This surfing life

Surfing at world renowned Angourie on The NSW North Coast Photos by Andrew Quilty

Nick Carroll

Albe Falzon, creator of the classic surf film, Morning Of The Earth.

For generations it’s been known as a goat track, but the Pacific Highway is no longer such a thing. North of Raymond Terrace, the highway sort of settles itself. Then it takes off in a series of vast, streaming 21st century curves through the valleys beyond Karuah and past Taree, drawing the eye away from the surrounding country and along its clean hard lines, presenting the coastal towns in green and white highway typography: ‘Seal Rocks 28’, ‘Old Bar’, ‘Grassy Head’, ‘Scott’s Head’.

The highway’s lines are hypnotic; it’s easy to stay on cruise control and fly past those turn-offs. But for thousands of surfing’s hard-core practitioners, they’re impossible to ignore. For them and for me, the little towns and their surf spots hold deep memories of waves ridden, surfboards broken, and hair-raising goat track hell runs after cyclone swells.

As I hurtle north through those new curves, boards in the back and watching the speedo, it strikes me that those towns and their changing relationship to the highway seem to trace surf culture’s own extraordinary shift. In the past 35 years, it’s swung from slightly dangerous, magical, hostile post-boomer youth cult, full of mysterious allure, to a mainstream recreation, partly nostalgic, democratised by time and wealth, and made safer for all concerned. But, in the process, what of its mystery remains?

Surfing in Australia is as old as Federation. For 60 years it played a bit part in the great Australian coastal romance, epitomised by a bronzed Aussie in a Resch’s ad, or a surf club member whose big wooden craft took up one of the gear shed’s racks on weekdays. There were few dividing lines; girls were as welcome as boys, and Freshwater girl Isobel Letham became the nation’s first surf school instructor. The beach was Australian democracy in action. A ‘surfer’ was anyone who went into the waves, riding in on body or board or surf ski, at play along the ‘Australian Riviera’, as the postwar newsreels of the 1950s so gushingly called the stretches of coast near Sydney and Coolangatta.

Then came the teenaged baby boomers with their lightweight foam surfboards, and the word surfer began to alter and refine its meaning, as the kids of the 1960s abandoned the surf clubs, got hold of cars and took off up and down the coast with just one goal: pleasing themselves. Albe Falzon was one of those kids. He left home – a block of units at The Entrance on the NSW central coast – at the age of 15, basically running away to become a surfer.

Today Albe lives in a farmhouse at Eungai Creek, a half-glimpsed turn off the highway not far south of Scott’s Head. He bought the property with some of the money from the sale of Tracks, the anarchic surf magazine he started in 1970 with John Witzig, and film producer David Elfick. “I’ve had a lot of surf lately,” he tells me when I call in September on the way north. “Crescent Head all the way up to Valla – it’s a nice place to hang during winter.”

In the 1960s, he and his teenage mates saw Crescent as the surf trip. They’d just strike out, up the Pacific Highway, infected with salt water and some half-felt idea of freedom. They’d weave their way up along the goat track, sleep in an old shed next to the camping ground, and ride waves at the point until it was time to head home. The drive seemed to take forever, but Albe says, “it wasn’t unpleasant, just not as fast. The journey was the thing for us. Driving along the old highway was part of that.”

A job at a photography shop led to work at Sydney’s Surfing World magazine, then to Whale Beach, where Tracks set up house. “It had a kicked-back country feeling; everyone was friends in the water. You could wander up to Barrenjoey by yourself … it was like being on holiday.” Tracks gave Elfick and Falzon a platform for the launch of their first big surf movie. “One ocean once covered the world,” said the posters. “It was the … Morning of the Earth.”

The movie has since become an icon, dislocated from its origins by time and nostalgia. But what was Albe really recording? In Morning Of The Earth, nobody says a word; there’s no need. The surfboards are suddenly short, slashing, alive; the waves, off the NSW north coast and Oahu in Hawaii and the still-unknown Bali, are hollow and glowing blue-green. Freed of its bronzed Aussie legacies, in the hands of wild boys like Michael Peterson and Terry Fitzgerald, surfing had suddenly become electric, overwhelmingly intense. It wasn’t a romance any more; it was a passionate affair.

