The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  In 1973, after a brief fallow period, he introduced the Morey Boogie—a small, bendable, finless, soft-skinned wavecraft; sort of a cross between the bellyboard and the inflatable surf mat. The Boogie was 4 feet 6 inches long and weighed just over 3 pounds. It was designed to be ridden prone—“bodyboard” would soon become the generic term—and Morey applied his usual rhetorical flourish in the product-rollout magazine ads, saying it was now possible to “Boogie safely over guys in your way, skim beneath the curl into the shallowest waters, or warp yourself into positions no one has yet dreamed of.”

  At first glance, the Boogie looked like a beginner’s device—nothing all that interesting or earth-shaking. Surfers might consider taking one out if the waves were junky, for laughs. They were legal during blackball hours, when regular surfboards were banned, and that was cool. Morey himself had a more grandiose vision, comparing the bodyboard to the Gutenberg press, in the sense that it would give wave-riding power to the masses. And indeed, as the first few Boogies started turning up on beaches, they were used almost exclusively by school kids, weekenders, and summer tourists—clearly this product wasn’t going to have any real effect on the lineup.

  BODYBOARDING AT PIPELINE, 1977.

  That’s how it looked in 1973, anyway. Then beachgoers fell in love with it en masse. The Boogie was cheap, safe, indestructible, easily transportable, and fun from the moment it hit the water—the surfboard was none of those things—and the bodyboard industry, led by Morey Boogie, was soon posting the kind of sales figures boardmakers only dreamt of: an estimated 125,000 units in 1977, the year Morey cashed out and sold his Boogie to the Kransco toy company. Millions more followed.

  Surfers were right, in a way. Novices, part-timers, and tourists would always make up the bodyboarding majority. But within two or three years of the Boogie’s debut, truly skilled bodyboarders emerged, including a handful of media-recognized experts, and they were out there mixing it up with the regular surfers—who generally viewed this new phenomenon not as a form of democratization but as a huge annoyance. As the number of bodyboarders surged, so did the contempt of most stand-up riders, who, predictably, did their best to let the newcomers know they were second-class. You weren’t a “bodyboarder”—you were a “sponger,” a “booger,” a “speed-bump.” Surf magazines who dared to publish photos of bodyboarders risked a mailbox full of letters with comments like, “I have a seething dislike for those guys,” and “You have no business placing a leg-dragging, water-soaking sponge rider anywhere in your magazine.” Mike Stewart of Hawaii, a nine-time bodyboarding world champion who invented a half-dozen corkscrewing aerial moves and rode inside the tube virtually at will, was the only one of his kind to get a pass; like George Greenough, Stewart was simply too advanced a wave-rider to ignore. The title for one of his Surfer magazine profiles was “Is Mike Stewart the Best Surfer in the World?” But even Stewart took his hits. “To answer your question,” a Surfer reader said in response, “No, Mike Stewart is not the best surfer in the world. He’s a boogie fag.”

  Bodyboarding’s popularity in America and Australia would peak in the late 1980s, when the sport had its own magazines and professional competition tours. In developing countries, however, where surfboards were prohibitively expensive, bodyboarders grew to outnumber surfers by a huge margin. As with the surf leash, the bodyboard outlasted its most virulent critics. It was never really declared as such, but the surfing world eventually made peace with itself, on these terms: 1) bodyboarding will never go away, and 2) bodyboarding will never be cool. Not a stance to be proud of, necessarily, but a truce nonetheless.

  Australia and the Handmade, All-Natural, Psychedelic Country Soul Trip

  During the first half of the 1970s, Australia suffered from none of the angst and stagnation that marked the California surf scene. Just the opposite, in fact. Aussie surfers had already left the rest of the world behind in the small- and medium-sized waves that were the focus of the shortboard revolution. Now the nation was looking to put an even broader imprimatur on the sport. “Soul surfing” was the sport’s hip new wave-riding ideal, and for awhile the Australians—some of them, anyway—out-souled everybody.

