The Misner Factor

Chapter Fourteen

Byron Bay 2003

Situated on the northern New South Wales coastline some 800km north of Sydney, the small country town of Byron Bay is the new hub of the SAE Empire. It’s also where Tom lives now. Here in this once sleepy, hippy surfing town, he’s built his masterpiece – the forty-third member of the worldwide Institute, the SAE World Headquarters and Degree Centre.

“We’d been looking for a house for simply ages”, Janette told me, “and we came up to Byron Bay because Tom had friends who lived nearby. While we were here, we started looking again for some property, and Tom and I found the house that we’re in now. I fell in love with it right away, even though it needed a lot of re-modelling, and Tom, who’d be the first to tell you that he doesn’t normally get excited about houses he lives in, actually liked this one straight away as well”.

“But I didn’t buy it straight away”, Tom takes up the story. “I knew that it wouldn’t sell at the original asking price. A couple of weeks later I bought the house, but didn’t tell Janette. For six weeks she went on at me, ‘You know you should have bought that house’, and, ‘I really liked that house in Byron Tom, you should have bought that’. Anyhow, we eventually went back to Byron with my friends Sue and Michael Hunter, and I was driving in the car so I said, ‘Hey guys, let’s go look at that house, maybe we can peek in the windows or something’.

“When we arrived at the house, Janette was all nervous and said to me, ‘Tom, you can’t just drive in and look in the windows, somebody might be in’. When we got there I got out of the car and the others stayed behind. Suddenly the former owner came out and started talking to me. After a few minutes, I beckoned Janette to come out of the car and the woman said to her, ‘Ah, you must be Mrs Misner congratulations, I hope you’ll enjoy your new house’, and that’s how Janette found out that I’d bought the house for us!”.

And it’s quite a house. It sits several hundred feet up, atop a hillside overlooking the town of Byron Bay to the North. There are 180-degree panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean, and the beautiful beaches of Byron that so attract the surf-dudes and sun-lovers to the area. It’s built split-level, with a huge deck that literally wraps itself around three quarters of the property, at the side of which is an open-air swimming pool designed by Tom, the water seemingly flowing out over the edge of the cliff on which the house sits.

I myself first saw Byron Bay in January 2000, when I drove down from Brisbane as part of the initial research for this book. Tom & Janette hadn’t yet moved in fully, but were still travelling back and forth between their apartment in Alexandria, Sydney just walking distance from Studios 301. The house in Byron is, I think, one of the most relaxing spots that I’ve come across. And not only the house, but the town of Byron Bay itself, with its laid back people, surfy-hippy image and picture postcard shops and houses. In recent years it’s become a haven for the wealthy, and a magnet for young, beautiful bronzed people who like living and playing in the sun.

For many years Byron Bay was much like many any other sleepy country town in Australia, and by the 1950s nothing much had changed since its’ founding nearly a hundred years before. Then Byron Bay was somehow left behind as many larger towns around it like Lismore and Ballina became more built up, the net result being that Byron was left in a kind of timewarp. By the end of the 1980s however, that old-world hippy surf-town feeling was back in vogue, and people began to rediscover Byron Bay and started to come there more and more.

The knock-on effect is that property prices have sky-rocketed, and at weekends and holidays now, the entire area is a hang-out for Sydney’s rich, if not so young and beautiful people, but who desperately wish they still were. They fly up in their hoards to the newly enlarged and massively updated Coolangatta Airport, pick up their enormous shiny four-wheel drive SUVs, and then charge up the newly built two-lane highway for 35km south to Byron, where they have a second home, or a third, or a fourth.

Byron Bay is the kind of place where it’s OK to sit out on a street-side café, drinking Cappuccino coffee and pretend to read the newspaper all day, while in actual fact, you spend most of your time just watching other people, watching you. It also has some of the daftest rules I’ve ever encountered in all my travels. For example, on some streets you can only park your car end in. Never front in, always end in. Or you get a ticket! On other streets – and you have guess which ones they are because nobody tells you – you can only park front in. This, I’ve discovered, is so that the locals can laugh at Queenslander’s (and the odd visiting POM writer!), who, unaware of the Council Ordinance, park any which way they like!

Byron Bay Council is well known throughout Australia as being the most dysfunctional in the entire country. Their town is a newly-found attraction for tourists, which means that the meandering main street packed with cars often grinds to a 10kph crawl or even a stand-still. The Council have now been debating a by-pass for the town centre for ten years, and still haven’t come up with so much as a plan! One councillor recently decided that the town should adopt a more environmentally friendly attitude, and brought the matter up before the Council at a weekly meeting. When, some weeks later, the other councillors agreed with the proposal and put the matter to a vote, the woman who’d originally proposed the change voted against her own proposal!

