A Fine Little Revival

Jack London Loves Purple

California: The New Frontier

Beachboy Life

Duke Kahanamoku

Surf Shooting Down Under

The Bronzed Islander Shows How

Surfing in the Jazz Age

Tom Blake Redesigns the Sport

What Depression?

When Clubbies Ruled Australia

Surfboard as Woodcraft

Palos Verdes Surfing Club

San Onofre: the Nearest Faraway Place

Riding the Hot Curl

Enter Makaha

Death at Waimea

The Overwhelming North Shore

Gliding Return

It must have dawned on Kahanamoku, at some point during his three-month stay in Australia in 1914 and 1915, that by dodging his own troubles he’d placed himself in the middle of a troubled nation. Halfway into a three-year drought, the country’s entire wheat crop had just failed. Gallipoli’s slaughtering toll on Australian infantrymen was still a few months in the future, but the Great War was underway, and the country had already begun to mark its dead and wounded. Genocide and institutionalized racism meanwhile hummed in the background. In 1770, eight years before dropping anchor in Kealakekua Bay, Captain Cook became the first Westerner to land in Australia, sailing into what would later be called Botany Bay. The results for Australia’s aboriginals were just as devastating as they would be for Native Hawaiians. In a little more than a century, the million-strong aboriginal population was reduced to about sixty thousand, mostly because of disease, but also through massacres by colonizing British. The country’s first major parliamentary act, after federating in 1901, was to launch the White Australia Policy, helping to insure, as one official put it, “the absolute ascendancy of the white Race.”

Still, for the Sydney-bound visitor in 1914, it’s hard to imagine that Australia would come to view as anything less than a nation of optimism, energy, and great loud good humor. It had a particular strangeness, of course. Australia sat at an enormous remove from the rest of the English-speaking world, and its map was filled with aboriginal place names—Wollongong, Tamarama, Bunyip, Boonoo Boonoo—that sounded straight out of a Kipling children’s book. But it was familiar in many ways, too. Australian nationals didn’t care for the title, but for good reason the country was still referred to as “Britain’s Little Boy.” Where America had gone to war, twice, to distance itself from its colonial past, Australia remained the Commonwealth’s single most loyal and Anglophile nation. Daily life was marked by rugby and cricket, shillings and pounds, tea and pudding, ruthlessly boiled vegetables, left-side driving, and rhyming slang. In the cities and suburbs, at least, Australian culture often seemed imported wholecloth from the United Kingdom.

But where Great Britain faced in on itself, toward London, Australia faced outward, to the coast. The endless red-dirt moonscape of Australia’s interior was described by early English settlers as the “ghastly blank”—aboriginals called it the Outback—and almost no one lived there. With a 1914 population of just 4 million people, Australia was less populated than New York City, and apart from Adelaide and Perth, the country had developed almost entirely on a semitropical 450-mile coastal crescent between Sydney and Brisbane.

It was nearly impossible not to be drawn to the ocean in this part of the country. Beautiful scallop-edged beaches filled the gaps between headlands and points. The climate for much of the year practically demanded the removal of excess clothing. Water temperatures often hovered around 70 degrees. Yet for most of the nineteenth century, Australian beachgoing was governed by the same set of Victorian bylaws as in England. This included curfews for “sea bathing” (in general, no swimming between 7 am and 6 pm), area restrictions (at Sydney’s Manly Beach, no swimming “in waters exposed to view from any wharf, street, public place or dwelling house”), dress codes (neck-to-knee bathing costumes for both men and women), and gender segregation, with all relevant bylaws to be enforced by city-employed “nuisance inspectors.” By the late 1880s, a small but keen group of Sydney schoolboys nonetheless figured out for themselves how to bodysurf. Arthur Lowe of Manly Beach was among the first, and decades later he recalled his autogenic discovery, at age seven, of what locals would soon call “surf-shooting.”

