Nav Fox. Photo: Barlo
Rough as guts she was, with a personality to match; an ex-WA surfie chick (or so she said) with sun-damaged pre-cancerous skin and freshly diagnosed emphysema brought on by 15 years of chainsmoking.
But she was sweet enough, a survivor of sorts, fleeing her third husband, a beautiful Greek monster 20 years her junior who would beat her for sport. She was holed up in an old canefield farmhouse outside of Iluka while he cooled off doing a sixth-month stretch for unlicensed drunk driving. She seemed to fancy me, though, and shouted me a rum and coke while the house band did passable AC/DC covers at the old Pacific Hotel pub in Yamba. Somewhere in conversation she offered me a ride on her horse, another beautiful monster some 16 hands high. I fled out the back door while she was dancing wildly into the starry, cold night.
In Yamba I’d hooked up with locals Nat Young, Nav Fox and David “Baddy” Trealor and surfed Angourie on a solid six-foot south swell. Not all that clean and the local crew were getting all the choice sets, of course, but to surf Angourie after seeing it for years in films and mags, was a definite touchstone moment.
Nav Fox turned out to be a bright spot in my rather mundane, decidedly drug-free, meander south. He’s a likeable guy, tall and gangly, and rips with the same loose-limbed soul style that’s powerful, but easy on the eyes. At 27, Nav (for Navrin) has impeccable surf credentials. His dad is a master shaper and one of the early surf pioneers to Angourie along with Nat Young and Baddy Trealor. Nav cut his surfing teeth at the town beaches of Yamba and later Angourie and Spookies. Over the years the royalty of surfing have pitched up in the Fox’s guestroom, (formally the garage out back). He’s obviously Yamba’s favorite son. Everybody, from the geezers to the grommets, knows Nav and his family. It’s hard to get down the street because he has this gift of making people have a laugh in spite of themselves.
Nav rescued me from a dingy Yamba motel one morning and took me down to Turners for the early. A big low off Sydney had thrown a large sloppy south swell up the coast. We had a get-to-know-you session at Turner’s Beach.
While toweling off afterwards in the carpark we met two Australian Vietnam vets from Victoria—Budda and Wart—who were burning off a two-day drunk enroute to a platoon reunion in Grafton. In 1967 they’d both been infantry foot soldiers, common grunts, holding an invisible but bloody line near the Cambodian border. Both were in their early 50s and free of wife and kids for a week, were having a fine pissup of a road trip.
They’d arrived in a Princess Di Mercedes touring sedan and were watching the surf action. True-blue Ockers, gap-toothed smiles and all – they were cracking themselves up by imagining themselves taking up surfing at their advanced age and trying to pull young chicks on the beach. I asked the tall one, Budda, who was wearing a bush hat and a thick pair of glasses, what his infantry division was.
“The ARA Fifth, mate…the Tiger Battalion!” he laughed through a freshly lit Marlboro, “We were called tigers, but we were really pussycats. That’s because all we did was chase pussy.”
It’s an overlooked fact in most American history books is that over 52,000 young Australians served in Vietnam between 1966 and 1969. Over 500 died. Vietnam was technically classified an international “police action,” but it was, in fact, America’s war and the US was calling in markers for helping the Aussies out of WWII and for post-WWII development aid. Many times the Australians were given nasty suicide missions that the Yanks wouldn’t touch. But the dogged “diggers” distinguished themselves with their mad-eyed ferocity under fire.
In Wart and Budda’s case they’d been choppered into a valley where the Viet Cong held one ridge, and the US the opposite. The US tanks would fire deafening fusillades over the heads from one direction while the Viet Cong would hail bullets and mortars down from the other. Budda had taken some shrapnel in his side and that sent him back to Victoria early.
I asked him what his specialty had been. He choked up on that one.
“Fucking ducking mate!…fucking ducking.”
Read Under a Fatal Sun, Part 1: Cane Toad Pilgrimage
Read Under a Fatal Sun, Part 2: The Gold Coast