Then there was the ‘Club Med’ affair. Club Med had made it known that they wanted to open a hotel resort in Byron Bay, something the Council eventually voted against on the grounds that it would spoil the town and bring too many new people in. That same Council recently voted the ground that Club Med were going to build on as: ‘zoned for the development of two hundred new houses’! And perhaps the best one of all… during the initial building process of SAE Byron Bay, the builders were stopped from working by the Council for three months because some palm trees were planted in rows outside the main recording studio. Palm trees, it seems, are not allowed to be planted in rows in Byron Bay!

And simply because it is that kind of a town, it’s managed to retain its’ fair share of artisans, artists and general ‘would-be’s’. There are frustrated musicians, painters, writers, surf-dudes, actors, failed singers and just plain old beach bums. For a town that’s outwardly full of happy, sunshiny people, there are a lot of frustrated angry ones just under the surface. And you don’t have to look too far to find them popping out of the woodwork. It’s a huge back-packers town of course, and the streets are bursting to capacity with tourists, surfers, and the occasional local desperately trying to find a parking space at the solitary supermarket.

There’s almost no crime, the main shops all shut at 9.00pm – all of them! But unlike the nearby towns of Ballina, Mulumbimby and Lennox, which are totally dead, the bars in Byron Bay stay open till 3.00am and are packed. Frankly, it would be the last place on earth I would’ve expected Tom to end up, bearing in mind he’s such a city-type person… or at least he has been up to now. But Tom like all people, has mellowed with age. And in the thirteen years or more that I’ve known him, I have never seen him more laid back, mellow and dare I say it – happy, as he is now.

Byron Bay has undoubtedly changed Tom Misner. OK, age has changed him too. In February 2003, he turned forty-eight, and that’s probably a crossroads in anybody’s life. Tom isn’t the man that I first met and knew in 1990, if anything he’s actually more driven now than when I started writing this book in Sydney in January 2000. But you’d never know it outwardly. Today, for perhaps the first time ever in his life, Tom has found a balance and an inner peace, at home among people who take him for who he is as a person rather than what he has done as a businessman. And that’s definitely done him the world of good. I’d like to think that it’s also helped the people around him who know him so well like Rudi, Mike Brück, Jochen and myself. You simply can’t run your entire life at 200kph twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week – as Tom’s discovered.

Perhaps the most obvious outward expression of this is his morning ritual at what he calls ‘The Breakfast Club’. Leaving home usually not long after the sun rises, Tom drives the 5km into the centre of town from his house, and takes up residence at the café/restaurant owned by the current Mayor of Byron Bay, Councillor Tom Wilson. Here he’ll sit in the sun, read the newspaper, drink fruit juice, maybe eat some toast and idly chat with a small, but select group of artisans that he’s come to know over the last few years. I’ve joined in many times. It’s a very pleasant, gentle way to start your day!

Not that Tom’s lifestyle has slowed to a standstill up on the north New South Wales coast. Far from it. Since coming here in 1999, and buying the house with Janette, they then spent six months having the place entirely re-modelled. And Tom has now invested much of his time and effort in a relatively new venture for him – real estate. The house where he now lives, as mentioned, sits on grounds of about eight acres on the top of the highest peak in Byron Bay (even the local television and mobile telecommunication people have begged him to use his land to position their various aerials and transmitters – all to no avail. Tom doesn’t want his house microwaved day and night!).

In mid-2000, just after the birth of Yasmin their now three-year old daughter, he and Janette moved there permanently. Since then Tom has purchased a fifteen acre plot of land on the main road into town which, he tells me, was once the historical site of the original Byron Bay settlement, favoured because it sits some five meters above sea-level and wasn’t prone to flooding. Some years ago the then owners of the land had tried, unsuccessfully, to build a supermarket and a sub-division for forty houses on it. The ‘far-sighted’ and ‘future-thinking’ local Council had always vetoed such a plan because they wanted so badly for Byron Bay to: “…retain its’ small-town appearance and attitude”.

“I found out about the land through my contacts in town”, Tom smiles wryly. “And basically made the guy who owned the property an offer he simply couldn’t refuse. He was by then utterly fed up with his efforts being continuously turned down, and of course accepted thinking that I too would have the same problems developing it. He obviously hadn’t allowed for The Misner Factor! Having acquired the land, which had one house on it already plus a huge shed, I immediately began the thought process that initially became the project of Studios 301, Byron Bay. Then, walking around the fifteen acres, I had a vision of what I could create here, and in no more than ten minutes I had the entire complex mapped out in my head”.

And what a thought process! Council objection brushed aside, the land became a construction site. In just over a year of planning building, toil and effort, an army of constructors have literally hewn from the bush an entire complex of recording studios, editing suites, accommodation blocks, classrooms and offices led by Ian Jones, Tom’s indomitable Building Foreman, and his ‘gang’. By the time of the official opening on 25 July 2003, the facility will be entirely self-sufficient with its’ own power, sewerage, water and security. It’s the latest addition to the SAE Empire – the new SAE Institute World Headquarters, Byron Bay.

