The Sports Factor

When you've been surfing for fifty years, it's not so much a pastime, more of a lifestyle and an attitude. Three old salts describe their days on the waves.

(This program was originally broadcast on 13/04/07)

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Mick O'Regan: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Sports Factor, here on ABC Radio National.

I'm Mick O'Regan.

This week we're chasing that endless summer, marked by swell and breeze, and the chance to surf the waves.

And we're travelling with people who consider it a marathon, not a sprint.

To practice any sport for almost half a century is an opportunity to master your art, and to know yourself through that art.

Bob McTavish: Soul surfing is surfing alone, or with one or two friends. It's incorporating the style of surfers you've admired over the years, and the manoeuvres they've done. It's positioning yourself in the wave so that everything's dressed cleanly and neatly and timing is superb. It's enjoying doing it because you're doing it, not because there's anyone watching you, or any accolades for it , it's just the purity of the act and you're enjoying being amongst the natural creation and slotting into it in an elegant and quiet way.

Lester Brien: It's fun from the first day. The first time you catch a wave laying down is fun; the first time you stand up is fun, and so it's fun right through the learning process and that's probably why it's unique, but as far as your level of attainment goes, that takes many, many years to become a good surfer. Now the question is, should you bother?

Rusty Miller: Well my vintage is '63 and I say 'vintage' because I don't want to get into that age scenario. As with vintage in wines, things can get better over the years, and you learn a lot about surfing. Now these days I don't go out and just burn around, I sort of have learned to go with the currents and use less energy for the same enjoyment.

Mick O'Regan: Three veterans of the salty swell: Rusty Miller, Bob McTavish and Lester Brien, all of whom have witnessed surfing's transition from niche passion to mass product.

Rusty Miller: There's actually a rhythm in the ocean, and for instance today it's let's say maybe you might call this a 1-metre swell, and as it comes up it wraps around, so waves are made by wind, they come in and when they feel they have feet, and they feel the bottom of the shore or the sand here, the bottom slows down and the top keeps going, therefore the wave eventually breaks, and what we do is we sort of stand here, observe, and then we go out on the south side where that boat is backing up there, and we go out near the rocks, so that we know that when we go out, as soon as we go in the water, the current's going to be taking us to the left.

Now the left is a large sweeping sand beach, it goes all the way down to town, which is about a kilometre and a half away into the bay. So what we do is we go out and we get through the waves, and we turn around, we paddle with the rhythm of the wave, in other words surfing is an investment; if you just sit there, nothing's going to happen.

If you paddle on with the wave and you can get going a similar speed to the wave, the wave will pick you up and when the wave picks you up, you're in a prone position, you do like a push-up, and you stand up with both feet hitting the deck at the same time, and you put your hands up to keep your balance, and you bend your legs so you have shock absorbers, and you look forward and you ride the wave to the beach. So it's actually very simple. This whole method is trying to convince people how elementary and simple surfing is.

Mick O'Regan: In 1965 Rusty Miller was the US surfing champion. He moved here to Australia in 1983, and now lives in the hinterland of Byron Bay, in northern New South Wales.

Along with producing an annual visitors' guide to the region, he teaches people to surf. Or rather, in his words, shows them how to teach themselves.

So come with me to The Pass, a beach we'll hear more of in this program, as I check out the waves with a genuine waterman.

Rusty Miller: When I was a young boy I lived near distance to a guy who to me was everything in surfing. I was starting to go in the competitions, and this guy was not a competitor, he was just a guy who made his surfboards, and he shaped the surfboard out of balsa wood then, and then he fibreglassed it; he made a fin, a skate on the bottom of the board and he put that on the board and he shaped it. And then he went out and he rowed the board like he was the best surfer in the world, and hadn't gone in competition, but he was the best surfer because everybody who surfed said he was.

And he was one of those - he was an all-rounder; in those days surfing wasn't just surfing, the older guys that surfed were the lifeguards, and so the lifeguarded during the day, they went out skin-diving and got their fish, the abalone and lobsters, and they came into the beach at night, closed down the lifeguard tower, and we'd go surfing and we'd come in and make a fire on the beach, cook abalone and lobster, and they'd have sourdough bread, and drink wine in those days, and they'd play music because they'd been to Hawaii and Polynesia.

