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

“Surf-shooting” on a board wasn’t entirely new to Australia in 1914 when Duke Kahanamoku visited on his swimming tour, although misfires had been the rule up to that point. Years earlier, Pacific Island swimming marvel Alick Wickham had lugged an oversized piece of driftwood off the beach and carved it into a surfboard, which sank not long after Wickham’s first test run. Manly resident Charlie Paterson shipped a plank-style board back with him from Waikiki in 1912, but he had no luck riding it in Sydney’s irregular beachbreak surf; he retired the beautiful redwood craft to the family laundry room, where it served as an ironing board. A few local bodysurfers, however, made copies of Paterson’s board and began riding already-broken waves, usually prone or kneeling, but occasionally pushing up to their feet. Queenslanders had meanwhile taken to riding smaller cedar or pine “prone boards.”

Australians saw photographs and newsreels of Hawaiian surfing, which helped push things along. At a 1912 surf carnival at Freshwater, Sydney’s 

 noted that sailor Tommy Walker gave “a clever exhibition of surfing shooting . . . coming in on the breakers standing balanced on his feet or his head.” But the sport hadn’t caught on in general, and the surfboard, according to another newspaper, remained “an instrument of pleasure that Australians have so far been unsuccessful in handling to any degree.”

Duke Kahanamoku took up lodging at Freshwater Beach a few days before Christmas, ready to perform in a series of hotly anticipated demonstration swim meets—or “Kahanamoku carnivals,” as named by the local press. Meanwhile, he was feted and toasted, interviewed and photographed. Government officials and event planners did not discuss it openly, but it was understood that White Australia policies didn’t apply to Kahanamoku. He was the world’s best swimmer, and Australia was a swimming-crazed nation. He was also American, a global celebrity, and had made friends with the best Aussie swimmers two years earlier in Stockholm. Dark skin, in this particular case, didn’t matter. “Athletically and socially,” one biography put it, “Duke was accepted [in Australia] as a quality human being.”

It was Kahanamoku’s idea to put on a surfing demonstration. At his request a lumberyard delivered a heavy rough-hewn slab of sugar pine (he asked for redwood, but none was available), which he planed down to a crude but serviceable 80-pound plank—which local reporters variously referred to as a “raft,” “canoe,” and “coffin lid.” On Tuesday, December 22, two thousand spectators arrived at Freshwater to watch the “Bronzed Islander” shoot the surf, but in a mean bit of shorefront politics, the event was blocked at the last moment by New South Wales swimming officials, who by contract had final say over all of Kahanamoku’s performances. Two days later, when Duke finally took to the waves in the officially sanctioned performance, the crowd was less than a hundred.

It was a clear midsummer morning, and waves were shoulder-high, choppy and ragged, but adequate. Kahanamoku muscled his board into the water, then quickly outdistanced a few local swimmers, who joined in for an impromptu race through the surf. In what was probably a half-hour display, he rode straight to the beach, cut along on a slant, and pivoted around to ride backward. “Kahanamoku’s control of the improvisation was wonderful,” the 

 wrote, further noting that the Hawaiian at one point dropped prone on his board and “caused it to describe a turn completely round without spoiling the shoot.”

Several more Sydney-area surfing demonstrations followed in January and February, with the number of spectators reaching as high as three thousand. One of the best-attended was a January 10 visit to Dee Why, when Kahanamoku encored by riding tandem with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl named Isabel Letham. After shrieking at Kahanamoku to let the waves pass, Letham fell into stunned silence after he caught a small roller, stood, reached down, and hoisted her upright before him. (In later years, Letham became a Jazz Age adventuress who taught swimming at the University of California at Berkeley and worked in a San Francisco hair salon. She continued riding waves into the 1960s, and she was often described as the First Lady of Australian Surfing. When Letham died in 1995, at age ninety-five, her ashes were scattered at Freshwater.)

At every stop on his surfing demonstration tour, Kahanamoku patiently and pleasantly talked to the locals about wave-riding technique and showed them in detail how to make their own boards. There were also lessons in beachboy comportment– at a formal dinner in his honor, when asked to say a few words, Kahanamoku delighted the room by instead playing his ukulele and singing a Hawaiian song.

During a side trip to New Zealand, Kahanamoku gave two more surfing exhibitions, one in Wellington, the other in Christchurch. He also spent several days with the native Maori, who were Polynesia’s southwestern-most settlers. Like the Hawaiians, the Maori had board-surfed during the warm summer months, but this ended after Christian missionaries arrived in New Zealand. Surfing would return here following Kahanamoku’s visit, but just barely—the weather was too cold for much of the year.

Australia’s surf-shooters, before Kahanamoku’s visit, had doubted whether their homegrown waves were of suitable quality for what was sometimes referred to as “Hawaiian”-style riding—as if the local version of the sport, just as a matter of geographical bad luck, was destined to be a lesser version of that practiced in the islands. For a long time it was. Aussie surfers wouldn’t be on equal footing with Hawaiians or Californians until the early 1960s. Yet Kahanamoku clearly demonstrated that the waves were just fine, and that wave-riding here could be performed at a level miles above the going standard. The message was instantly embraced. As he left the water after his first Freshwater debut, Kahanamoku was mobbed by a group of teenager boys who were hopping up the beach shouting, “Give us a try!” Duke handed his board over, and before he was done toweling off, one of the boys was on his feet, wobbling toward shore, his mates scrambling along in his wake, each one determined that he’d get the next ride.

Duke patiently and pleasantly talked to the locals about wave-riding technique and showed them how to make their own boards. There were lessons in beachboy comportment—at a formal dinner, when asked to say a few words, Kahanamoku delighted the room by instead playing his ukulele and singing a Hawaiian song.

Chapter: 2

Gliding Return

The Bronzed Islander Shows How

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