This interview, recorded by Phil Jarratt, was originally published in a 1977 issue of Tracks magazine. Raymond was 22 at the time.

I was born in Wauchope, out in the country, and we lived in Nambucca Heads until I was four. Then we moved to Sydney, near Bronte Beach, and that’s where I started surfing.

What did your parents do for a living?

My mother was a stenographer and my old man was a bit of everything. A bit of a scammer. I’m really not sure what he was into. He died of a heart attack when he was 36. He lived pretty fast.

What made your family move from the country to the city?

My old man bought a book called How to be a Watchmaker, and six weeks later he opened up a watchmaking business in Nambucca Heads. Turns out there wasn’t much work for a watchmaker in Nambucca Heads, so he spent most of his time fishing and shooting. Het couldn’t support his family like that so we had to move to Sydney. We moved into a classic old house with heaps of bedrooms and high ceilings and my parents turned it into a boarding house. We always had broke young guys staying, these cruisers, staying there. Really funny guys, some of them. One guy was the front half of a donkey in a circus act. We had a jug band, and at night they’d play broomsticks and jugs and anything they could find that made noise.

I enjoyed it up until about second year [age 14] and then it became stifling. I got more into surfing and spent less time at school. Then I just stopped studying completely. For the last two years I was in school I didn’t take a single note. I’d turn up once a fortnight or something. In fourth year—the year of the School Certificate—I did four surf trips to Queensland, three to Victoria and one to Cactus. Fifth year was the same, and at the end they told me I hadn’t gone enough to sit for the exams, so I started fifth year again the next year. Then I chucked it in completely.

Yeah, kinda. I’m sorry in a way that I didn’t finish school. I feel that I was denied the education that everyone has a right to. But I couldn’t do the subjects I wanted to do. They wouldn't take me seriously. For example, I wanted to do home economics. I wanted to learn how to cook, right? I really wanted to learn how to cook, but there were no guys in that class, just chicks. So the teachers just thought I wanted to be in a class full of girls. I got sour with it and lost all interest.

Do you think you could’ve done better at school under a different system?

Yeah, I got a raw deal at school. I missed out on learning how to learn. Or that’s what they should teach you at school, anyway—the way to learn. As I travel, I keep my ears and eyes open all the time and listen to people who are older and wiser than me.


Mostly guys who surfed because we all lived near the beach, but I was a lot keener than most of them. What usually happened was I’d hang out with a group of guys who were at one stage in their surfing, and I’d catch up to them, pass them, and move into another group of guys who were at a higher level. I was always leaving behind most of the people I surfed with. In the end I was hanging around with guys who were a lot older than me.

I started out as a goody goody, I guess. But it changed. There’s nothing delinquent about surfing but it sort of puts you on the wrong side of the establishment. You’re going to be labelled as an arsehole anyway so you end up just being one in the eye of some people.

I never stole cars or anything like that. No, I was just really wrapped up in surfing. When you’re that keen on something you don’t have time to be a trog.

The area you were brought up in is notorious for its drug scene. Did you get caught up in that?

Bondi’s just full-on. It’s got a bit of Hollywood in it. You can walk off the beach and step into any situation. When I began surfing I was a clean-cut kid. The other kids were smoking joints and taking LSD, but I shunned the whole lot, I was totally against it. Then I turned 17 and did a total about-face. Just turned into a total drug fiend.

I was smoking joints all the time, but after awhile I wasn’t satisfied with the buzz I was getting off that. So I’d get a bunch of hash and LSD and go home to my room and get totally spaced out in my own little bubble. I joined the fire brigade and earned $150 a week and I’d spent $100 of that on dope.

Did anyone warn you that you were screwing yourself up?

Actually I don’t think many people knew I was into it.

Yeah, that’s why it was worse. If I’d been into it socially it probably would have been cool but I used to like going off on my own and getting totally blitzed. 

Seems like a strange preoccupation for a good young surfer to get into. 