  Nobody knew exactly what “soul surfing” meant, except that it was another backlash response to the sport’s boom-era commercial growth. It was like localism in that respect. But where the hardcore local had a message (“If you don’t live here, don’t surf here”) and a plan (abuse nonlocals), the soul surfer existed in the anticommercial world of his own device. Most had no interest in competition, but some did. Most rode in a quieter and less-acrobatic style, but others jammed it out with the best of them. Most embraced similar countercultural social and political ideals, but nobody actively identified themselves as “soul surfers.” The term had a squishy softness that would eventually be ripe for mocking. Yet soul surfing became an easy way for everyone to reference the widespread back-to-nature grassroots surf movement that found perhaps its greatest expression along the bucolic North Coast of New South Wales. Leading the way was none other than 1966 World Champion Nat Young.

  Young was the most unlikely person in all of surfdom to fill this particular role. He was a confirmed city surfer, with his own signature model board, who wore a suit and tie for business lunches with sponsors. He was also the hardest-training, most victory-obsessed contest surfer alive, and there didn’t seem to be a mellow bone in his body; friends and foes alike knew him to be arrogant, intense, and sharp-tongued.

  However, Young was also a good listener with a flexible mind and open to new ideas. Above all, he was a man of action.

  In 1970, $3,000 richer for having won the Smirnoff Pro-Am in Hawaii, the twenty-three-year-old decided to quit competition and leave Sydney. In December, Young and his new wife rented out their Sydney beachfront home and moved to an eleven-acre parcel in Byron Bay, a slow-moving farming community on New South Wales’ subtropical North Coast, forty miles from the Queensland border. Their dilapidated wood-frame farmhouse had no electricity, no phone, and no hot water. Young loved it. Fully energized by his rebirth as the bare-handed agrarian surfer, he chopped wood for the stove, cleared brush, built a solar-heated shower, and grew a magnificent beard. The inside of his minibus was decorated with a poster of Meher Baba, the mute but always-smiling guru who invented the phrase “Don’t worry, be happy.” To that end Young was never too far removed from his next chest-expanding hit of pot. The Youngs gave birth to a daughter just a few months after arriving in Byron, and to support his family, Nat made surfboards out of a closet-sized “factory” built in an old tractor shed.

  Young moved to Byron for this full-contact rural immersion, but he came for the surf, too. Not only was Cape Byron itself fronted by several excellent breaks, there were other fine North Coast spots just a short drive away, including the point-surf beauties at Lennox Head and Angourie.

  NAT YOUNG DURING HIS “COUNTRY SOUL” PHASE.

  “MAYBE I WENT A BIT OVER THE TOP WITH THE COUNTRY SOUL. I WAS SMOKING TOO MUCH POT. I BECAME A TOTAL VEGETARIAN, AND GOT INTO AN INDIAN MYSTIC NAMED MEHER BABA–THE ‘DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY’ GUY.”

  —Nat Young

  More surfers came to the Byron area for the same reasons. Bob McTavish lived there in 1968, calling it “the friendliest town on the coast.” In the early 1970s, McTavish visited often, and returned for good in 1973. Rusty Miller of California arrived in 1971. Among the dozens of first-rank Aussies who also circulated through Byron were Ted Spencer, David “Baddy” Treloar, Ken Adler, Chris Brock, and Russell Hughes—a few bought land, but most just pooled their miniscule resources and rented a farmhouse for fifteen dollars a week. Sydney was an easy one-day drive down the coast, but it might as well have been on other planet. By 1971, Byron was a tiny but viable New Age hub, with an organic café, the “Neverland” clothing shop, a backyard surf-wax-making operation, and a surf shop called “Bare Naturals.”

  As with Hawaii’s North Shore pioneers, the Byron surfers weren’t immune to the lonelines
s, boredom, and gossip that always find their way into small-town living. And the local police, more for sport than anything, liked to keep the surf-hippies on their toes. McTavish was once yanked from his campsite, thrown bodily into a squad car, and driven to the town barber for a forced military-style haircut—paid for with McTavish’s last ten-bob note. “No crime, no charge,” he later shrugged. “Just hair past the collar.” Also like the North Shore, life in Byron in the early 1970s often resembled nothing so much as an extended surf vacation—much of it paid for with government-issued welfare checks.

