Yesterday I hung out at Chris Garrett’s Phantom Surfboards shop in Burleigh. Phantom is a core Gold Coast surfboard factory where one can still hear the whine of Skil 100 planers and smell the pungent resin scent of curing boards drying on the racks. Chris was out with a gammy foot from kicking a door in frustration but his shop boss, Pete McGuinness, gave me the five-dollar tour. The factory was a warren of cluttered shaping bays decorated with years of profound and obscene shaper graffiti.
I was introduced to the current shop rats, Tom and Libby, a young couple from Norfolk, UK. They were pitched up in a kombi out back. To me they represented everything good and real about surfing, as dark forces from within the surfing community seek to chop it up like hamburger to sell to the clueless Great Unwet.
It proved to me there was still a world where kids not even out of high school didn’t get paid obscene amounts of money to shill surf clothing. There were still kids who lived in old cars and worked dinky part-time jobs just so they could get enough scratch together to live the dream. These two poms grew up surfing shitty, cold, small waves in the English Channel, but schemed a way to make their surfing dream beat hard with a strong, wild heart. Good on them and their gracious Aussie hosts.
Pete, who lets them park out back and use the shop bog, said his hospitality was a way of saying thank you to their English ancestors who transported Pete’s convict forebears to Australia 200 years ago.
So, been taking yoga classes and going to drum circles with fellow surfwriter Tim Baker and his newly pregnant wife Kirstin. Despite the legendary Australian-male sexism and the Goldy’s audaciously tacky plastic façade, it’s pretty new age, touchy-feely around here. There are lots of organic cafes and yoga studios on every corner. In a way, the Goldy is a sort of parallel-universe Byron Bay where one can make a decent wage.
In a past incarnation Tim was a full-on Ocker, a footie-loving surfie with a bad attitude who once had a screwdriver held to his jugular by a wild-eyed Johnny Boy Gomes. But these days he smiles easily, burns incense and gives lots of back massages. I told him he should clean the bog often for Kirstin’s sake – make it a flowered shrine of sorts for her bouts of morning sickness. They live in a cozy cabin up in the gums of the Domain. Gets a bit chilly at night so he burns stringy-bark branches that smell quite fragrant. He says he’s writing a book about his transformation. It’s called “From Yob to Yogi”.
Currumbin (Aboriginal for “shifting sands”) is a nature reserve of sorts. Lots of native wildlife still comes down from the river valley to bless or plague the two-footed suburban interlopers. I saw a possum and heard a big gallah laughing in a backyard tree last night. There are ancient sacred gum trees and aboriginal sites scattered all through the region. Good Thai food as well.
Yesterday I made the 1:00 p.m. “Snakes Alive!” snake show at the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Australia is home to four of the world’s most venomous snakes, which include the Eastern Brown snake, The Taipan, and the colorfully named Death Adder.
Some snake trivia: A Death Adder has the fastest strike in nature—1/20th of a second. The fastest you can blink is 1/18th. Its large scimitar-like fangs can pierce thick denim and boot leather. One average-sized Death Adder has enough venom to kill eight adults. That same snake can potentially curb the reproduction of 3000 rodents. Australia, therefore, has never suffered from the Plague. Small comfort if you’re lying out in the bush – paralyzed from a Death Adder bite – feeling your internal organs melt down and your heart slowly seize up like a car with a sugar-spiked gas tank.