“SAE Institute has been the largest education facility of the kind on earth for a number of years now”, Tom proudly boasts. “But this… this is something else again. This is the largest single complex of its’ kind to be found anywhere on the planet. Students can come here, live in their own custom-designed living quarters, work in audio engineering, multimedia or digital film and attain Bachelor of Arts Degrees, and now even Masters Degrees in facilities that are second-to-none.

“We’ve had a ‘no-expense-spared’ policy with the World HQ here in Byron Bay right from day one. So much so, that in places we’ve gone two or even three times over the Councils’ required specifications for safety. I had one safety officer up here recently, quite happy to sign us off saying that we could support a thousand people on this complex if we wanted to! The facility will have cost in the order of US$20 million by the time it is ready to open its’ doors to the first students in October 2003”.

What Tom doesn’t mention, and what the records should and must show, is that the entire project from conception to completion was designed entirely by Tom Misner himself! No architect has set foot on the site. The whole project was designed firstly in Tom’s head, and then in conversation with Ian Jones and Gary Fardon his Chief Builder. The entire site was then handed over to the workers themselves with constant supervision from a Structural Engineer. “I may not be a qualified architect”, Tom admits, “but I’ve designed and constructed so many recording studios and other buildings now, that I know as much if not more about this particular aspect of the trade than any builder or architect”.

The World Headquarters is by any standards, an impressive sight. There are eleven main recording studios, five of which are surround rooms. These have consoles ranging from the new SSL 9000K XL, to a Neve VR72, two TLA all-valve consoles, an SSL 4000 G+, a Neve 1081 (a classic console built by Rupert Neve himself, purchased by Barry Nagel for Festival studios in 1973. Tom once worked for Barry Nagel and even spilled Coca-Cola on that very desk as a junior engineer!).

Then there is the fully re-fitted Neotek that was once used to record some of ABBA's greatest hits, and originally housed at Soundtrade Studios in Stockholm (now Studios 301, Stockholm). In some of the smaller rooms are to be found Yamaha DM2000s, Digidesign Control 24s, a Digidesign ProControl, Mackie D8b, several Yamaha O2R96s and a Behringer Euro9000.

In the three main video rooms are AVID DS and Final Cut Pro systems, all ready for High Definition with proofing and vectorscope screens. Then there are the 96 additional Apple G4 dual-processor computers, running ProTools, Logic, Steinberg SX & Nuendo, Final Cut Pro, AVID Xpress, Shake, Maya and Cinema 4D. There are also ten PC workstations. Every computer in the complex is individually linked to a cluster of Apple Xserves via Gigabit Ethernet. The central computer room houses a quite staggering 6 Terabytes (Tb) (that’s 6,000 Gigabytes!), of storage space.

When students come to Byron Bay, up to sixty of them will have the opportunity to live on-site at the complex in one of thirty double rooms. If they want a room to themselves then that too can be arranged, but they have to pay a little more. Then there is the ‘elite’ accommodation level where students can be housed off-site, paying rent in the town of Byron Bay itself in one of several houses Tom now owns. The main student common-room facilities include a fully fitted kitchen, cable television, computer workstations with free broadband Internet, and various games facilities such as a pool table, table-tennis and Playstation 2. The students are also provided with laundry facilities for their washing.

In the main reception area of the complex is an additional eating and seating area for 80 people. This is the restaurant and café area which have fully commercial kitchens attached with enough cooking facilities to feed much of Byron Bay! Just beyond this is the student equipment ‘shop’. Here students present their coded ID cards to a store man who scans the students’ records and supplies them with the microphones, cables, headphones whatever gear they need up to, but not beyond the point of their current learning ability. There’s also a small commercial shop where students can purchase items such as batteries, CD-Rs etc.

There are parking spaces for 210 cars on site and several bike racks for those who prefer bicycles. Tom has even purchased some bikes that the students can rent for a day, a week or the entire time they’re at Byron Bay if they like. He’s even thinking of putting a couple of surf-boards in for the students to borrow! In the grounds of the complex is the re-furbished main house (the one that was originally on the site when Tom bought it), and this is the home of Roger Cotgreave and Anke Bueter who are responsible for security. In addition, the entire complex has dozens of the very latest digital motion-sensor, infra-red cameras, as well as patrolling security staff around the clock. Indeed, Byron Bay will be the first ever SAE that never closes, it will be open 365 days a year!

Naturally, Tom has also built a studio and an office for himself on the site, and he informs me, he will for the first time in many years, be teaching again. “I like teaching, and to be honest I miss it. It’ll remind me of my early days at SAE!”, he quips. There are eight main classrooms, several of which can seat a hundred students or more, and there are various smaller more intimate lecture rooms and demonstration areas. “This is the vision of SAE as I always wanted it to be”, Tom adds. “Here, we’ve been able to create an almost perfect environment for teaching audio engineering, multimedia and digital film”.

It’s certainly impressive. I wish SAE had looked like Byron Bay does when I was studying and later teaching there!

This chapter has been re-produced here from the book:
'The Misner Factor - The Official History of SAE Institute'
by
Robert Charles Alexander
ISBN 0-9545163-0-3 SAE Publications Publ. 2003

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