New Stories or Old Ones? is an excerpt from Clifton Evers' newest book, Notes for a Young Surfer.
Stories about independent blokes like outlaws, larrikins, anti-heroes, as well as a “full pantheon of inventors, travellers, rogues, competitors, and stylists,” were told and retold by surfers around me until they captured my imagination.[i] It’s how I learned to be enthusiastic for the “escape” from the humdrum of everyday life—work, school and family.
The pioneer of our local spot, Larry’s, stories told me to avoid the white picket-fenced house, two cars, steady job and kids. Home life was negatively linked with being tied down, being pussy whipped, and being like a woman. It’s rubbish though. Home life can be very fulfilling, and heaps of stay-at-home dads and mums would vouch for that.
I drew pictures of my favorite versions of the “heroes” on my schoolbooks. Posters of them plastered my bedroom walls. Mind you, these blokes weren’t actually heroes. It would have been more appropriate for me to restrict that title to people who go out of their way to help others.
Over-the-top adjectives were used in the stories about these blokes: cultish, innovative, masterful, enigmatic, dependable, industrious, revered, imposing, determined, stylish, smooth, gritty, powerful, hard-charging, self-destructive, thrill-seeking—and that would be just one bloke. It’s a tall order to live up to such expectations and qualities.
For many families, the steady job, safety and comfortable home life the surfer is meant to reject are themselves a faraway dream. Some families are poor, some are limited by their cultural situations, live in war-torn areas and the like; some have too many bills to pay to just get by. They don’t have such things to ‘escape from’ in the first place. And if they did, why would they want to? Independence is a privilege, and can come at the expense of thinking about and helping others.
I dreamed about the lives of the “heroes.” The act of being enthusiastic about them kept their stories, insider knowledge and version of manhood going round, even though I could never be like that.
Michael Peterson is revered as the most charismatic bloke ever in Australian surfing stories, the essence of the anti-hero. Surf journalist Sean Doherty wrote a biography of MP. In it, he explains that during the early 1970s, at the birth of professional surfing, Peterson won every major surf contest in Australia. He’d paddle out late for a heat, arriving from around the headland riding a wave to psyche out his competitor. Peterson was an imposing figure, with long limbs, a muscled physique and a focused stare. He shaped his own boards. He sometimes wouldn’t turn up at award ceremonies to accept prizes, and when he did he was drunk, or drugged up to the eyeballs. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia after a dramatic police chase in 1983.[ii]
But while MP was idolised, it was Larry’s stories about the Californian surfer Mickey ‘Da Cat’ Dora that most influenced me. Larry called Dora the surf mongrel because he was one of the very first to just do his own thing: surf, party hard, avoid work, and travel to far-flung surf spots. When asked about his lifestyle, Dora said:
My whole life is this escape, my whole life is this wave. I drop into ’em, set the whole thing up, pull out the bottom turn, pull up into it and shoot for my life, going for broke man, behind me, all the shit goes over my back. The screaming parents, teachers, police, priests, politicians, kneeboarders, wind-surfers, they’re all going over the falls into the reef—head first into the fucking reef—and I’m shooting for my life, and when it starts to close out, I pull out the bottom, out to the back, and I pick up another one, and do the same goddamn thing.[iii]
Dora began surfing in the 1950s. He hated the rise of the surf industry, and the use of surfing to sell things. Sometimes Dora wrote angry letters to the surf media about how the buying and selling of the “surf image” corrupted the uncomplicated life of surfing.
It wasn’t until later in life that I began to think that for a bloke who thought surf culture was a sell-out, Dora took part in it an awful lot. He wrote stories for the surf media about his pranks and travels, and did stunts for Hollywood films. Perhaps he knew how to exploit the industry for coin and status by living, and then selling, a rebellious and romantic story of surfing and manhood.
It’s possible that the colorful story of manhood passed on by Dora led to more buying and selling of the surfing image. Dora’s followers preach his story as gospel and demand long-term commitment to it. It’s Dora’s story of surfing and manhood that seduces most people into taking up surfing; it’s the engine room of the surfing industry.
While I may be wrong about Dora, it is always important to question heroes, legends, idols and role models. It’s healthy to blaspheme them, and never blindly follow their lead.
New Stories or Old Ones? is an excerpt from Clifton Evers’ newest book, Notes for a Yong Surfer. Click here to learn more about Evers and purchase a copy of his book.
[i] Matt Warshaw (2004) Zero Break: an Illustrated Collection of Surf Writing, 1777-2004, Harcourt, p. 48.
[ii] Sean Doherty (2004) MP: The Life of Michael Peterson, Sydney, HarperCollins.
[iii] Surfers: The Movie (1990) Directed by Bill Delaney.