I ended up seeing some really heavy scenes, because the people I hung with to buy dope were not surfers. They were total deviates and fiends. I remember spending two days at a time in slummy little flats with these fiends shooting up, dropping LSD and smoking joints nonstop. One day I got up at eight o’clock, smoked a couple of joints, took a tab of LSD and smoked some more while I waited for it to come on. Then about 30 minutes after I took the LSD I shot up and must have passed out. I got up later, totally zonked out of my head and started smoking again. That day I think I had four tabs of acid because I was afraid of coming down. It amazes me that you managed to keep it in the closet. The people who were close to me knew what I was going on. Other than that, I mean, I didn’t go around advertising it. I’d have these rushes of guilt. I knew I was screwing myself up. Some days I’d wake up and feel like a real crud. I’d go down to the pool and swim 20 laps and run along the beach and spend a day in the sun and get fit. But that wasn’t solving the problem, which was this frustrated life I’d brought onto myself. So anyway, with the drugs, I think I was punishing myself in a way, because I was trying to fit into society doing something I didn’t really want to do.

You mean the fire brigade? [Note: Raymond at the time was a rookie fireman]

Yeah. As a young guy, I’d been surfing with people like Rabbit [Bartholomew] and PT [Peter Townend] in the Australian Titles and contests like that, equalling their efforts and sometimes beating them. Then I got caught up in this so-called normal life where I had to get a job unrelated to what I was really interested in. I joined the fire brigade, thinking I’d be satisfied because I’d have plenty of money and plenty of time to surf—but I wasn’t satisfied at all. I’d pick up a surf mag and read about other guys going to Hawaii and being successful. I had the energy to be doing that too, but I had to stifle myself and bring myself down to a level where I could handle doing mundane work.


Why did you choose to go in that direction? Couldn’t you have done what Rabbit and PT and the other guys were doing?

I don’t think I had the guts at that point. There was this outside pressure. Or I put the pressure on myself. Like, it was easy to get the ordinary job and do it every day. The hard thing was to put all that aside and do what I wanted to do. There are a lot of people who are like that, you know? They just do their jobs everyday and never push themselves, never find out what they’re capable of—and a lot of them are alcoholics. They sit in an office somewhere and appear to be quite successful, but underneath they’re discontent. That’s what I was doing. I’d come home from the fire station and get really stoned to bring myself down. I remember times after a heavy dope binge when my brain would feel like a dirty ashtray.

So what happened? How did you manage to change things?

One day I was sitting in one of those cruddy little dope dens and Kevin Brennan came in. He was totally filthy. He’d been sleeping in gutters and was totally out of his head. I looked at him and thought, “Wow, that guy used to be one of the world’s greatest surfers.” And here he was, just totally wasted. A walking corpse. I looked at the people around me and I realized that anyone could be a heroin addict but it took something special to be the best at something, and I wanted to try and be the best, and the closest thing to me was surfing.

Sold everything I owned and booked a ticket to Hawaii. Cut off the whole lot, just walked away from it. The day I left was my deadline. No more getting stoned. I removed myself from the life I’d been living, I teamed up with Geoff McCoy and Mark Warren, and went to Hawaii to surf. That was just a seven week trip but I saw how good things could be, how much I could do and where I could go.

I did the amateurs in the Smirnoff Pro-Am and came fourth. That was the confidence booster I needed.

He got behind me with surfboards, and in general helped push what I’d got started.

I’d known him for a few years but not closely. It wasn’t until that first trip to Hawaii that we became good friends. He made me a fleet of really great surfboards.

Have you got a contest strategy worked out? Is there a certain way you’re going to act when you go to the beach?

No, not as such. I’m just going to be myself. I do treat it like a job, though. You get up, take a shower, brush your hair and teeth, have a shave and go to work. If you’re a businessman, you know you have to look neat and have a good act to meet with the board of directors. Same for a surfing contest, you have your boards ready and waxed, you watch at the surf to see what it’s doing, and you just get into a competitive pattern of thought right from the start.

Right now pro surfing is limitless. There are no boundaries as to how far we can take this. Australians in particular, because we’re doing so well internationally. Soon we’ll be recognized for it, and we won’t just be talking to our own media. It’ll be 

 magazine, things like that. For me personally, it’s a way of pushing myself as far as I want. There’s no point where surfing ends and you’ve got to step down into something else. Surfing will expand as far as you want it.

Bruce Raymond

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