At first I was content to play about amongst the rolling surf, and get the warmth that their friction and tumbling-about would engender. But as the days went on I wasn’t satisfied. There was something missing. Then, unconsciously, I found myself plunging with the wave as it rolled to the shore. And then swimming with the wave [as it] broke. And struggling to stay on it. Others watched me with great interest, and tried to divine what I was trying to achieve in this year of our Lord, 1886. At the time, I did not know myself. I was but following a certain course set for me . . . to recover man’s greatest, most thrilling, and cheapest sport ever, requiring no clubs, bats nor balls, next to no garments . . . just one’s body and health and strength. Then came the day, just before I reached the eighth year of my life, when I went for a wave just beyond my own depth, caught it, and shot with my head and shoulders well out in front, steered through my fellow surf-bathers, and grounded my chin on the shoreline. I rose to my feet. I felt very grateful.

Two or three years later, a more advanced form of bodysurfing was introduced to Australia by a Vanatu islander named Tommy Tanna, who worked as a staff gardener for a Manly Beach family. At daybreak, after setting his fish traps on a nearby headland, Tanna would jump directly from the rocks into the water, catch an unbroken wave, and ride in with arms tucked to his sides. Arthur Lowe and Freddie Williams were among the locals who befriended Tanna, copied his wave-riding style, and then introduced the sport to other Sydney-area beaches, where it quickly caught on. The famous Australian Crawl swimming stroke was likewise appropriated around this time, at nearby Bronte Beach, from a ten-year-old Solomon Islands houseboy named Alick Wickham. A future champion swimmer for Australia, Wickham also helped spread the word about bodysurfing.

Frustrated Australian bodysurfers and beachgoers, mostly from Sydney but also from Queensland and Victoria, made up the “all-day surf-bathing” movement in the 1890s. Fairly or not, credit for the movement’s success went to a self-important British immigrant named William Gocher, who owned a small Manly-area newspaper. Gocher was a latecomer to surf-bathing and probably didn’t know how to swim. Still, in 1902, after receiving basic surf zone instruction from a few locals sympathetic to the cause, Gocher ran a notice in his paper stating the date and place of his upcoming illegal midday swim at Freshwater Beach. He entered the water as promised and rode a small wave back to shore “breathing salt, spray and defiance” (Gocher’s words; other sources claim he didn’t ride a wave at all). He was then promptly escorted off the beach by police, questioned—and let go without charge. Swimming restrictions, by the early years of the new century, were apparently viewed as too ridiculous for local governments to bother defending with any vigor. Beaches remained segregated by gender. Nuisance inspectors still prowled about, making sure that bathing costumes were of appropriate length and cut. But surf-bathing was now open to one and all.

Predictably, the number of beachfront drownings shot up at once. Locally funded lifeguard organizations (“surf clubs,” as termed by the Australians) were soon chartered in response, and lifeguard clubhouses were built front and center on every popular beach. Volunteer club members in matching swimsuits drilled like military units, grimly working the spooling belt and reel device, sprint-swimming with cork-filled life jackets, and rowing their high-prowed wooden surfboats out across the hedgerows of broken surf, only to turn around and ride the waves back to shore. An early version of Surf Life Saving Australia—originally called the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia—was formed in 1907; within three years there were SLSA chapters in Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia, as well as New Zealand. Saturday afternoon “surf carnivals” were held, in which club members competed in a newly invented set of beachfront games and events. Each carnival opened with a bit of vestigial British pageantry (club members lined up in formation behind their flag-bearer for a solemn march and review), and closed with a lot of back-slapping cheers as competitors all retreated to the local clubhouse for beers and a long recap of the day’s events.

While still a junior member among English-speaking nations, Australia proudly took the worldwide lead in beach safety—with hundreds of lifesaving rescues made each year—and the bronzed clubbie, with his rubber swim cap and tiny pectoral-hugging swimsuit, soon become the country’s first iconic figure.

While still a junior member among English-speaking nations, Australia proudly took the worldwide lead in beach safety—with hundreds of lifesaving rescues made each year—and the bronzed clubbie, with his rubber swim cap and tiny pectoral-hugging swimsuit, become the country's first iconic figure.

Chapter: 2

Gliding Return

Surf Shooting Down Under

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