Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 416 i Surfing World Magazine

UNE VIE AQUATIQUE – Ben Thouard’s life aquatic

BEN THOUARD: “I am from the south-east part of France, which is not famous for waves. It is on the Mediterranean Sea, so it is pretty flat most of the time. But this is where I grew up, and where at a young age I started surfing. It was enough to get me interested in being a surf photographer. For the last 12 years or so I have lived here in Tahiti, in front of Small Pass, basically, a five-minute boat ride from Teahupoo. It’s still pretty remote and chilled, but it’s changed over the last ten years a little bit. An important part of me moving to Tahiti was the welcome I felt from the local people, their willingness to share not just their waves but also their culture.…

THE ART OF NICHE CREATION

Prime example, Andrew Kidman – up to his neck as Lieutenant 2nd Class within the collusive industry at Waves magazine by age 23; bails out; eventually, doggedly, scripts, builds, brands, cult films and music at the end of the mail order and start of online sales. A prodigy of the Sarge school of goofyfooted Alley blasters contending in the Greeny/Occy/Dog generation, Jimmy McMillan had missed or blown his shot by the late ‘80s. I’d once given a young 16-year-old Jimmy his coaching report after a team day down at Era in which I’d penned, “Future Top 16, possible.” I’d written it for every hopeful. Anything was possible – in future retrospect, even Pottz winning a World Title. In late 2000, Jimmy McMillan hit his private wall and took to the…

2 min

PETER’S LAST VOYAGE A Pacific legend

“That doesn’t look right,” I say to Shaya. I’m looking out toward the river’s entrance. A small yacht keels violently from side-to-side in the turbulent brown water. Large waves smash into the end of North Wall, sending spray high into the air. The river is expelling floodwaters from rain that has lashed its catchment for months now. The tide’s also going out. The yacht’s diesel motor is no match for the torrent of water flowing into the ocean. Unease circles my stomach. The yacht is now being pounded into the southern breakwall. Where are the crew? Are they still on there? “Call triple-zero,” I say, reaching for my phone but finding empty pockets. “I don’t have mine either,’ says Shaya. “Fuck. Okay.” I ask a stranger nearby. “Excuse me? Has…

8 min

The Path of the Angry Man

The atmosphere is angry. The guys in their Holden utes, the clubbies… even the hot teenage girls older than me seem angry. Fluro shortjohns and springies are filled out with the thick, muscular, hairy physiques of men with scowls on their faces. As if every one of them doesn’t shred! Not in a light-footed, pretty way like they do now, but in the way that lions feed on fresh meat after weeks going without. Paddling back out I’ve gone to duckdive after snavelling a less contested, shitty wide one, but I didn’t allow for the fat bloke on his 6’4” T&C quad-fin to cover the 15 metres in three lightning hacks. I’d never seen surfing like it. Not that close. Four oozing black-and-red welts pulsed with their imprints across my…

9 min

“ONCE YOU’RE IN, YOU’RE NEVER GETTING OUT.”

Perce is humble and laconic, a salty bloke in a frayed wool beanie. He holds one eye cocked, appraising conversation from beneath a pair of grizzly eyebrows. He speaks slowly and deliberately, often saying more by what is alluded to than actually said. He speaks of various outer reefs, trailing off with a “you know what I mean…” implying that yes, perhaps I do know what he means. He understands people well and avoids bullshit. Fools are not suffered lightly. He’s straight out of a Tim Winton novel, all saltbush and foam dust, occasional swigs from a Coopers Green held at hip. Perce grew up in Cronulla as one of the Skid Kids, a crew of body boarders that decided to redefine the way slabs were approached, starting with their…

7 min

ALT-SPECIAL – The Making of Oscar Langburne

JACK FREESTONE “I’d say Jack because of how humble and genuine he is. He’s really helped me a lot over the last few years and is almost like a second dad to me, in a way. He doesn’t give a fuck but is still so humble. Plus, he surfs amazing too. He’s sort of how I want to be as a person. Just having time for everyone but still doesn’t take shit off people if they’re being assholes. I went and stayed at his house a few years back for a couple weeks, just surfing every day and he was amazing. It was a pretty crazy experience.” ACE BUCHAN “Ace is from my local beach. I’ve known him since I was a young kid and he’s always been so kind…

