The blonde, mop-headed kid with a board under his arm may still be a well-known cultural icon of the Aussie beach, but there’s no doubt that the global face of surfing is in flux. With two Brazilians crowned world champ in the last two years, the forecasted ‘Storm’ has well and truly hit. But what does this mean for surf culture worldwide? The cultural contrasts between surfing’s dominant regions (the USA, Australia and Hawaii) and Brazil have, at times, kept Brazilian surfers under a haze of prejudice. But it looks as though the times they are a-changing. I spent a year living in Brazil at the age of 17 as a Rotary exchange student. I left my small beach town on the NSW south coast where I did little other than surf, and landed wide-eyed in Campo Grande, far-western Brazil. The town name means ‘Big Field’. I spent the year going stir-crazy in cowboy country, telling myself there are other things to life than surfing. A good learning curve I suppose, but maaaan was it good to smell the salt air when I finally made it to Rio. I went for a paddle on a rented, dinged-up board, but never really got to explore the surf culture in any depth. I did however get a feel for just how deeply engrained the love for sport is in the national psyche. When writing an article on the rise of Brazil as a surfing nation, I thought I’d best get some inside info. I asked Brazilian surfer Silvana Lima for her thoughts, and learned about her upbringing at the same time. Like Adriano De Souza, Lima came from humble beginnings. She grew up living in a hut on a beach in Paracurú, north-eastern Brazil, and learnt to surf on an old wooden door. Her father was a fisherman who had various other families. She believes she has around 20 siblings and does not know them all. (This brought back memories of my ‘Rotary father’ who had five children to five different women. The two youngest kids were just a few months apart in age and were both, coincidently, named Julia. Suffice to say the two mothers were unaware of the existence of the other at the time of naming.) Lima’s mother, unemployed and grappling with alcoholism, could not provide enough food for her five kids. Lima managed to pull herself out of … Read more