Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 420 i Surfing World Magazine

It’s really better not to look back at the early issues of Surfing World. Everything, from the photographs to the writing, and maybe especially the production quality was simply terrible. The magazine was printed by letterpress, a process already being consigned to history by modern offset printing. I managed to get an article run in the seventh issue – Volume 2, No. 1 in March 1963. It was an awful story, and easily met the poor standards of the day. A couple of years later I prevailed upon Bob Evans to let me do the design of an article called ‘Rincon is where you find it’ – the first published photographs of Noosa Heads that I’m aware of. We didn’t say where this most prized of ‘secret spots’ was. Finally…

“Very confusing,” offers Phil dryly of trying to get his bearings in the town. “It had all changed so much.” He tried to find Green Gables – the second-oldest house in Torquay at the time and a house he’d lived in for a while – or at least find where Green Gables had once stood. No luck. “That street didn’t look anything like it used to.” Phil’s family still owns a house in the old quarter of town, but even that proved hard to find in amongst all the overwrought development. In the early ‘70s Phil had also lived in another share house on Ocean Boulevard in the suburb of Jan Juc. ‘Suburb’ would be a generous term for Juc at that point. When Phil drove back through Jan Juc…

2000 The Year 2000. “One thing I remember about the year 2000 is what Maurice [Cole] drummed into me. He was doing my boards and advising me and managing me, all of the above. I’d just got second to Occ in the world title in 1999, and Maurice would say to me, ‘The world champ in the year 2000, you’ve gotta do it! That’s the one everyone’s going to remember.” It sounded so good at the time; ‘The year 2000… wow!’ You’d think it was going to be like something out of a movie with robots and hovering skateboards, so futuristic. And I remember him saying that and me going, ‘Yeah, you’re right, that’s going to be sick! I’m doing it!’ And it ended up Sunny won and it wasn’t…

HOTBUTTERED.COM incoming… A radical stab, creating an alternative to the Thruster. The Drifta Series it’s width and emphasis on skating speed pre-dated the revival of fish-style boards in the late 90’s. Main features include: an updated classic single-to-double concave, running a decade ahead of the Performance School. Fluted and pinched wings, stepping down to a stubby swallow, or, chopped square tail, a round nose and mini side-fins, giving the Drifta it’s almost spaceship-like appearance. A 7 1/2” wide-based single fin completed the revolution to hotdog happiness. Driftas hide a typically uncompromising design capable of extraordinary down-the-line speed combined with the ability to break tracks (vertical or horizontal). Truly a board about transition, from singles to tri-fins. From speed to advanced modern performance surfing.…

That first trip with Bob was great – Kevin Platt, Bobby Brown and me in his new Holden station wagon. The old Pacific Highway was a two-lane donkey track in those days. We had to cross two major rivers on punts which carried cars and their passengers, one at the Nambucca River south of Coffs Harbour and the other the Clarence River near Yamba. It was a real adventure going up and down the east coast of Oz in the early ’60s. There were two tick gates that were abolished in the mid-’70s. Bob said when he used to come to the North Coast with his brother Dick and their dad, there were five punts between Sydney and Coolangatta. When we crossed the Queensland border and stood peering out at…

On an impressionable kid, that magazine left quite a mark. Forty years later, flashes of it are still there. It was 1982. The Surfing World photo annual. ‘Wave Havens’. Eight bucks, black cover, silver calligraphy. The cover was understated but the magazine went supernova once opened. MR surfing a pink board in the dying Victorian light. The Queensland points washed in golden sunshine. The thing sparkled like an opal, a riot of new-wave colour and shape. It was filled with wild-eyed guys driving through frontier landscapes, surfboards on the roof, no bakery or pub safe, headed for some mystic surftopia, somewhere on the Australian coast. Flicking through it, the imagination ran wild. That magazine had a profound effect, but it would take me a few years and a hundred more…

The two kids were fast asleep when the car pulled up out front. The day before, the two Queensland teenagers had made the final of the 1982 Pepsi Pro Junior at Narrabeen and had spent the night celebrating in Sydney’s notorious Kings Cross. Kong and Chappy had only just got back to Narrabeen when Bruce and Hugh pulled up early that morning to collect them for a Surfing World road trip. Kong walked out into the morning light, rubbed his eyes and burped. The boards were tied to the roof, Kong and Chappy jumped in, and they drove south. “We passed straight out,” remembers Kong. “Next thing we wake up and we’re like, ‘Shit, we’re in Victoria!’” It was while they were on that Surfing World trip that Kong, in a…

