I spent a bit of time hanging around Angourie during the 1960s. If you knew that a good swell was about to hit the coast – preferable east or better still, from the north – then you could jump in your car in Sydney, drive straight through overnight and arrive to see waves like this. I’m not sure who this is, but given the quality of the wave, it doesn’t really matter. Possibly it’s Russell Hughes who had a way of holding both his arms out in front of him as if he was driving a bus. And Russ was definitely there that day. In the unfortunate (and typical) fashion of the time, most of the negs from this day got lost. I don’t think that I had a darkroom at the time, so I probably cut the best frames out and gave them to a magazine to print for me… and then they just disappeared.
JOHN WITZIG
A Golden Age, an exhibition of John Witzig’s photographs of the 1960s and ’70s, will open at the Bondi Pavilion Gallery on 11 September and run for two weeks.
