The instructions were pretty vague: compare my Australian experiences with the Great American Surf Life. Like Jules from Pulp Fiction: "Just walk from town to town, meet people, get in adventures." Photo: Barlo
“Prosperity and mass car ownership after World War II, together with the youth surf culture and the rise of the Gold Coast as a tourist destination, resulted in massive traffic jams on the two-lane South Coast ‘Highway’“—from “Queensland’s Smart Road, the M1 Pacific Motorway”.
To be a great surfer one must first be a great driver. Or at least reasonably sober. For to survey a wide variety of surf breaks in an hour’s time before the wind gets up requires the winged heels of Mercury, or a Kingswood ute, and a Holden is a hungry beast that demands kilo upon kilo of well-manicured bitumen. Give thanks to the industrial revolution the next time you paddle out for an early. If not for Henry Ford together with great feats of coastal road engineering, surfing as we know it would not exist.
The archetypical surfer’s road trip on the Pacific Highway One from Sydney to the Goldy is at once utilitarian and Homeric. The Pacific Highway, like California’s PCH or South Africa’s Garden Route, is one of the world’s great surf highways. It traces the eastern edge of NSW, more or less, through seven degrees of latitude and 800 kilometers. It is one of Australia’s most heavily used roads and also one of its most dangerous. It leads the nation in fatal head-on collisions. No odyssey is without its peril.
In the mid-sixties, scores of Sydney city youth saw the rural coast north of Newcastle as the great Never Never, the El Dorado of surfing. Rumors drifted down of miles of desolate beaches and pristine pointbreaks spinning to infinity unmolested by any surfer’s fin(s). A great modern migration—based not on a lust for unploughed fields but for uncrowded waves and some clean homegrown mul—began. They loaded up their rattling utes with boards and sleeping bags, put the Great Dividing Range on their left, and sputtered north to Nirvana.
Some, as documented in Greenough’s Innermost Limits of Pure Fun and Falzon’s Morning of the Earth, found it. Many settled and established thriving surf burgs in the small backwater towns like Noosa Heads, Byron and Yamba
And I’m on an assignment. I think. Basically, if I understand this correctly, I’m to drive from Brisbane to Sydney via the Pacific Highway, hopefully retracing in reverse the classic Australian road trip.
The instructions were pretty vague. Drive south, surf, eat, talk, take a few snapshots and jot down the occasional note. I’ve been given a short list of people to look up and a generic white Hyundai compact hire car (I requested a 1976 Kingswood) from Budget rentals. No specific focus really—just compare and contrast my Australian experiences with the Great American Surf Life. I’m reminded of Jules, the philosophical hitman from Pulp Fiction, and his desire to walk the earth like Caine in Kung Fu. “You know—just walk from town to town, meet people, get in adventures.”
This was a last-minute deal. I’d only come over to OZ for a week to escape the unrelenting rain and chilly waters of a New Zealand winter before returning home to California. But Sean Doherty, damn him, put me to work. He suggested I turn the whole trip into a drug and sex-riddled Hunter S. Thompson-esque debacle.
But one can’t plan debauchery really. And besides, real degeneracy is an acquired art that would take at least a month to build up the required levels of Class-A tolerance. I’m technically on vacation.
So, where to start? History? Well, if you fast forward from the Duke at Freshwater in 1915 and backdate to the 1956 Olympics when Greg Noll and others came over from California as part of a surf lifesaving demonstration team, that spans over four decades of discovery, design, and surfers. Myriad books are available on the subject, but I don’t care to write one myself.
Modern Australian competitive surfing? Please God, no. Statistics, and all that desperate flinging about for points, make my eyes glaze over.
I can’t tell big stories, I confuse names and dates and get my facts all jumbled up. And all the fine South Australian chardonnays available at a very reasonable price against a weak Australian dollar don’t help either.
So I decided to just hit the road ass-backwards and see where I ended up. Like Caine, I only seek water.
Editor’s Note: The following article is the first in a nine part series detailing Steve Barilotti’s travels along the coast of Australia. This article was originally published episodically in Tracks in 2001, but nine years later, it still shines true as an inspiring piece of travel writing. We hope you enjoy.
