A Byron Bay tour that will change the way you see this coastal location

Ancient beliefs, childhood memories and brutal history collide.

Delta Kay leads a tour.

By Denise Cullen

Updated August 15, 2025, first published August 14, 2025

The breeze tousles Delta Kay's hair as we gaze out over the foaming ocean at Broken Head, less than 10 kilometres south of Byron Bay. The Dreaming story of the local Bundjalung people states that a collection of rocky outcrops here formed when three drowned sisters were turned to stone.

Behind us is a grassy green slope popular for picnicking and whale watching. Kay, a softly spoken Arakwal Bundjalung woman, recalls how she and her siblings used to visit the local shop to buy lollies and grab old cardboard boxes, which would serve as sleds. "We'd run all the way up here and slide down - it was great fun and kept us really busy," she says.

I'm on the Broken Head Aboriginal Tour led by Kay, which follows the Three Sisters walking track through the Broken Head Nature Reserve, as a way to learn more about the area's Indigenous history, culture and lore.

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The roar of the surf fills my ears as we continue to tread the sandy path, still damp from recent rain. When we reach the turning-around point, Kay leans on a guardrail, as if to gather strength, and retells the story of a massacre of her people that occurred nearly 200 years ago.

As she speaks, silver gulls whirl, storm clouds gather and the wind picks up speed, all conspiring to underscore the import of her message. She reveals that mounted police from Brisbane, seeking a man suspected of wrongdoing, came upon a large group of sleeping Bundjalung people and indiscriminately opened fire. They killed dozens, leaving the rest to shelter in rocky coves that embroider the edges of the beaches.

Bush tucker snacks.

"As the high tide pushed them out of the rocky coves, they were just shot at," says Kay. "That's why the southern end of Whites Beach holds a lot of sadness [so] Mum didn't feel comfortable with us going there as young ones."

Kay launched Explore Byron Bay Aboriginal Tours in 2020. "Covid just opened the floodgates - people wanted to connect with country and to start learning the Aboriginal stories about the places they visited," she explains. Her other tours explore locations including Walgun (Cape Byron) and Bangalow, but the Broken Head Aboriginal Tour is her most personal, revealing her ancestors' deep connection to the land.

On the way back, Kay points out tasty native bush foods like pandanus, pigface and sea celery. She then leads us to a picnic table with an appetising display of yet more treats - pink lilly pilly fruits, purple dianella berries, plum pine, macadamia nuts, sour ooray plums, cups of lemon myrtle tea. We throw the scraps towards scrub turkeys that are scratching in the leaf litter. Demonstrating how the land, its creatures and the changing seasons speak as one in Aboriginal culture, Kay points out how the scrub turkeys' colours emerge as the weather cools down.

As I sip my tea and simply listen, I feel an expansive sense of the interconnection of all things, just as it was, and always will be.