Revolution is not a Dinner Party

The Tao of George

Getting Slippery with Bob McTavish

Bismarck with a Tan

Plastic Machine

Enlightenment at Honolua Bay

Panic on the Showroom Floor

Style Takes a Dive

Everybody Must Get Stoned

Surfer Goes Electrical Bananas

No Contest

There Will be Slaps

Kook Straps, Cadillacs, and Sex Wax

Blame it on the Boogie

Country Soul

Higher and Brighter with Alby Falzon

Fresh Blood on the Newsstand

Long Road to Bells Beach

Speed Freaks

Gods of Thunder

The Impossible Wave

Into the Vortex

Gerry Lopez, Pipeline Firewalker

The Rubberman Cometh

Barefoot Revolution

 magazine, an oversized Sydney-made newsprint monthly, made its debut in 1970, and was very much of a piece with 

, Aussie surf publishing had been a cheaper, traced-over version of 

. 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 action photography. Even the newly groovy 

 didn’t mess around with this basic format. 

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.

 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. 

. Each issue had about four times the text of any given issue of 

, and every copy was a counterculture pile-on: antiwar editorials, organic food recipes, DIY articles, essays on meditation and ecology, plus a bracing quote or two from Thoreau or the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. An interview with a famous surfer could go from G’day to Vietnam without pause, then on to the some recent heavy-handed action by the local police, and 

 on to last month’s big swell. Plenty of great surf photos, and just as many candid shots of smiling hippie kids, bare-breasted girlfriends, senior citizens, and sundry farm animals.

 would change direction in the mid-'70s—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 

 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 singlehandedly made “the surfboard rival the tennis racket and the cricket ball as a symbol of Australian sport.” So it was an abrupt shift, to say the least, going from the weekly 

 “Surfing With Midget Farrelly” column to 

—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 '60s surfie, who might wag school, or group-piss against the clubhouse wall, 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 red-eyed, left-tilting, 

-loving surfers chucked the sport right back onto the social fringe.

 had lots of surf shots, but just as many photos of smiling hippie kids, bare-breasted girlfriends, senior citizens, and sundry farm animals.

Chapter: 5

Barefoot Revolution

Fresh Blood on the Newsstand

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