STUPID AND CONTAGIOUS — Nirvana’s first and last Australian tour

A guy who saw a whole bunch of those shows was legendary surf-punk artist, Ben Brown. At the time Benny was out front of his own band, The Hellmen and the Manly surfer remembers distinctly hearing Nirvana for the first time. “We were on Waterfront Records at the time, and they released all the Sub Pop stuff out here [Nirvana’s original Seattle label]. But somehow even though Nevermind came out on Geffen they had advanced tapes of it that they sort of passed them around to a couple of us guys. We were like, holy shit. It was a quantum leap in sound and listening to it you just knew it was going to blow up.” Their first gig was in Sydney. “They played at the Phoenician Club in Ultimo,…

MORNINGS WITH TOM CARROLL — Froth, namaste

“These days I take things a little more slowly. I’m up at 4:30 every morning. Four-fifty at the latest. In the morning, my mind is really active. I’ve got all sorts of stuff bouncing around in there, competing for my attention. Surf here, surf there, this board, that board… aaaaggghh! There’s all this shit going on in my head. Froth Carroll, right. My mind is very lively first thing and always has been. I’ve been an early morning person all my life, so this routine helps me organise my thoughts for the day and stop me going in a million directions at once. “I usually set up in the living room, but I open the doors right up, even if it’s raining or windy. I like hearing the birds starting,…

FREE JALEESA. The creative prison of green hills.

“Usually when I’m travelling, I just can’t wait to get home and do some painting. I get so many ideas when I’m travelling. When I go on a trip, I’ll just get so amped seeing different stuff – different bands, different art, different buildings and all sorts of different stuff. But it’s been so nice being at home. I’ve done so much painting, and creating, and playing music, and I’ve had so much time to do that. But I’ve slowly started to lose inspiration because I’m in the same place all the time.” She laughs, “Just being here in the same spot for so long, I feel all my paintings now are just green hills.” Jaleesa is officially a freesurfer, but if you take the “free” out of freesurfer, what…

8 min

THE GRANITE COUCH — Kerby Brown’s frontier psychology

SW: You’ve just flown the coop over east to launch the movie. After a couple of years locked down at home in the west, it must have felt like going overseas again. To be honest I haven’t been travelling for years anyway. I tend to not leave WA much at the best of times, even before all this stuff. But yeah, it’s been weird times, hey. Weird to be back on a plane. We were staying at Kirra with the NSW border right there, and they had the border patrols and all that stuff going on. Where we live down here in WA, we’re just in this little bubble. You wouldn’t know anything has changed. SW: Where exactly are you? I’m down on the south coast. We’ve got a little…

17 min

ROLLING WITH RENO — Hawaiian royalty meets Yalata mob

ROBBI LUSCOMBE “It wasn’t really a surf film so much. Paul came up with this idea to do a movie called Rolling Home, which was like Evolution meets the Leyland Brothers. Paul was heavily influenced by Bruce Brown and loved the idea of the surfers as adventurers. There was a very tribal feel to this movie. Paul wanted to capture all these different cultures around the fringes of Australia, and Reno was the central character. Paul said, ‘Let’s go around Australia,’ which was very simpatico with me, so I jumped on the chance to take a year off and shoot for it. This was 1972. “We drove straight across to Cactus. Paul owned the land at Cactus at this point I think, but there was no camp. We stayed there…

The Great Australian Dream – take one last look.

Let’s watch the sun come up in another townTry our luck a little further downLeave the cards on the tableLeave the bread on the platePut your hand on the gearshiftPut your foot off the brakeAnd take one last lookAt the place that you are leavingTake one last look– Tom Waits, Take One Last Look As a surfer, you don’t want to live in Grovedale. It’s the closest suburb of Geelong to Torquay, only 20 minutes down the road, but a million miles away. It’s the suburban badlands of Gee-troit. Grovedale and the new suburbs springing up along the Torquay road are the scourge of local surfers. Every crowded morning at Winki some local will paddle back out grizzling about “Grovedale Boardriders.” “Grovedale?” I couldn’t help but ask. The van was…

8 min

Larry is the crowd — Thirty seasons at G-Land but none like this

If your eyes can take it, this is a great time to surf G-Land, when heat and glare send most into the shade of the camps between surfs. Old timers like Larry McGraw know this is a good time to surf without crowds, but this season, out of all his 30 seasons past, Larry isn’t thinking about that. This season, Larry is the crowd. In this strangest of years, when the Indonesian archipelago sits locked down and shut off from the world and surfers everywhere navigate their own new normal, Larry sits alone at the edge of the wilderness. It’s his birthday today. He’s 72, but for now time is on his side. He can afford to wait for the sun to dip a little lower and surf the sunset…

