Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 417 i Surfing World Magazine

“I first started surfing out there when I was eighteen or nineteen. We used to go out on these little foam boards, called Coolites. When we got smashed, the board would come up in bits and pieces – so that was the end of that. Before that we used to go down to Caves Beach. There’d be a mob of us, you know. We’d go down there and when the guys out there surfing lost their boards we’d take ‘em back out. That got us interested in trying it. They’d give us a loan of their boards for 15 minutes or half an hour to have a go. It took us a very long time before we even tried to go out there [to Pipe] on surfboards. “The first guy…

* The title refers to the mysterious spoken lyric in the background of Midnight Oil’s famous instrumental, Wedding Cake Island. The band has never confirmed what was actually spoken. If you were there at the start, back when the Narrabeen Sands was the Narrabeen Antler, when Peter Garrett had cropped blond hair, when the ceiling rained sweat like a tropical downpour, you might remember Midnight Oil the surf band, singing about Wedding Cake Island, long swell lines, and the low coast road. It was a carefree time, but the Oils were just finding their voice. A few years later Midnight Oil cared about everything, from American militarism to Aboriginal land rights, an activist rock band like none before or since. With a ferocious live energy and high musical IQ, they…

When the rivers burst their banks, pro surfing’s elite were among the first to answer the call. “It was full on,” recalls Joel Parkinson of what greeted him as he rounded the bend on the Tweed River on his jet ski. “Every house was completely inundated. I never expected the Tweed River to do that. I’ve seen it do its thing, but I never knew it had that in it,” he said. Joel spent the next 12 hours whisking people to safety from rooftops, cars, and anywhere else above the flood. When he got home he found his wife’s car had been stolen and the house robbed while his family slept inside. He barely gave it a second thought, waking up the following day and doing it all again. “I…

SD What are you working on at the moment? SM Yeah, so it’s another Scomo mural, I guess. It seems like he fucks up every single disaster that happens in Australia, so basically it’s a play on him. He’s always there for photo op. It’s him cleaning up – or pretending to clean up – the floods with a high vis vest in front of a green screen, with all the cameras in the foreground. He’s got a little speech bubble that says like, “So, this green screen’s going to make me look like I’m in Lismore, right?” SD You obviously watched what happened in Lismore with the floods fairly closely. How do you feel about it all? SM It was pretty sad, man. It was just like the fires…

“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck,” wrote Horne. “It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.” Horne wrote about how the luck we enjoy as Australians – endless white beaches, riches in the ground, a fish on the first cast – had lulled Australians into becoming culturally lazy. The Lucky Country was published over 50 years ago now but would be horribly relevant if it had been published last week. The above passage couldn’t sum up modern Australia any better. When the Black Summer fires burned up and down the eastern seaboard two…

It’s a type of magic the Oils perform when they walk on stage, pick up their instruments and begin channeling Australia. You sense goannas in their songs. Waves crashing into cliffs. Wide open spaces. Holden wrecks and boiling diesels. Over four decades Midnight Oil have refined their pummeling pub rock into something singular. It’s sensory and immersive. It hits you in the hips and the head. Somehow the Oils make you want to dance to songs about nuclear proliferation, Indigenous rights, the climate crisis and the perils of asbestos mining. Somehow, it’s angry and joyous simultaneously. The Oils begin their farewell tour in Newcastle with the slow burn title track of their new album, Resist. The band appear silhouetted and solemn in front of a slideshow of protest imagery while…

SW I overheard one guy in the surf this morning comment that the Victorian summer has been so bad, this feels like the first week he’s actually seen anyone in six months. NVD Yeah. That’s why I’m all banged up, limping around after the last couple of days. I’ve spent so much time in the water this week because this summer’s been so dismal. I think everyone’s just frothing out now there’s waves again, me included. SW What have you been doing all summer? NVD Well, I’ve been home since August… but I’ve been in rehab for five months. I tore my hamstring and was out of the water, so I’ve just been spending time in Melbourne. I started my yoga teacher training course because I was like, “All right,…

Like many of the world’s airports, international arrivals had been thin in Honolulu. US Customs hasn’t had much to do over the past two years, so my camera gear and I were triggering. After an over-zealous hazing of my equipment, I spotted Jacko Baker and Callum Robson, two Australian rookies shuffling past dragging boards and Gath helmets. “Plenty of swell coming,” Baker grinned as he slid his boards away. “It’s gonna be an epic few weeks.” Plenty of swell indeed. It just didn’t stop. Swell after swell pounded the North Shore of Oahu. Packed to the brim with every pro and wannabe, social media went into overdrive along the Seven-Mile Miracle. With one notable absentee – reigning world champ Gabriel Medina. Medina pulled the pin on Hawaii, and most likely…

