Angie Ball at Lowers. From little things big things grow. Or something like that. When it’s big, Angie glows.
Why the attraction? It’s not too difficult to guess. There’s a grandness to this coast that spoke to me in a way I can barely explain. A gut thing that was there before I knew it existed, if that makes any sense at all. A home-coast-of-the-marrow.
Looking east towards the Jarosite Reef. I was standing at low tide but up to my thighs keeping a weather eye on sets. No matter how slight, I always seem to be chasing rainbows.
Fast-forward over 40 years and suddenly we – my Sue, and our younger son Tom – found ourselves beginning a new life on the coast as our old one had started to fall to bits. Our eldest, Joey, remained, devastatingly, to do uni in Melbourne. Too long a story to tell, but through a wild six years we began to find our place. New friends, wonderful projects, interspersed with commuting to town for work, both of us couch-surfing gigs for years at a time, all the while slowly becoming our own little squares in the tapestry of the town.
An air attempt that I think this fella made. A little like flying kick-outs, airs for most, to me, seem lessons in futility. I tried one once, back in the eighties. Like I said, it was futile.
My new surfing life evolved from needing to do a dawny at every chance, to discovering gentleman’s hours and johnny-on-the-spot surfs when you suddenly realised just how the odd off-timed surf check can find you getting a cracking splash with a couple of new, or old, mates — or all by yourself.
A roaring offshore at back Addis. A white horse day, late afternoon but not yet golden, with this lone surfer seemingly lost at sea, his board barely in his grasp. I felt as though I was watching a shipwreck.
Realising that on the biggest swells, by doing the long walk along Southside west towards Point Addis, you could paddle out under the sheltering reefs, head-ing to the back of Bells without enduring the flogging of the world’s worst shorey. Instead, a quiet-at-sea adventurous meditation as you paddle the 1.8 kays back to the lineup. Spot the dolphins, dodge the sneaker sets, pray you don’t get bit.
Becoming a part of that banter out the back, laughing like drains as generations fly by. Watching ten-year-old girls, once being pushed into waves by their dads, evolve into giving those same dads a new grey hair every time they paddle out.
Seeing the next cohort, in the many dynasties of shapers, grace our shaping bays with new dusty magic.
Watching autumn turn our skies into a parade of rainbows being chased by clouds that could double as Chinese mountains.
The light. Discovering that if you sit long enough on that one rock under the cliff, and just look, and wait, something will happen. And it will be beautiful in that secret way that you see beauty.
Realising that all of this was a gigantic unconscious act of self-preservation, as simply the chase of surfing kept mind and body strong enough to still be paddling out since late 1968. Way beyond what any of us thought conceivable back in the ‘olden days’.
And Sue. How she came to love this alien place as an English girl, only to have it suddenly taken away by pancreatic cancer in our seventh year here, though she did come to know the folding-into generosity of this town that I will forever be grateful for.
The welcome sanity of the horizon, meditating by diversion as those first years of grief gave way to honouring Sue’s life by honouring my own, and being there for our boys.
That horizon, and the many waves both ridden and missed that we all know will keep coming to Us, and those that follow us for the decades and centuries ahead.
Winkipop. Fly away kick outs are my favourite thing. Those moments at the end of a ride where you are forever 15.
I think too of all who have felt this same near-genetic pull. The born and raised like Red Whyte, Marty Reid, ‘Boots’ Garrard, Carlo Lowdon, Corey Graham and Jeff Sweeney, some of the many second-generation locals who cannot remember not surfing here. Maurice Cole, whose life journey could easily be taken to the screen. MC first made me a board when we were both 19 in 1973. Now we still laugh and bang heads together, unbelievable given his many scrapes with The Reaper. He’s now back to his scary self after a complete heart re-bore. And international new-comers who discovered here and realised here was home. Ben Herrgott from France. Jonte Carlson from Sweden, and Melina Lindinger from Germany, who left and just had to come back.
Maurice, in his happy place. When he’s shaping it can be a mad passionate dance, music blaring and an almost feral energy. But sometimes he finds these quiet spaces, delicate moments in a rarely delicate life.
The surfing life of this coast is a recipe of those who have created this beautiful pie in the many thousands of pies that form the surfing communities of the world. This is our pie, and I’d leave this with the thought that our pie was baked on the lands of the Wadawurrung.
At Bells you can still find the remains of shell middens, those places where the happy chatter of hundreds of generations would have rung across the Bay of Djaraak, as perfect, unridden waves marched across the Bowl.
Tim Stevenson at Winki. Again, I’m shooting with wet feet, low tide and on the Winki reef. Looking up as Tim ‘gives it some’ in that Timmy way of controlled mayhem. Probably the most unselfconsciously abandoned surfer I can think of.
Opening image: The Birthday Party. A wild swell at dusk drew me to Bells at high tide only to discover a mob of local lads playing in the shorebreak. Only it was an eight-foot shorey. I discovered a new meaning to ‘Where the Wild Things Are’.