My vision for Surfing World magazine back then wasn’t right either. I couldn’t help referencing my love of the Hugh McLeod/Bruce Channon period. The magazines they made through the ’80s changed my life. I was in love with the feelings and beauty of surfing, and everything they did in SW made this love bloom. After hours, in my bedroom, trawling over the photos and art, trying to understand what the writers were expounding about. Hyndsight! Need I say more? And because of how deeply this affected me, when I was asked to contribute, I wanted to do what Hugh and Bruce did. But that was wrong because I could never do what they did. It was their time and their expression. So, I saved my money and bought a camera and…

Young Adam Blakey’s first memory of moving to New Brighton was seeing the whole town underwater. “Our new house was on stilts luckily. It looked like it was floating away before we’d even moved in.” Mary Blakey had moved her brood to the North Coast from Narrabeen on a whim. Cheaper living, a fresh start. Worried about her kids settling into town and meeting new friends, “she was keen to get us into surfing big time,” says Adam, whose mum is the only one who still refers to him as Adam today. “The first person I got introduced to at school was Matt Smith. I remember he had cotton wool taped over his ears because he had ear infections from surfing so much. He had a mate who I’d meet…

January 22, 2023. Nobody knew that day would happen the way it did. There were no portents, no sign that surfing’s most profound mythology — loss, sacrifice, and a humble yet quietly glorious redemption — was about to play out before the world’s eyes. The entire week leading up to that impossible Sunday was as gentle and pretty a January week as I’ve ever seen on the North Shore of Oahu. Me and my buddy, Hannah Anderson were there to shoot some innocuous video projects and sneakily surf our brains out. We weren’t expecting giant closed-out Waimea Bay, spectators being washed into the lagoon, a range of people leaping into mid-air off saltwater office blocks, and a cruisy, yet naturally skilled lifeguard winning an event full of the biggest names…

We don’t actually own a complete set of Surfing World magazines going back 60 years, but fortunately for us Bob Smith, who lives just up the road, does. North of 70, Bob remains a total surf nut. In 2020, his goal was to catch 2020 waves over the course of the year. He did it by July and lost count after that. Bob realised the significance of Surfing World – now the oldest surf magazine in the world – turning 60 and was gracious with his collection. We rented the holiday shack, picked up the magazines, and disappeared back in time. It felt like the act of bringing the archive together for a ceremonial reading opened some kind of gateway between worlds. As we scrolled through thousands of pages and the…

At the time he took the gig, Glenn lived half the year in Coffs, where he rented a house on a banana plantation for $2 a week. For the other half of the year he’d be in Sydney, where he’d work at Shane Stedman’s, doing everything from shaping, sanding, glossing and fins. His career pivot into publishing didn’t come through what he knew, but who. “I was best mates with Frank Pithers,” recalls Glenn. “Had been for a long time. When I’d come down to work in Sydney I’d mostly stay with Frank.” At the time Frank, a freewheeling photographer, was the last connection at Surfing World to the Bob Evans era. “Frank was still at Surfing World but was trying to get out of there,” remembers Glenn. “He didn’t…

At the time SW and Tracks were having their one and only bonding moment. At stake, the artform. Pillorying Mike Hurst and his Bronzed Aussies quartet over their ‘surfing as mainstream sport’ putsch mostly united the general readerships. The legrope had only just been accepted at Easter Bells, parents in support of surfing sons and daughters had rocks in their heads, most city to country beaches had feudal pecking orders and dog catchers were being bashed for good measure. The BA’s were thumbs down for the sparklers after donning velour disco jumpsuits at coastal Sydney’s ES Marks Field 440-yard track. They took a fateful lap of honour before an international athletics assembly gathered to watch world’s greatest miler, John Walker assault the mile record when they could instead have chosen…

“WE’RE FINALLY HERE.”…

It happened that the writing group were prisoners. As we talked there were buzzers going off, metal-screech announcements on a PA. One of the inmates told me that everything, everything inside was about time management. “If I listen to you for another hour I won’t get to call home tonight. Phone’s only free till five. So don’t get pissed off if I leave, right?” It warrants a refiguring of the idea about the interface of lives. Maybe it’s not where my life bumps into your’s, but where that happens in the clutch of past meeting future: the tiny, improbable sliver of time where the past strips away and the future rushes at it – the bit we call the present. Time works like barometric pressure: it flows from areas of…