A popular part of the state. Barren out there but not quite. The sandstone fences are numerous, as I’ve seen for months. Trees minimal. You wonder how far a crow flies for a drink. It’s easy to sit on 130 kays, no cops for miles. If the situation arose you could talk your way out of it with some local slang or knowledge – one cop for the next hundred kilometres is my guess. Before losing reception I download Diesel and Dust in its entirety to play, eventually caught in my own world. I’ve wanted this trip for decades, alas unfortunately without the trusty horse, so there’s no decent car stereo and I’m reduced to $6 headphones. Clutch problems in the new car. A quick fix and a week goes…

As a fresh-faced, tipsy 21-year-old, Noa Deane infamously shitshowed his way onto the awards stage at the 2014 Surfer Poll in Hawaii and uttered the famous words, “Fuck the WSL”. The oxygen vanished from the room. It’s an awkward topic to start an interview with and whilst prepared for the line to go dead, it’s an obvious starting point for the narrative arc of the maturing of Noa Deane. The incident still echoes today, even rating a call out from ‘77World Champ Shaun Tomson on a recent podcast. Somewhat awkwardly, Tomson’s call to see “Guys like Noa Deane, he’s always flapping his mouth, let’s see him [out at Pipe] when it’s ten foot…” neglected the evidence. Noa’s charged out there. He’s even had a heat win over John John out…

Austin lives alone in his yacht, which is currently tied up by the Wharf Restaurant in Ballina. He’s not going anywhere for a while because there’s four hay bales and so much water-… … logged timber around and under his boat it lists to port and on the outgoing flood tide the hull rubs hard against the side of the pontoon depriving him of sleep. In four days his boat has aged ten years. Austin though is ageless. Five days without power now and no phone no internet and River Street is indeed, river street. So, no hot pies for lunch. The only two businesses in town that have generators are the bottle shop and the hotel next door and that’s where we sit in a big empty room charging…

SW So, you’re down in the city? OC Yeah, I usually paint in my garage at home, but it’s so crammed in there now that I’ve come down to the gallery at China Heights. I’ve got a big space out the back here. I’ve just started work on my solo show. It’s good. SW You’ve dodged the rain at home too. It’s been a wild summer. OC Crazy. We’ve had surf for the last four months straight. There might have been like, one or two weeks where there were no waves but even then, it was like, two foot and still good, just onshore. SW And there’s another run of swell coming. OC Man, some of my little secret beachies at home have just been nonstop. A little bit onshore…

And no matter how many waves roll down the concrete sides of the Tullamarine tub, nobody ever will. Still, thousands of committed surfers call it home. We’ve all got our reasons, and they’re as interesting or as boring, or as complicated or as simple as the reasons anyone puts down roots in any place. For many people, it’s not a choice. Even in the lucky country, girt by sea, dumb luck and circumstance dictate where most of us spend our lives. But Victoria has its waves, and in spite of the hours and effort it takes to get in the water, in an average year Melbourne surfers get by. Back in March 2020, we had no idea how much we’d miss those average years. As the irrationally confident media voices…

Buffett has a famous track called Pirate Looks at 40. The song is about a guy Buffett met in the Full Moon Saloon in KeyWest – a guy named Phil Clark – who in a previous life, amongst adventures had smuggled dope through the Caribbean. The track is Clark’s lament about turning 40. He dreams of being a real pirate, instead of a less salty, modern-day in-carnation. Clark marks his birthday by getting shitfaced for two weeks. He feels his days of living – like, really living – are over. After 40 he was just marking time. Kelly Slater recently turned 50 and marked the occasion by winning at Pipeline, beating a surfer less than half his age. There was no lament from Kelly. No two-week rock-bottom binge. He just…

Once upon a time ‘claiming’ was a rare and self-indulgent exhibition of pure elation. A subtle recognition of what had been ‘allowed’; aesthetic and yet something personal, an acknowledgement of self and a thank you to the Gods for allowing escape, survival, cutting-edge. And maybe echoed by an excited hoot or two from mates paddling out, or on the beach. Less is always more. Respect can turn 15 seconds into 15 minutes. Surfing can be incredible, death-defying, inspiring. Maybe we need a scale of claim, where less is more: — Non-disappearing tube ride = triple back-flip with pike — Minor tube with spit = two arms plus double pumps — Barrel 3-5 seconds = one arm with fist — Chopes/Jaws/Shipstern-like death-ride = one arm with single finger Poto ‘doing The…