9 min

SHADOW ALOHA — A counter-seasonal disorder

I’m generally not home this time of year. For the past 25 years, give or take a couple, I’ve spent every December in Hawaii. But not this one. Not last year either for that matter, and the memory of Hawaii has slowly disappeared in a fog created by being stuck in one place for a couple of years. While it’s becoming hard to even remember Hawaii, what it looks and feels like, my cells still do. Last year, when I missed the Hawaiian winter for the first time in two decades, a physical memory kicked in. I always used fly to Hawaii on December 3, and on that date last year, stuck at home, I experienced a kind of, I don’t know what you’d call it… a twitchiness. It was…

2 min

WHY I HOOT — When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

Simultaneously, I was discovering that I was no longer young and hadn’t been for some time. It was all going down like a bucket of cold porridge. I needed a circuit breaker. Eventually I learned to live more in the bright actionable moment and less in the uncertain future. I had a teacher who helped open my eyes, but he wasn’t a life coach or a Dalai Lama disciple. He was a bright 11-year-old with autism who was supposed to be my surf student. Hunter wasn’t much interested in surfing until the day he suddenly was. I was on duty as a support worker that morning and it felt like good work to be involved in. It was a warm summer’s day at a protected corner of a favourite local…

A SINGLE POINT OF LIGHT — Albe Falzon takes ultimate spiritual form.

SW: Are you a morning person, Albe? Yeah, my cycle moves around so I’m up at five most mornings. I think the most important thing is to get a good, deep sleep. You don’t really need eight hours… four or five hours is enough if they’re deep. SW: Quality over quantity. Yeah. You know when I’m surfing sometimes, I feel when the good sets are coming. You don’t see them, you just kind of feel them. It’s another sense you pick up. I’ve noticed that when I’ve been in the water a few times with Dave [Rastovich]. Here’s a funny Dave story. This time I was surfing Lennox Head… I didn’t know Dave was out, I just went surfing. I’m paddling out and there’s this board upside-down and there’s a…

24 min

“IS IT EVER GOING TO END?” Yes, just not yet

“It’s a weird one,” says Tom. We are driving to the Warringah Aquatic swimming pool on a Wednesday at six in the morning. In two days, my little brother will turn 60 years of age. I laugh and say: “Well it’s not as weird as all that.” I’m allowed to say this. After all, I’m already 62. But it is weird, or something. A blink of an eye ago, we were in our 20s and in the midst of it. Young princes swaggering about the place! Owning everything we saw, or thought we were. That’s how we’d always pictured surfing: as a pure expression of Immortal Youth. And now here we are, 40 years later, on this gloomy La Niña morning — two grey-stubbled little bald blokes, driving off to…

Dark Horse — the Blackie Wilson interview by Brett Burcher

BB: How was life growing up in Maroubrain the ‘70s? I actually grew up at Coogee, which is just a nasty shorebreak. I left Coogee when my mum moved over to Maroubra, and it was quite a heavy beach. Luckily, I was only young, so I didn’t have to negotiate certain things. A little bit older, you could get into strife. I joined the board riders and a couple of the older guys took me under their wing and said, “Come up to the Summer Sheds.” That was the spot on the beach. There was Poo Hill to the south of us, the Wrong Enders down the very south end. These guys wouldn’t come up to the middle of the beach to surf, no way. I got in with that…

22 min

Tuesdays at Hoy’s – if these walls could talk.

Starting with Matt’s grandparents, the Hoy family have owned the modest fibro beach shack up the coast for exactly 54 years. It’s been a long time. Back then the beachfront here looked a little different to how it does today, dotted with multi-million-dollar holiday homes. “Mate, when I was a kid, they were sandmining the fucking shit out of the beach,” recalls Hoyo. “They were sandmining right below our house. No joke. There was this massive sand dredger parked on the beach just digging huge holes all day. Imagine turning up with your bulldozers and trying to do that today! You’d get life!” Hoyo spent great chunks of his childhood up here. “I was there every school holidays until I started travelling on tour at 17. I think I missed…

TELL ME WHY—A book from a broken past

Archie Roach is a gifted storyteller. He speaks from the heart and uses simple, unadorned language. His first song, Took the Children Away, describes being forcefully removed from his family, culture and home life. It begins: “This story’s right, this story’s true, I would not tell lies to you.” It was the first time many Australians had heard about the Stolen Generation, and it remains a powerful indigenous protest song. Eight albums have followed 1991’s Charcoal Lane and Archie Roach has found sustained acclaim as a songwriter and performer. Now in his mid-sixties, Roach reflects on his extraordinary life journey, in a book and album of the same name. It is heartbreaking in parts – how could it not be – but it is also inspiring and uplifting. Tell Me…