Phil Jarratt is the Tracks editors’ editor, par excellence. His ghost still haunts the corridors, but thankfully for his many friends and fans, he is very much in body – though a heart attack several years ago while surfing in Bali gave that a big shake. But, on the flipside, it led to the acceleration of writing this memoir.
Phil loves his history, is a great researcher, and has a fine eye for detail and an ear constantly tuned for the nuances of conversation. He is possessed to write and this, his 36th book (!), is a cracker that draws you in at a clipping pace. As a long-time friend and sometimes colleague, Phil appears to be constantly amused by something and he’s never short of a wisecrack.
Possessing such a rapier wit, backed by literary courage, he has made a few enemies among his usually lofty targets – “Nat Young didn’t talk to me for a year, and that happened several times,” he recalled at the Berkelouw Books Mona Vale launch of Life of Brine – A Surfer’s Journey last Wednesday. But the boy from Corrimal, North Wollongong, became adept at dodging punches – including a dustup at Bells with his Tracks chief photographer, Frank Pithers.
In Brine, Phil turns the laser on himself in moments of deep reflection, and occasionally wonderment at how he got himself into some of his predicaments – like the time he was a cadet police reporter and imagined the CIB (Criminal Investigation Bureau) boss, Superintendent Lendrum, was about to bring in the wallopers at the morning press briefing to drag him off to jail because he turned up at 8am tripping on LSD. Though he was at least respectably attired in his one suit and tie.
Or the time he was poncing around European nightclubs dressed top-to-toe in black like Zorro with his porn star moustache. Or going to breakfast with Hunter S. Thompson at 8pm in the bar of the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco and not surfacing until half a day later on what was meant to be day one of a nice, family Winnebago trip.
Coincidentally on the same night as the Northern Beaches launch last week, ABC TV 7.30 aired a segment on Phil, surfing and Tracks magazine and reporter Peter McCutcheon asked: “It’s difficult to talk about a history of surfing without mentioning drugs. Do you count yourself lucky that you survived?”
Phil: “Look, certainly I’ve seen a lot of friends fall by the wayside and I’ve been around a lot of drug use that started out as fun and ended up destroying people’s lives. In my case, flirtation with recreational drugs had an impact on my life and made me look quite seriously at what I had to do to get over that. By this time I had a great family, loving wife and kids that I really did not want to influence in a bad way. So for me personally the surfing experience didn’t lead to a full-blown drug experience, but too often I saw that happen to people around me.”
Good mate Simon Anderson intro’d Phil at the Sydney launch with a trademark, deadpan roast. “I don’t remember Phil coming onto the scene at all,” Simon said. “I don’t remember him coming to North Narrabeen, we didn’t like outsiders … and I don’t remember him in his one suit and tie at the 1974 Coke Classic at Fairy Bower. Plus I don’t remember sharing any flats on tour with him – though I do remember his largesse in later years with Quiksilver picking up the tab for the Masters events so I think he’s a good bloke.”
Captain Goodvibes even appeared on Wednesday, in a promo clip Phil produced called Making Tracks, and the great creator himself, Tony Edwards, was there in person, albeit hiding behind a bookshelf.
Phil has lived the life of 10 men and he’s still at large. Some anecdotes from his early days as a young political reporter in Canberra are hilarious. It was the time in the early 1970s when Billy McMahon was Australian Prime Minister and Gough Whitlam was trying to topple him.
Phil needed Whitlam to win as Gough was going to end conscription for National Service in the Vietnam War; Wayne Lynch, a fellow goofyfoot, had gone underground in the wilds of Victoria and Phil was planning to join him if his number also came up. “I would have become a much better surfer if that had happened,” he recalls.
Jarratt would have gone on to make a brilliant political writer but the lure of the surf was too magnetic and, in a great irony, there were dropout, hippy Byron Bay surfers to expose in the mainstream media – all while at the same time he was trying to court the cool guys, Albe Falzon, John Witzig and David Elfick, who had started Tracks in 1970. “I didn’t really think that one through,” he says after persuading the Sydney Morning Herald features editor to do a Byron Bay exposé when his subterfuge plan was just to go surfing for a week in magical waves.
Phil took the reins of Tracks at the beginning of 1975, coinciding with a January letter to the editor titled: I was revolted. “Four letter words, crude pictures and drawings, immoral and amoral ideas and attitudes, and general licentiousness were interspersed throughout the magazine … With literature of this type circulating freely, I can see little hope for surfing or the moral standards of the young surfer.” The Ed’s comment was succinct: Aw, get fucked. But Jarratt never wrote that comment – he blames outgoing American editor John Grissim, who had fled the country while Phil had to cop the flak.
If you’ve managed to get this far down the screen, it really is quite simple – just buy the book and help contribute to Phil’s pension fund. Even if you’re not a fan of his and may bear a timeworn grudge – in that case, buy it, then burn it and smoke your demons into oblivion. Life is too short.
And with that, Phil was gone – off to Dili, in Timor Leste, to interview Jose Ramos Horta for a documentary, and then on to Bali. Salt-encrusted rust never sleeps. He’ll resume his book tour in Australia mid-spring so don’t miss a chance to be entertained at one of his book signings and get his scrawl on a tome.
Good on you Briney ol’ mate – please deliver further volumes of your incredible journey well before stepping out of the great ocean of life.
Kirk Willcox was Tracks editor from 1981 – 1984