  But the “country soul” experience at Byron also had a genuinely noble aspect. It became a self-sustaining, real community—never a commune, although there was plenty of shared dope and potluck dinners—that was invented and maintained by surfers with no outside commercial help. It was living proof that the surfing excesses from the previous decade—competition, mass production, assimilation into the greater world of sport—truly were unnecessary to a rich and full wave-riding life. Country soul was surfing’s last and probably best grassroots effort, and those who created it were true believers in the notion that surfing has power well beyond that of mere recreation.

  “Good waves in our front yard will spill good feelings into our town,” as Rusty Miller put it, after more than three decades of living in Byron. “Even nonsurfers here get the vibes.”

  * * *

  Those vibes were on display for the world to admire in the 1972 film Morning of the Earth, which opened to rave reviews and jammed auditoriums and would, by the end of its first run, gross over $200,000, a record for an Australian surf movie. Earth was the first film by Alby Falzon, who financed the project after receiving a whopping $20,000 grant from the Australian Film Development Corporation—Bruce Brown and John Severson would have been more likely to believe in space aliens than federal funding for a surf project. (Australian government in general proved to be more surfer-friendly than its American counterpart: national military service was abolished in 1972, amnesty was given to thousands of Vietnam draft-dodgers—including Victorian surfing legend Wayne Lynch, who’d gone into hiding to avoid service—and a new welfare services program put small but dependable monthly checks into the pocket of any work-adverse surfer capable of filling out forms in triplicate.)

  Morning of the Earth’s oversaturated colors looked as if they were filmed through a psilocybin gel. In fact, the long Byron Bay sequence—the heart of the movie, and country soul’s primary document—pretty much was. Hallucinogenic gold-top mushrooms would spring up from the Byron cow patties after a good rain, and as Earth headliner Nat Young recalled, “The rule in our little group was quite simple . . . if anyone stumbled upon a mushroom while walking down a track to check the surf, they had to eat it.”

  Morning of the Earth has no narration or subtitles, and instead of bootlegged hard-rocking FM hits, it wafts along on a mostly acoustic soundtrack. It’s a stony seventy-five-minute mood piece, but it’s also precision-crafted. The Byron section is especially beautiful: Falzon strings together his North Coast surf shots like glass beads, then follows the Byron crew back home, where they make boards in a backyard clearing, feed the chickens, and buy fruits and veggies at a roadside stand.

  Morning of the Earth did for surfing naturism what Endless Summer did for surf travel and adventure, and Mickey Dora did for surf rebellion. It gave surfers a bigger, grander, more colorful version of their own lives. Not many people actually wanted to raise chickens, or chop wood, or give up TV, the way Young and his friends did at Byron. As bad as the commercialized surf industry often seemed, everyone still liked their mass-produced goodies—magazines, movies, boardshorts, and wetsuits. Competition, for that matter, never fell completely out of favor. Nat Young himself left Byron and moved back to Sydney in 1974, entering that year’s Coca-Cola/Surfabout Classic. None of this invalidated the all-in soul surfing experience as presented in Morning of the Earth. Falzon’s movie, if anything, just confirmed a set of beliefs held by surfers everywhere, city and country: that the sport was beautiful and engrossing, very different from other sports, and worth rearranging your life for.

  * * *

  A more detailed expression of Australian surfing’s new change in direction was Tracks magazine, an oversized Sydney-made newsprint monthly that debuted in late 1970. Up to that point, Aussie surf publishing had been a cheaper, traced-over version of what was produced in California. Everybody knew what a surf magazine was supposed to look like: an interview, a travel piece, a contest feature, a how-to column, and lots of hot action photography. Even the newly groovy Surfer didn’t mess around with this basic format. Tracks broke the rules with issue one, page one, with a grainy black-and-white cover photograph of a smoke-belching factory, above two small-print columns of accompanying text. The article, titled “The Jack Sullivan Show,” was about sand mining.