So I grew up with this sort of holistic look, and these guys taught me how to skin-dive, how to hunt for fish, how to body surf, how to kind of survive in big surf, and they watched over me when we were out in big surf. And sometimes they wouldn't let me go out in big surf and stuff like that, they sort of protected me. So I had this sort of older role model guys who like some of them were a bit rough and mean, and some of them were really nice, and I always remember that my youth and surfing wasn't just about getting on a surfboard and standing up and riding and you called it surfing.

Surfing was a holistic thing, it was travelling up the coast with these guys and meeting guys; like I lived in San Diego, and between San Diego and Los Angeles there's a place called Tressells, and we used to go up there and spend the night there, and I'd camp out, and it was like very holistic, and the guys who were respected the most were the guys who, not just the guys that could surf, but the guys that could actually play music and were really good skin-divers and knew about the water. In those days they were called the watermen. So I always look at surfing in a holistic way.

Mick O'Regan: And consider yourself a waterman?

Rusty Miller: Oh yes, indeed. My life is around the water. I have a sailboat. When you're out on a boat and I suspect that's the way surfing started, when you're on a boat and you're sailing downwind and you're in front of a swell and you pick up the swell, well that's surfing. And everybody knows that feeling. My concept of the first surfer was that a couple of thousand years ago, somewhere in Polynesia, a couple of fishermen coming in in a little outrigger canoe, and one of the guys out on the O Ke Kai, out on the little outrigger, sort of doing something on the outrigger, and they're coming in through the surf, and the outrigger broke away from the canoe and the guy was standing up on it, and now he's the first surfer!

So I say that kind of thing, 2500 years ago. And then you have great people in surfing, like people - one of the most obvious one and beautiful one was Duke Kahanamoku, and he was a waterman, because he was an Olympic swimmer. And when he went around to all these events around the world, he brought surfing with him. And when he went to Hollywood and did films with Johnny Weissmuller as a native chief of the little island they were making a movie about or something, Duke would take the crew surfing at Corona Del Mar and down from Los Angeles, and he'd take not just the movie stars, but he'd take the sound guys, and they'd have these weekend sessions at beaches, and Duke would sort of take them down and teach them how to surf, and get them in the water swimming and diving, and then they'd play music on the beach.

And so what I'm saying, it's a heritage and a lifestyle, and when I say the real essence of surfing is the Hawaiian thing, which is when I was a little boy, the older Hawaiians in paraphrase, basically said to me What surfing is about Rusty, is you paddle out through the surf, we call that pushing through, you go out, you sit up on the board, you observe the water, you find a wave, you get the biggest wave way outside, you paddle for the wave, you stand up, and you ride the wave all the way to the beach, and you step off on the beach with your hair dry. And that is what surfing is about.

Mick O'Regan: Well that sounds fantastic. Now I'm a complete novice, I've never actually stood up on a surfboard. For someone like me who's almost 50 and has never stood up on a surfboard, am I too long in the tooth, or is it your argument that anybody can learn to surf, despite their vintage?

Rusty Miller: Well what I usually say is that when you woke up this morning and stepped out of your bed, did you stagger, and grasp for balance?

Mick O'Regan: Not this morning, but it has happened.

Rusty Miller: Not this morning, OK. Well I'm saying that if you can do that, and you're of average intelligence and co-ordination, and you still have all your limbs and everything, I think we can get you out there riding a wave and doing what the Hawaiian said to me, riding it all the way to shore and stepping off with your hair dry.

Mick O'Regan: That'll have to be our test.

Rusty Miller: First time.

Mick O'Regan: Soul surfer, Rusty Miller, at The Pass at Byron Bay.

SURFING MUSIC

Mick O'Regan: Now to a name people have been standing on, and falling off, for decades.

McTavish.

If you'd never seen a surfboard or paddled out to a break, you might think of shortbread, or tartan. But for people who love putting their toes on the nose, McTavish means malibus.

The man who owns the name is Bob McTavish, the master craftsman of surfboards.

You might have even seen him in a famous photo, standing by his Holden, boards on the roof, checking out the break at Noosa in the days when you could still, sometimes, be the only one in the water.

Bob McTavish: It was only when the surf movies came out from America, they started roughly in 1960, and the first surf magazine, Surfer, came out from America in '61, that we started to appreciate that Australia had the pristine coast, that we had what California had 50 years before, before it was built up. And when I went to California for the first time in '67, I determined that when I came back here to live at Byron Bay, and I said, Well, I'm not budging from this most beautiful piece of east coast, because this is Mecca, this is paradise.

