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

Surfing pioneer work was underway during the 1930s in Lima, Durban, Rio, and a few other coastal cities. But the surf world remained for the most part tri-cornered—practiced in Australia, Hawaii, and California by less than three thousand people total—and each region was separated from the others by layers of cultural and geographic insulation. More than 7,500 miles of Pacific Ocean separated Los Angeles and Sydney, for example, without a single wire, cable, or satellite connecting the two. Over the previous thirty-five years, maybe a dozen surfers had circulated between California and Hawaii. Even less went from Australia to Hawaii, or vice versa, and surf travel between California and Australia didn’t exist. Occasionally a bit of surf news, in a magazine article or newsreel short, went international, and the hollow board was common to all three regions. Then there was Duke Kahanamoku, the living King of Kings, known and admired by wave-riders everywhere. Beyond that, not much crossed over from one surf region to the next.

Australia during the Depression was truly a surfing land unto itself. World War I had brought horrific carnage to this young gung-ho nation—resulting in 60,000 dead and 170,000 wounded Australian soldiers, out of a total population of 5 million—and inspired a long war-related political slugfest. In the postwar years it seemed like the entire country went to the beach for healing and reconciliation. On a hot summer weekend afternoon, Sydneyites by the tens of thousands drove their flivvers to Manly and Bondi and the rest of the sand-fronted suburbs to take a dip, sunbathe, and parade across the new amusement-lined boardwalks and piers. A few hundred miles north, a lush strip of coast in South Queensland, anchored by the Surfer’s Paradise Hotel, was being promoted as Australia’s version of Waikiki.

Duke Kahanamoku had left his sugar pine surfboard behind after his visit in 1915, and replica boards quickly turned up on Sydney beaches from Cronulla to Avoca. With each year, though, Duke’s performances, and his guide to proper technique and form, receded in memory, and the locals pretty much invented their own version of the sport. Australia’s east coast beaches were filled with quick, steep, fast-curling “dump” waves. Riding here wasn’t anything like Waikiki, where gently-sloped breakers nearly guaranteed a smooth entry. A long, heavy board paddled into a Sydney shorebreak dumper by a typically overeager novitiate was likely to tip to one side or nosedive into a shuddering full-stop “pearl.” During takeoff, the Australian surfer learned to pivot his board 90 degrees, parallel to the crest and at right angles to his body, and then plunge down to the trough—sometimes at one with the curl—like a human seaplane. Once safely ahead of the whitewater, the board was quickly rotated back to the standard nose-forward position, and the surfer would jump to his feet and carry on toward shore. “We just reckoned that two feet of sideways board was easier to handle on the dump than nine feet of board straight on,” one of the top Aussie surfers of the time recalled. If the wave had a suitable shoulder, a top rider might cautiously put his board on an angle, just as they did in California and Hawaii—“cornering,” as the local blokes called it.

Bodysurfing was practiced in Australia by nearly everyone but the infirm and elderly, and wave-riding expanded with the 1930’s introduction of two homegrown products, the wave ski and the Surfoplane. Saxon Crackenthorpe, a Sydney physician, brought his patent-approved surf ski to Manly Beach in 1934 (though he apparently stole the idea from a teenager in nearby Port Macquaire), and the new craft proved immediately popular for both wave-riding and rescue work. A surf ski was thick, wide, and hollow, usually about 8-feet long, with a slightly pitched deck—sort of a cross between a surfboard and an Eskimo canoe. Second-generation models were much longer, up to 17 feet, and some were made for two riders. Sitting on the deck, legs forward and feet held in place by a pair of cloth straps, the rider maneuvered through the water using a twin-bladed paddle. For the experienced hand, catching waves was nearly effortless, and with some added thrust during takeoff, it was possible to jet out ahead of the mauling dump section. While riding, the paddle itself could be used both for balance and as a rudder; an ambitious surf skier could also brace the paddle on the deck and jump to a standing position. In the late 1960s, the surf ski would be replaced by the compact and maneuverable, plastic-molded wave ski, which remains hugely popular in Australia.

Ernest Smithers, another wave-riding Sydney doctor, brought out his inflatable rubber Surfoplane in 1934, and it soon became Australia’s most popular surfcraft. Four feet long and 20 inches wide, the Surfoplane inflated with a tire pump and had a pair of solid rubber handles glued like bumpers to the nose. Kids loved them. So did wave-dabbling adults. Surfoplanes were soft and safe, cheap and transportable, and a breeze to use. A surf session was brought to a quick end with a puncture or tear, but an overnight glue-on canvas patch usually put things right. Although designed for prone use, youngsters immediately began to ride on their knees, even standing; three generations of Aussie nippers got their first best rides on the Surfoplane. Inflatables would later become just as popular in America, where they were called “surf mats”—most often the familiar blue-and-yellow mats built by tennis show giant Converse.