My brother and I and our friends devoured that movie. We bought the soundtrack album and listened to it for hours, replaying the sequences inside our heads, trying to grasp the movement of board and body against moving water. Once in the water, we re-enacted the movements for hours, endlessly, ’til our faces were half-burned off and our chests bled from wax rash. We locked out the adult world and feasted on this magical unknown thing that was ours.

In the late 1970s, the Morning Of The Earth grommet generation turned 18 and went feral. Boardriding clubs, all male, sprang up in odd imitation of the surf clubs they’d affected to despise, and laid claim to the sandy little city-states between coastal Sydney’s numerous headlands.

Unbeknownst to the crowds sunning themselves on the sands, the surf zones became brutal meritocracies, governed by elite surfers – the fastest paddlers, the quickest responders, the hardest fists. They dictated the Rules that nobody on land could possibly have understood: Don’t drop in, Stay in line, Locals run the show.

It was classic, hilarious, vicious tribalism, and it must have been terrifying at times for strangers who strayed onto the wrong turf at the wrong moment: ‘kooks’ or ‘rubbernecks’, to be cat-called or otherwise ejected. These were the years when women left the Australian surf. Pam Burridge, one of the few who stayed and prospered, did so because she was too young to be noticed: “I think they all thought I was a boy,” she told me, many years later.

In some areas you’ll still find traces of the old hard logic. On the way up the coast, I veered off the highway past Bulahdelah to surf Boomerang Beach, that sea-change paradise just south of Forster. Boomerang is ringed with holiday houses rebuilt to suit wealthy Sydneysiders, but the local surfers are the tradies who’ve done the rebuilding.

One afternoon the surf picked up, and the wind had swung to a clean angle. Greedy as ever, I invaded the locals’ turf – paddled further out and deeper, taking and holding position for the next big one, instead of doing what I knew was right, staying in line and giving them space. The big one came, I took off and two locals ‘dropped in’ on me, forcing the wave down and riding clear with a laugh. Later I got in and found my back left tyre flattened. Suck it up, I thought; you broke the Rules.

But despite the Bra Boy mythology and the tattooed love boys of Home And Away, the old hardness in surf culture has been largely washed away by a bigger wave, the same wave it first caught back in the 1960s: population change. Australians have aged; the rogue young men replaced by backpacker surf-school graduates, sea-changers, parents, grandparents. The boardriding clubs are run by fathers and mothers, the same ones who run the footy and cricket clubs. Surfboards have grown to fit the change, larger, wider and easier to use. The meritocracy is largely a democracy again. Surfing’s no longer a secret you’re keeping from the grown-ups – nowadays the surfers are the grown-ups.

The most recently published surfing book in Australia is Taking The Drop, an account of four Sydney northern beaches mums who’ve rediscovered themselves in the thrill of the waves. Mums! Fantastic! I sent one of the authors, Sheree da Costa, a congratulatory note and she came back: “We’re a bunch of middle-aged klutzes – but we give it our best shot.”

That same wave of change has swept through and over the magically rendered settings of Albe’s movie. One of Morning Of The Earth’s most romantic and compelling sequences involves David ‘Baddy’ Treloar. Baddy is captured preparing a new surfboard, applying the sanding machine to its curves in a sylvan outdoor setting before racing out to surf Angourie Point on his amazing magical craft. Back then Angourie, a few kilometres south of Yamba, was the sort of place where you could sand down a surfboard outside your shack and nobody would blink, if indeed anyone was around to notice.

It’s still a small town today. But there are notable differences: particularly the large, intricate house near the corner of Bay Street, set well back behind copper gates and rising in ranks up the hill toward the point. It’s the finest piece of real estate in 100 kilometres, and the fact that it belongs to Gordon Merchant, the reclusive co-founder of billion-dollar surf brand Billabong, is a hint about the oddest transition of all: surfers haven’t just grown old, they’ve become rich.