And I think surfers in general, were a pretty hard-core bunch, because basically you're at the beck and call of weather conditions and ocean conditions. So you couldn't follow a standard career path and be a surfer. So if you're committing to ditching the career and making a living however you could, maybe making surfboards, hanging around surfboard factories, then the trade-off was that you were going to get the very best of the surf on the east coast while it was uncrowded. In other words, you took your retirement first, and then you paid the price later. And that was our commitment.

My Dad set a pattern. He worked for the Commonwealth Bank for 21 years; he was overlooked for a promotion and he thought it was so unjust that he packed the family up into a caravan and we headed off to Darwin from Toowoomba. But the wheel fell off the caravan half-way, at Marburg, half-way to Brisbane. So we ended up living in Brisbane. And I saw Dad get back into the grind again, put on the suit and tie and go off to work every morning as an office clerk again, and Dad missed his chance. And I was only 12 when that happened, and Dad started me surfing, going to the coast at Currumbin every weekend, but that lesson wasn't missed.

The fact that Dad was ready to chuck in a career because being a slave to the Commonwealth Bank for 21 years and then being overlooked, I went Right, there's something wrong about this system, the way it's functioning. The whole thing of school, career, wife, kids, mortgage, finally pay off your mortgage when you're 65 and then have a brief retirement then drop dead, is a very suspicious way of living, to me. And I think Dad exemplified that.

And he got caught, he got sucked back into the trap. But his kids didn't. And I was working on the so-called career, I was working in Brisbane in radio at 4BH, I was a panel operator, and I was going to head up - I was setting on the way to be a disc jockey or something. But I had too many Mondays and I didn't show up; I didn't bother venturing back from the coast. So I was kindly given the sack, which was a great liberation for me, and said Yippee this is it, I'm going to just live on the beach and surf.

Mick O'Regan: Is surfing tied up with an attitude, more than simply an activity?

Bob McTavish: It was. Surfing in the '60s was, but as it slowly became commercialised and diverse, surfers were a hard-core bunch, really hard-core, and the attitude was We're going to enjoy life now, because well I mean the Cold War was intense, it was unsure what the future was going to be like. So surfers were a breed of people who literally made the decision not to follow the career path.

Mick O'Regan: So it was rebellious in that way?

Bob McTavish: It was, not that we were putting down society in general; we were having so much fun surfing that there was no negative aspect to it, we just thought we were super lucky to have discovered this thing, and that we could survive on bread and bananas and the occasional bottle of milk and a botte of beer, and survive, and surfing every day.

Mick O'Regan: It wasn't an idea that you were, as you say, trying to subvert social norms, it wasn't as if you were rebelling against what was being presented to you, it was that you were choosing another aspect that was available, but maybe not being presented by many people to you.

Bob McTavish: This was early '60s. It changed. Later on, like when dope hit in '66, '67 and the counter-culture with say Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan, and the Beatles and the Stones, and the culture of rebellion was being marketed. We identified enemies, which was the Vietnam War, the draft, and so yes we became a little vocal and saying Hey, we've got the great way of life; forget what you're doing, just do what we do, it's so much fun just going surfing, chilling out, having a great camaraderie up and down the east coast and all over the world. Surfers were a brotherhood, literally, and you'd always stop and chat with other guys with boards on their cars, or if you went overseas, you were embraced by the local surfers automatically. So we had a culture going that was based on friendliness, and it was a non-destructive culture, and by the late '60s we had identified some causes to rally around.

Mick O'Regan: What was your take on the '70s and the way surfing became a universal activity rather than a niche sport?

Bob McTavish: I remember calling myself a pirate. I felt like a surf pirate. I've had to dodge around the traffic, the crowds and plunder empty surf when no-one was around. You'd just be smarter than the average guy to get the waves still. By then I had a wife and kids, and I was still making surfboards, I mean I was blessed that I ended up developing an art, or a trade in being able to manufacture surfboards, which financed the family. But I still have an attitude that I went surfing this morning, there are 25 guys on one peak on the beach break, and there were two kooks on another peak just up the beach a bit.

Sure there were 25 guys, there was probably slightly better waves, but where the two beginners were, there was a little left-hander, and they couldn't even see it there, a little thing peeling on a rip. So I went and paddled across there. I rode 20 waves in an hour, had my board back on the car with a big grin on my face, and that's how I surf most of the time, is I'm still a pirate. I've got to work around the crowds because it's become pretty congested, and I don't enjoy that, I can't surf with crowds, it's not in my make-up.