  Alby Falzon was a Tracks cofounder, along with editor David Elfick and writer John Witzig—still infamous to American surfers as the author of 1967’s pro-Aussie “We’re Tops Now” article. Tracks was influenced by the Whole Earth Catalog and Rolling Stone. Each issue had about four times the text of any given issue of Surfer, it came out twice as often, and every copy was a counterculture pile-on: antiwar editorials, organic food recipes, build-it-yourself articles, essays on meditation, a bracing quote or two from Thoreau or the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, two or three long eco-features, and a surfer interview where the conversation often went from G’day to Vietnam without pause, then on to the latest heavy-handed action by the local police, and then on to last month’s big swell. There were lots of surf photos and just as many candid shots of smiling hippie kids, bare-breasted girlfriends, senior citizens, and sundry farm animals.

  TRACKS MAGAZINE, 1970

  Tracks would change direction in the midseventies—under the direction of editor Phil Jarratt, the sharpest and funniest surf writer of the period, the magazine became more interested in competition surfing and bawdy humor, and environmental issues were mostly dropped. But during its formative years, earnestness was the rule. California expat Bob Cooper wrote an article for the magazine in 1971, and aside from leaving out one important element—surfing itself—delivered the Tracks mission statement in a tidy seven-word phrase: “Hooray for ecology and nutrition and philosophy!”

  Australian surfing’s rush to the countercultural hinterlands was all the more pronounced for the break it represented with Midget Farrelly. For the better part of a decade, Farrelly had been a clean-cut, well-spoken, high-profile advocate for surfing’s acceptance as a mainstream sport. As one Aussie news program put it, Farrelly had almost single-handedly made “the surfboard rival the tennis racket and the cricket ball as a symbol of Australian sport.” It was an abrupt shift, to say the least, to go from the weekly Morning Herald “Surfing With Midget Farrelly” column to Tracks. Surfing World, Australia’s oldest and most venerable surf magazine, had jumped to the left as well, if a little clumsily, with topless surfer girls and articles like “Free Sunshine” and “Do Your Own Thing, Man.”

  The Australian public had been fairly tolerant of the sixties surfie, who might wag school, or hit the piss now and then, or even smash up a bit of public property—all of which could be excused as “boys being boys.” But it remained a conservative country at heart and was deeply wary of any Yank-imported hippie business. It must have broken Farrelly’s heart as this new generation of surfie, with the dope and the long hair, chucked the sport right back onto the social fringe.

  The Long Road to Bells Beach

  Morning of the Earth and Tracks made it look as if Australia had forsworn surfing competition altogether. In fact the Aussies never really took to the anticontest barricades with the same enthusiasm as the Americans—hardly surprising, given that cricket, tennis, soccer, swimming, and Aussie-rules football provided a background hum for the entire country, and that most Aussie surfers cut their teeth at surf carnivals. It was practically expected that surfers like Midget Farrelly, Nat Young, and Wayne L
ynch would come out of “retirement” almost annually to compete in the Australian National Titles or the big Easter week event at Bells Beach.

  Bells was an especially beloved part of Australian surf culture—it was a travel adventure and a weeklong party as much as it was a competition. Certainly there was nothing like the Bells contest in mainland America or Hawaii, where even the biggest and most popular surf events had a whambam-and-done quality. Bells required a commitment. Highway 31 got you from Sydney to Torquay, near Bells Beach, in a single full day’s drive, but that was the inland route. Surfers usually drove the coast and planned on at least a few surf-break detours over the course of two or three days. The Bells area itself is beautiful and a little foreboding. The weather changes abruptly, the water is cold, and the hilly rural landscape—fronted by the spectacular Great Ocean Road in much the same way California’s Pacific Coast Highway fronts Big Sur—is barren and raw in places and deeply forested in others. Wide open to all the storm-borne vicissitudes of the Southern Ocean, the Victorian surf is usually at least half-again as big as that in Sydney. By the early sixties it was a rite of passage for east coast surfers to drive in for a week or two during fall or early winter and test themselves in the cold-water heavies.

  The wave at Bells is long and sloped—not a perfect break but dependable, vaguely resembling Hawaii’s Sunset Beach in the way it shifts and changes depending on tide and swell direction. A limestone cliff fronts the surf zone, just ahead of a perfectly undeveloped shorefront. Local aldermen, way ahead of their time in viewing surf breaks as a natural resource worthy of protection, created the Bells Beach Surfing Recreation Reserve in 1973.