For all of Australia’s ingenious surfing equipment developments, the sport remained very much an auxiliary of the powerful Surf Life Saving Association of Australia. A sports organization and social network as much as it was a lifeguard service, the all-volunteer SLSA, by 1935, had nearly ten thousand bronzed, muscled, highly-disciplined members who were the beachfront pride of the British Empire. On any given summer weekend, surf clubs were responsible for hundreds of rescues nationwide. From the mercilessly competitive SLSA ranks came people like Andrew “Boy” Charlton, who won an Olympic gold medal at age sixteen, and Harold Hardwick, who won the 100-yard freestyle swim in the 1911 Festival of Empire Games in London and less than forty-eight hours later KO’d not one but 

 fighters, in back-to-back matches, to take the heavyweight boxing championship. Fathers helped sons train for their Bronze Medallion, which allowed them to become a patrolling member of the local club. Young SLSA initiates submitted gratefully to frat-style hazing by senior members and dreamed of manning the sweep and leading their club’s surf boat team to victory. Local sheilas arranged their beach towels so that they might cut looks at their favorite club members, and made plans for the big Saturday night clubhouse dance—the only time girls were allowed entrance into what was otherwise an inaccessible boys-only establishment.

Given the SLSA’s beachfront dominance, surfing Down Under was bound to come of age as a much different sport than it did elsewhere. Virtually all first-generation Australian surfers were lifesavers first and wave-riders second. Surfing was something you did during off-duty hours, knowing that many of your fellow clubbies thought the whole thing was somewhat pointless, and maybe even detrimental to the good of the club, as wave-riding had nothing to do with making rescues. The sport was included in carnivals, but as an afterthought.

In 1927, SLSA president Charles Paterson—the same Charles Paterson who, in 1912, failed utterly at surfing and converted his redwood plank into the family ironing board—voiced the prevailing Aussie lifesaver’s view of the surfer when, after a visit to Hawaii, he described the local guards as “lazy boys” who “spend their whole time on the beach, giving exhibitions on the board or taking out bathers on board or outrigger.” The SLSA’s disdain for surfing, and surfers, was also made clear the year before, during a 1926 carnival in Newcastle: after a shark was spotted cruising just beyond the surf line, meet organizers, rather than ordering a cancellation or postponement, simply reshuffled the day’s events and ordered the board-riders into the water.

Hollow surfboards were introduced to Australia in 1934 by Sydney’s Frank Adler, a Bluto-like paddling champion who made his first board by carefully following the do-it-yourself instructions from an imported issue of 

. The hollow was adopted for rescue work, but reluctantly; Australian guards never took to it the way their American counterparts did, instead favoring homegrown equipment like the surf boat and the belt and reel.

Still, the SLSA made room for surfing—indeed, just about every surfboard in a given beach community was stored in the local clubhouse. Boards were in fact often regarded as club property, regardless of who built or paid for it; the club insignia was painted on the deck, and any further design was invariably rendered in club colors. When it came to pure surfing (not rescue work), Australians far preferred the hollow board to the plank, and the bigger the better. The most popular model was the “racing 16” (also known as the “toothpick”), a lethal-looking stiletto of pine and plywood, 16 feet long and a scant 20 inches wide.

There were a few early signs that surfing would eventually break from lifesaving. Claude West and Charles “Snowy” McAlister, SLSA members with solid rescue work credentials, were both celebrated mostly for their wave-riding skills. A lantern-jawed apprentice undertaker, West as a teenager attached himself to Duke Kahanamoku following one of the Hawaiian’s surfing exhibitions at Freshwater, and Kahanamoku later anointed West by giving him, for keeps, the sugar pine demonstration board. One year later, West was the best of the fifty or so dedicated surf-shooters in Australia. Ten years after that, in 1925, when the national surfing population was somewhere around 500, he was still on top. West was the first native-born surfer to give demonstrations; if the event was within a few miles of his Manly Beach home, more often than not he would hoist his board to the water’s edge and paddle up or down the coast to the demonstration site. A Kahanamoku loyalist, West for decades honored the Hawaiian’s legend by riding Duke’s Freshwater board at least once a year.

West was a skilled and durable wave-rider, but also quiet and serious, with a vaguely patrician bearing. To some degree, he was a placeholder for Snowy McAlister, a friendly little gamecock of a surfer who, spiritually if not chronologically, was a much better fit for the role of Australia’s surfing forefather. Yet another wave-crazed Manly youth, McAlister also saw one of Kahanamoku’s demonstrations, and at age eleven he made himself a smaller version of the board Kahanamoku had given to Claude West. Eight years later McAlister beat West in the board-riding portion of the SLSA nationals. Two years after that, at the 1928 championships, McAlister famously kicked up into a headstand while riding, carried on through the shallow water, grounded himself on the beach and held a fully inverted position until a meet official walked down, tapped McAlister’s leg, and announced him as the winner. McAlister would remain a happy, friendly, yarn-spinning presence on Australian beaches for another sixty years; at a local surfing contest in the early 1980s, he arrived wearing a T-shirt with “Valuable Surfing Antique” printed across the chest.

Sydney was the undisputed capital of Australian surfing during the interwar years, but the sport migrated easily to Queensland’s semitropical Gold Coast, and also took root in the beaches around Perth, Adeline, and Geelong, Victoria. But progress was slow. Surfing in Australia wasn’t the Sport of Kings, as it was in Hawaii, and had little or none of the early-onset cult panache that was developing in California. While Australia was destined to become the world’s most exciting surf nation, first it would have to make a clean break from the SLSA.

World War I had brought horrific carnage to this young gung-ho nation—60,000 dead and 170,000 wounded Australian soldiers, out of a total population of 5 million. In the postwar years it seemed like the entire country went to the beach for healing and reconciliation.

Chapter: 2

Gliding Return

When Clubbies Ruled Australia

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