Mick O'Regan: So has that diminished the camaraderie that you spoke of?

Bob McTavish: Oh, totally, truly it disappeared in the '70s.

Mick O'Regan: It disappeared?

Bob McTavish: Yes. Well pretty much. There's a camaraderie amongst the core guys, especially the big wave riders and the guys who have continued to surf as I have for 50 years, there's definitely a brotherhood with all those guys here who have been surfing all that time. The brotherhood's still alive there. And we've got no dislike for the masses that have taken it up, but they're just discovering what we do, just a lot later. And we welcome them.

I was chatting with the blokes, the two beginners in the water today, I was encouraging them, showing them where to find the spot to sit, you know, because you wanted them to enjoy themselves. So there's still a friendly vibe - I surround myself with a friendly vibe. But if you go into you surf The Pass down here on a busy crowded summer day with 150 people out, it can get tense and it can get angst for me; I don't like it, I'd rather not go there. If the vibes are bad in the water, I'll just leave.

Mick O'Regan: What's the residue of surfing in your mentality now? And by that I mean what have all those years of surfing and being associated with all the aspects of surfing, both in the water and out, how has it affected you as a man now in your mature years?

Bob McTavish: That's a tough question. Well I've had influences that are bigger than surfing in life. I mean I'm a Jehovah's Witness and I studied the Bible, and I've got to tell you that, you haven't got to run it on air, but that changed everything, and very few people become Jehovah's Witnesses, so that changed my whole viewpoint too, everything.

Mick O'Regan: Well just on that, your religious faith and your recreational activity, do they blend, or do they sit with a subtle antagonism?

Bob McTavish: No. No, not at all. I believe there's a wonderful life creator and I think he designed the ocean for our pleasure, and he designed waves for our pleasure. There could have been other ways to dispel the energy of the wind, but the fact that they peel beautifully down strips of sand all around the world, it's been marvellous. And it's such a huge variety, and it's a pleasant thing and that's why I enjoy it, seeing all sorts of people having fun in the water, it's great.

Back to your original question, the residue of surfing for 50 years, you know a lot of metaphors in surfing that you could say apply to life. For example, you've got to select the time to go, so you start to - you work in harmony with the weather for a start, and every morning the first thing you do is check the cloud movements against the venetian blinds to see how fast the clouds are travelling, and what's the wind angle, and then you go for the sound of the ocean. So you start to be selective, in tune with the natural elements is I guess the first thing.

But the metaphor I was driving at was that you've got to be selective of how you choose to live each day, which is probably a very healthy thing. Instead of the rat race that most of the poor workers in the world suffer from, of getting up at 6 o'clock, gulp down the cup of tea, head off on the bus, and do the eight hours, and put up with the traffic for the next few hours, and that's a terrible situation that's been dumped on mankind and it's very unfortunate. It's nice that you can get away from that, and surfing is more like the natural way of living. When I say surfing, the surfing lifestyle. And when you select a wave, and you try to make it a challenging wave, I always try to set up so that you've got to use a lot of speed and timing to get through that breaking section, and sometimes a giant bowl will threaten to close in on you and you have to make a choice: do I go for it, or do I back off?

And I work on the go for it, kind of guy, and so in life I've been the same. And I either have a go, and I've come a gutser plenty of times too, and I've been broke twice, I paid my bills but it took me time, and it's hurt my wife and family because of that, and you move from the house you own into a rental house, and start paying back what you lost, and what I lost was always over surfboard construction methods.

I'm a surfboard lover as well as a surfer, and so I tried twice to develop new construction techniques, and finally set myself, and twice I went down the gurgler, so I didn't make that bowl you know, that closed down on me and I got wiped out. But plenty of other times I've had a go at things and come through, you know just like good timing on a wave.

Mick O'Regan: For you, what are the mental aspects of surfing?

Bob McTavish: I admire the unusual characters who can surf alone, and in strange conditions. Or riding an unusual surfboard that everyone else would laugh at, I think that's pretty cool. I was out surfing Lennox in a big swell three months ago, and the tide had dropped and all the short-boarders had gone in, it was just me and one other guy on long boards left. I've got gun long boards for riding 8-10 foot waves, and this was a solid day.

I was paddling back out against the current, and I saw this guy on a flat old-fashioned long board way outside, coming around the corner from Boulders, which was freaky. So he rode this wave through on this terrible old plank of a board to where we were at the main take-off, and I said, 'G'day', he said, 'G'day', I said, 'Where did you come from?' He said, 'I just came down from Flat Rock'. I said, 'What?' 'Yes, I was paddling and surfing down - ' this is like three miles, he's paddled and surfed down the coast in an 8 to 10 foot swell. I said 'That's fantastic'.

