To be honest, I didn’t really want to be there, but you can’t say no to a heartfelt request from the biggest-hearted of all Big Kahunas, and in recent times, when Jack McCoy said, “Jump!” all I could ask was, “How high?” So I was at Nambour for the last picture show.

Jack and I have been helping each other out in different ways for 50 years or more, probably since he pulled up on his bike at my losmen in Kuta Beach in 1975, interrupting my banana and tea breakfast by hollering, “Man, have I got a scoop for you!”

I was the new editor of Tracks, and Jack and Dick Hoole, his partner in Propeller Productions, were our Bali correspondents, among other things. The scoop, it was soon revealed, was that Jack had secured an exclusive interview with the legendary Miki Dora. Several of us in the small posse of surfers who frequented dry-season Bali in those halcyon days knew that Dora was in town – I’d spied him lurking in the lineup at Kuta Reef just a couple of days before – but Dora talk? Yeah, nah.

However, after only a year and a bit of our acquaintance I already knew the persuasive power of Big Jack, so I grabbed my tape recorder and jumped on the back of his bike, bound for the Legian Beach Hotel.

It didn’t happen. Dora flat out refused to do an on-record interview or be photographed, but we lounged around in his room while he held court from his bed for more than an hour, all off the record, of course, but very entertaining. When we’d done I got Jack to drop me at the cane juice bar in Kuta where I took a corner table and wrote down everything I ...