyway, that was one thing.

Also, I worked at the Byron Environment Center it was in the little arcade at the top of Johnson Street and it was great.

I met a lot of fantastic people at the time. One thing that came across the desk, that no one really knew what to do with, was that there was this piece of wetland that was next to the Butler Street reserve that was being asked by the government what are we gonna do with it? Acres and acres of wetland. The Netball Association and the Football Association wanted to flatten it and fill it and just make it a netball an extension of their netball, close or fill it in as a football thing. And we were like, wouldn't it be great as an information site, so people could have walkways to walk through the wetlands to see how amazing it is. Because Byron is a swamp basically, it's just been filled in, and it was always a wetland. So I happen to be in the right place at the right time to go fill in this form and I noticed that there had to have an environmental aspect to it. So I really pushed that and we won and we got this land saved.

Then I had all these other things take over my life and then other people took it on. Stuart McConville, who writes a regular article in the number of good times, he happened to be there, and he took it from there to the next step. And all these other people created the walkways, and it's not being used at the moment because it's been affected by the flood but I think we have to get back to having that as a place where people can learn about it. So that was another thing and I also was a spokesperson for the anti-Club Med campaign at the time as well. So yeah, there's a lot of things happening that year and it was meant to be I should be living away from a relationship in a little place where I could just focus on all these things.

Image Supplied: In Casino a couple of years ago, showing people want ‘Real Rail AND Rail Trails

"I did a film from the off-cuts of a beautiful film called Blow Pipes and Bulldozers about the Penang people in Sarawak who were losing their forest. Jenny Kendall and Paul Tate, where she directed and he did the photography camera work with very famous local people. They had the off cuts and a friend of mine, Darwin, who sadly passed away a couple years ago, he wrote a song about this and he said, he needed to get an edited visual to go with the song. I said I can do that. So, I got the offcuts and I made a visual to go with it."

Then I also have co edited all sorts of bits and pieces. We helped Bob Carr bring in 60 new National Parks, and we got him elected, we were sure of that because we did a little ad that once again guided us because Dailan Pugh who everyone knows, he showed me a map of the leftover bits of old growth forest in New South Wales from what we had, to what we had then, which was back in early 90s.

I realised we had to tell people please don't vote for the coalition at the time because they were going to knock down even more. Bob Carr had promised if he got elected, he would establish 60 national parks, which he ultimately did.

I ended up getting all these great images from the Queensland University of endangered species that were going to go with these old growth trees. a piece to camera from Olivia Newton John and we had Kathy Hinkle and Jeff came in editing this fantastic sort of video. Someone from the Greens actually gave $10,000 to us and said, I'll pay for it.

So amazing. I went to the television place here in Lismore where they organised all the ads for the whole of the North of the of the state and we worked out the optimum places for this ad to be shown before the election so that it would get to as many people you know, just before a really good program that people would be watching, and Bob Carr got in in some places with a busload of people in some areas.

So we know we helped him get in, that was a great thing. I've never told him that, but I'm going to tell him that soon.

When I first came up here, I lived in my car around Lismore, and Byron and various places. Then I got together with a partner at the time and lived in Byron, for a couple of years and then we moved to Rosebank, where I took on the Village Journal, the local newspaper, because the editor at the time was going overseas for a year to do a Dictionary of the Solomon Islands language. He needed someone to take it on, and my partner at the time wasn't interested."

"I said, I'll have a go. So we ended up caretaking his property there and I was the editor. I had a wonderful helper who did some typing for me but I basically had to pull it together every month, get the ads, get the information, do all the things and it worked. It was great fun. I did that for years.

I tried to get a lot of information, even for local farmers about you know how to do things more sustainably, once again, with the environment. So that was a great initiation into it. I also did the earth friendly show for two years on Bay FM when it first started. That was wonderful. I really enjoyed doing that with the music that would complement the interviews and the information that I got out there. So that was wonderful."

