Parko and Slater. Australia and America. Both products of the six-second theory. Photo: ASP/Carey
What’s Australian surfing all about? What’s our “culture”? If you sat down and made a list of all the uniquenesses about the way we surf in the Sunburnt Country, boardriding clubs would feature. National pride in our top surfers’ competitive success. The famous Australian skill of beer-drinking. Hardcore back-foot power surfing. To that you could add 100 other fabulous items! Fashion, music, movies, art, advertising styles, media of all kinds … hell, there are almost too many to list.
It’s incredibly tempting to judge a culture on how it appears. But it seems to me that in looking at the effects, we’re missing out on the causes. Mateship, national pride, club culture, back-foot power, all the rest of it … they seem circumstantial stuff, not enough to explain the form and function of Aussie surfing. Why did Australian surfing come to develop a distinct style of its own? Why do so many Australian surfers – great or otherwise – seem to fit so well into the competition forum? Why did the surfboard riding club develop here, and not in other nations? Why did Australia witness the birth of the shortboard, the vee-bottom, the modern twin-fin, the thruster? To see why, we might dare to delve into an ultimate cause – to wit, the wave environment itself. Might it be possible that an entire surf culture could find its ultimate cause in nothing more or less than a type of wave? To understand what the hell I’m gibbering about, let’s take a look at that first question: why we developed an original surfing style, and in turn, why so many of us plug right into modern competitive surfing.
Maybe the best way to view this is by comparison, between two of the most well-known and settled surfing coasts in the world: eastern Australia and southern California. Over the years, it’s often amazed me how many Americans, particularly older ones, refer to “aggro Aussies” – and how many Aussies swallow the label with glee. The Californian surf culture has always seen itself as laid-back, its roots in ’60s cool and longboard trim style; by contrast, Australian culture seems to revel in a vision of crazy, uncompromising animalism and competitive success.
Yet on the face of it, nothing supports the idea that Australian surfers are more “aggro” or competitive than Californians. In fact, there’s a broad base of evidence to suggest exactly the opposite. Localism, for instance, is far more vicious and locked-in at places like Lunada Bay and Hollywood-by-the-sea than it is at any Australian break – yeah, you might get vibed here, but you won’t get rocks thrown at you, or threatened with a knife, or your car pushed off a cliff. And nobody is currently languishing in an Australian jail as a result of punching out a fellow surfer – unlike in California, where in the past five years a rash of complaints have emerged from the surf and come before the courts.
The same goes for competition. West coast American lifestyles and business practices are vastly – hugely! – more cut-throat and competitive than anything you’ll find in Australia. Even in the big cities like Sydney and Melbourne, Australians tend to rely more on the informal networks of the racetrack, rugby ground and surf club to get things done; the merciless workloads, two weeks’ annual holidays and “at-will” employment contracts of Californian business are still largely unknown to the Aussie workplace.
In fact, in only one area of life might it be said that Australian surfers seem to show more aggression than their Californian counterparts, and that’s in the action of riding a wave. There’s a simple reason for this: it’s what our waves demanded.
Study the way surf hits these two coasts, and you’ll quickly notice a massive disparity in the sheer number of ridable waves arriving in virtually any given time period. Eastern Australia is characterized by the constant appearance of small, low-interval windswells and sea-state swells created overnight, or in the course of a day, by strong sea-breezes and southerly gales passing through the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. These waves are rarely larger than six feet and often broken up into messy, choppy peaks, but they arrive relentlessly, boom-boom-boom, with a wave period of six to eight seconds. Along our sandy, crescent-shaped beaches, these six-second swells also tend to provide a wide range of different wave-catching zones; it’s not uncommon to see several separate packs of a few surfers each, rather than one big group focusing in on a single takeoff zone.
In contrast, SoCal is all about groundswell. Swells arrive with plenty of warning, generally in long groomed lines, cleaned out by their 3000-kilometre-plus journeys from the further reaches of the North and South Pacific and by a broad, shallow continental shelf inside the windswell-blocking Channel Islands. These swells rely on points and a couple of handfuls of reefs to mould their length into clean, evenly shaped waves, 17 to 20 seconds apart, with nothing in between. Dramatically different surf, calling for dramatically different responses.
A six-second-interval windswell, with its quick peaky angles and short speed runs, gives a surfer little time to relax. By its very nature, it rewards quick reflexes, turns snapped around hard in the lip, recoveries – exactly the sort of surfing that the second generation of hot Australians became internationally known for in the early to mid 1970s. That style, so natural when applied to east coast beachbreaks, came as utterly alien to the eyes of Californian surfers, whose long clean flat-faced waves demanded an angular, controlled stall-and-trim approach. No wonder – if you looked at surfing style alone – it was so easy to see Australians as “aggro”. And no wonder the Aussies of the day saw themselves that way too, when they compared their surfing with the cruise-control riding practiced by Californians.
The issue was compounded by another feature of the six-second windswell: it has many disadvantages of shape, but a massive advantage in numbers. Waves pile in so fast, in so many different angles, they act as a constant goad to the surfer. There’s no sitting still in windswell surf; you’re either duckdiving, chasing a peak down the sandbar, or going left on what started out looking like a right but changed its mind halfway through. It breeds a surfing approach based on constant movement through the lineup, constant adaptation to change – and when that’s combined with a short-turning, snappy wave-riding style, you have something ideally suited to competitive surfing.
So Aussies became known as aggressive and competitive, the Californians as soulful and fluid … yet the only real basis for these traits is the type of surf with which they dealt. While Australians had to learn to move, Californians had long since learned to sit and wait. And there’s the biggest significant difference between the cultures.