After I got to the beach after riding a couple more waves, he came in, and I said, 'Well where do you live?' he said, 'Broken Head', and I said, 'Well how are you getting home?' He said, 'Ah well my girlfriend dropped me off at 6.30, it's now 11 o'clock, I might just have to paddle and surf all the way to Broken Head'. Mate, I've got such admiration for characters like that. They're just so different.

Mick O'Regan: Bob McTavish, thank you so much for being on The Sports Factor on ABC Radio National.

Bob McTavish: I'm totally stoked, Mick.

Mick O'Regan: Bob McTavish surfboard rider and designer, reflecting on more than half a century searching for the perfect wave, and being part of a celebrated sub-culture.

Our third old salt has made a living our of showing people what it's like to surf on empty beaches.

Lester Brien, a schoolmate and former surfing buddy of world champion Midget Farrelly, started the firm Surfaris, surfing trips measured out beach by beach, as tourists search for the sensation of an uncrowded wave, and an offshore breeze. Just like the old days before commerce took over.

Lester Brien: Once you got commercial interests in it, they started to need champions, and so they started to get the contests organised again and things like that. You've got to realise that what actually happened between about '68 and '74 contests had more or less been sidelined in board-riding. Most of the top surfers weren't going in them, they switched solely to soul-surfing, and the commercial side of it was denigrated, and the early Tracks magazine, I used to know Dave Elphick fairly well, and he started Tracks, and the early Tracks magazine never mentioned a contest result. The whole magazine was on the basis there wasn't such a thing as a surf contest.

They wrote articles about health foods, nuclear problems, surfing, people downing cactus and things like that. However, once you get commercial activity involved in the sport, more than outside of the manufacturers in industrial estates, as started to happen in the '70s, and the surf clothing industry and all that type of thing, then they need champions, they need people to think contests are important and the winner of a contest is important, because then they can sell the gear, and put the gear on the contest winner etc. And so commercialism drives competition.

Mick O'Regan: Which side of the fence were you on?

Lester Brien: Well by then of course I'd - I don't want to get too critical of contests, in the sense that when in the '60s I certainly was in them. I think as a young guy you look for contests, and then you get to an age where suddenly - well not suddenly, but over a period of time, you start to think Well is this a worthwhile activity? And why am I coming down to this beach to surf a lousy surf to get a little cup, you know, is it important? So my views changed probably around '68, I think the last contest I ever went in was '68, in the Australian titles, and then once I moved, I moved in 1970 to Byron and I lost interest in contests.

At the point I moved, I was obviously moving to a small country town to go surfing, and it had nothing to do with participating in any sort of contest format. And most of the people around that time had the similar view, that is like Nat [Young], blokes like that, even though he was the world champion, he dropped right out of contests around that same period.

One of the benefits of the commercialisation of surfing of course, is that it opened up avenues for a bloke like me to say Well, you know, there might be a lot of these travellers are interested in doing what we used to do in the early '60s, going to remote beaches and still getting surf. Now while a lot of the places along the coast have changed over the last 30 years, equally there are many places that haven't, predominantly places within national parks. And so you know, the commercialisation of surfing if you like has allowed me to live the life where I've got a business, where I have flexible time.

I mean if you want to be a surfer, you have to have a job where your time is flexible, because the surf's only good very rarely in reality, anywhere in the world. It may be more consistent in one place than in some others to some degree, but the fact is, there are 365 days a year, if you get 100 days of good surf, you're doing bloody well. So what are you going to do the other 265 days? So you know, you need to have a job or have your life organised so that when the surf is good, you can enjoy it. So it's directed my life to the extent that that's what you try and organise.

Mick O'Regan: Veteran surfer, Lester Brien.

And that's it for The Sports Factor this week. My thanks to Producer Andrew Davies, and to our Technical Producer, Peter McMurray.

I'm Mick O'Regan, thanks for listening.

I hope you'll join me again next week when we return for the new season of the Sports Factor, here on ABC Radio National.

Guests

Lester Brien
Veteran surfer & founder of 'Surfaris'.

Rusty Miller
Soul Surfer.

Bob McTavish
Surfboard shaper / designer.

Presenter

Mick O'Regan

Producer

Andrew Davies