"Then I ended up getting together with my partner Garth Kindred who I ended up marrying. We went back to the Village Journal when no one else wanted to take it on and we all did it for 11 years together, two lots of five and a half years. I'd already done it by myself for 14 months. Then at the end, I had to take it back again, when everyone stood back and no one wanted to take it on. I said, well, I'll do it and until we could find someone else who would take it on."

People used to call Garth and I the Mayors of Rosebank for a while because we ran the local paper. We were also were on both Hall committees, Rosebank Hall Committee and Repentance Creek Hall because no one else wanted to do it. We were always two of the three, or four people on each committee keeping them both going.

At one stage Repentance Creek Hall actually, they were the others, including Garth, my husband was saying let's sell it and and give the money to Rosebank Hall, which is what you're supposed to do give it to the closest sort of, you know, similar operation going on. I just stood my ground said there is no way you are going to sell this hall.

Image Supplied: Lydia in one of the gardens she has created over the years.

Then we went to dinner at a friend's place or two friends up the road, who he had built this amazing Adobe Pizza Oven and I said, would you be able to make one of those at Repentance Creek Hall because we are so strapped for cash? We can't even maintain the place because there just wasn't enough going on and he said, yeah, sure. This is my wonderful friend Benny.

He set up this whole training, teaching people how to build them and now they have it every month, virtually, sometimes they really don't do it every month during school holidays. It has brought in so much money, they've now been able to do the walls, the floor, new toilets, new ceiling, everything."

Sadly, Garth was diagnosed with Leukemia. He got diagnosed in Newcastle, so that's where he had all the medication that he had to go down there to be in Newcastle where his family lived. So that was good in some ways, but in others, maybe not. He was treated there, over a two-and-a-half-year period. We had to live in Newcastle a lot of the time and Sydney part of the time, because he had some extra bone marrow transplant down there.

So we didn't spend of time here, maybe six months at the time, and then he'd go out of remission and go back down. Anyway, it was very hard. So our place up here, everything sort of got affected the wind, the weeds and house started falling apart and whatever.

But in the end, he passed away, at the beginning of 2015. It was a while ago now but so many people loved him. He worked with a local company Envite which was wonderful because it was it was a community-based not for profit organisation.

They've been taken over by another company but they still have the Envite brand there and they do a lot of bush regeneration work. He was a supervisor for Work for the Dole and Green Core who went out and did great work. They did a lot of work at the local rain forest, Lismore Rain Forest right next to the to the tip. And a lot of things, they built bridges there, they've actually got a Garth Kindred bridge there.

Image: With Macca from the ABC radio program ‘Australia All Over’.

We went to the ceremony that was commemorated, we have Janelle Saffon, and Jenny Dowell, who was the mayor at the time, and everybody was sort of very happy, as he'd been the main person building and he'd had people helping him a bit. You know, he built our house by hand, with no power tools, back in the early 80s. He was very clever. Every room six sided, and every window is diamond shaped. It was this incredible work of art that it was just a creative thing that the everybody who goes there goes, wow.

He was also a great writer and an amazing musician. He wrote incredible songs. I'm feeling bad that I haven't had the time, because I've been otherwise engaged with all sorts of things happening, my sister being ill, the rail and a whole lot of other things happening but I'm determined to get his music out more. And his writings. He wrote a whole series called On common Ground in the village Journal every month, I think there was 36 in the series. It was all about how the common in our lives, like roads and rivers and local holes and things that are all common to everybody, even local clubs and places, where you know, that might not be fully owned by the community, but it's common for people to meet and, and how we use these together. So I'd like to put that together in in a beautiful book for him."

I was a member of a band called Sheryl and the Muffin Tops for four years. But we split up a couple of years ago. We were very eclectic. We did some real rock and rolling things and we did some funny things. We all dressed up in all sorts of garb. I played the Congos and sang and we had Robin, the bass player and Kay, who was our mentor, she knew a lot about the music and musicality, she played the keyboards and sang and Teresa Mason, who, who played the guitar, and she's great as well.

So everyone sang along, and we had a wonderful time, and people thought we were great but everybody had things that were happening in their lives. It was a great experience to be in an all girl band. I loved it.