An hour up the highway from Angourie is an old rural industrial town that more than any other place on the coast has been redefined by surf culture and the sea change that swept along in its wake. Gary Timperley is third-generation Byron Bay. His grandfather Harold moved to Australia from Derbyshire in England in 1937. A couple of years later, Harold bought a piece of land on the northern corner of Jonson Street in Byron and set up a motor garage. His son Graeme followed Harold into the mechanic business, and Gary and his brother Mark were set to follow Graeme.

But Gary could do something no Timperley had done: surf. Timpo could do mind-boggling stuff on a surfboard. I once watched him, during a competition at Bells Beach, ride up and over a falling lip and down the half-hidden slope behind the breaking wave, before banking his board at terrific speed and riding back over and onto the wave face. Kelly Slater and all, I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone do that since. In 1984, not long after Graeme died, Gary came back from a desultory year on the pro surfing tour and began thinking about his future. Being a mechanic wasn’t first in his thoughts. His brother-in-law, an accountant, suggested starting a surf shop where the garage stood. “He reckoned we could do it if we sold three or four pairs of boardies a day,” says Timpo. “To me that sounded like a lot.” Then Byron changed. John ‘Strop’ Cornell bought the top pub and there was talk of movie stars in town.

The shop boomed. “We were lucky. Things were growing. Even when Keating was talking about the recession we had to have, me and Mark were looking at each other and saying, ‘What recession?’” They added more shops around town, each with a different spin: a Big Kahuna for the older demographic, fashion and streetwear for the tourists, a Billabong outlet for backpackers keen on collecting some Australian surf culture.

A year and a half ago, Gary and Mark sold out to Billabong for several million dollars. At 53, the apprentice mechanic now gets to spend his time surfing with his 12-year-old son. He thinks there’s been a 50 to 75 per cent increase in surfing numbers around Byron in the past 30 years, a figure that seems to match Australia’s general population curve.

But he’s philosophical about the changes to his home town and all the other spots off the highway that move closer to the city with every stretch of divided road. “Change,” he says, “it’s not going to stop. Yamba, Scott’s Head, they’re all moving on now.”

What’s left of those times? Albe’s movie has been touring cinemas across Australia this summer, with live renditions of the soundtrack from Brian Cadd and Tamam Shud, packing in thousands of aging surf-nostalgia buffs and hipster kids looking for an alternative to surfing’s modern pro-athlete image. Whale Beach, where Tracks once did its pasting up on the wooden floor of an old beach house, is now a realm of glittering prizes – vast glass-and-steel holiday palaces for those who can’t quite buy at Palmy.

In October, I took a French film director down to Whaley’s north end to check out a possible location for her next feature. She looked at the ocean, then turned back toward the glittering prizes and swiftly dismissed the possibility with a shrug: “Too ... bourgeois.”

Surf culture’s not magical any more; it’s too well known for that. But the actual movement and act of riding a wave still remains a small, graceful mystery. It baffles me as much as it ever has. I’ve done it quite literally more than a million times and I still don’t quite understand what occurs when I slide to my feet and set the rail of my board into the wave face. I know what I’m doing, but beyond that?

Albe calls it the “personal magic”. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s also about a sense of place. My teenage surf trips up the Pacific Goat Track usually ended in disappointment; there were never any waves, or at least, never any waves like we’d seen in Morning Of The Earth.

But there was one I remember. Some school friends were going up to Racetrack near Point Plomer for a few days – I suppose it was our version of schoolies – and I went too. For some reason, the surf pumped. We drove a bit further up and got Scott’s Head at a solid six feet. Next day, I surfed Angourie alone in the late afternoon under huge lightning-streaked thunder clouds, the grey bowling waves stretching far over my head. I can still feel the power of those waves driving my board down the line, and the thin white sand squeaking under my feet coming back up the track in the dark.

AFR Magazine