There are many forces at work in the life of longboarder, Lucy Small. Lucy grew up in a quiet, coastal town in Western Australia but these days prefers the cosmopolitan bustle of Sydney’s Newtown. She writes surf stories for the WSL but completed her Masters dissertation on women in conflict zones. Lucy loves Australia but at only 28 her intrepid instincts have taken her to Algeria, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Morocco, Vanuatu and overland through Cairo, Israel, Palestine. And while Lucy lives to surf and compete she has to squeeze her sessions in around her job with the Greens party.
Last year Lucy Small became the bold new voice of women’s surfing when she won a prestigious, Sydney longboard contest and called out event organisers for the prize money discrepancy between men and women. If you look closely at the cover of issue 583 it features the fabled words Lucy uttered that day at Curl Curl. Since then she has been riding a wave publicity.
For issue 583, Tracks spoke at length to Lucy about a range of issues relating to women’s surfing. Lucy also linked up with good friend Georgia Matts to nail the cover shot as she explains. “When my story was going to be in Tracks and I needed surf shots, the very next thing that happened was that my boss tested positive for COVID and I went into iso’. It was a hot minute before Christmas and after a hectic year I was devastated at the prospect of spending my break locked in my bedroom in Newtown. But then I was COVID negative so on a high 30s degree day I zoomed down south to see Georgia and even though it was basically flat, we managed to play around in this fun little beachie and Georgia snapped me from the shallows.”
As far as we know it’s the first Tracks cover by a female photographer. It’s certainly the first time two women have teamed up to claim page one.
Here’s a snippet from the interview. To read the rest, pick up a copy of issue 583, which goes on sale this Monday.
Do you think the industry could be accused of lacking creativity and authenticity in its approach to marketing women and men? There’s lots of different ways to market and promote people do you think there’s a lack of imagination in that process?
Yeah, totally. I think that it’s sort of like, a lot of marketing seems to be quite one-dimensional and doesn’t show that case diversity. It’s sort of like you can just see that men’s marketing for surfing is like adrenaline and women’s marketing is like having fun. So you get those two. And like, that’s the sort of aspirational background of basically most surf related ad campaigns that I’ve seen. I mean, some people will just want to be passionate and do stuff. They don’t want to look like they’ve got some lovely smile and look cool, or sweet and golden, when really they’re fired up, and they want to win and they want to get barrelled and they want to do airs, or whatever it is… Like if the model of being a pro-surfer is to be sponsored as an advertising tool, then the brands need to reflect that and show that. Show the different complexities of people and have different characters across the industry. And I think it’s also reflected in race as well, like I don’t know how many billboards you’ve seen with people of colour as surfers, but it would be not many. In fact, there has actually been very few black, African, or Asian women that have had access to the top tiers of surfing. And that’s something that really, really needs to be changed or to be worked on.
