Rabbit has featured in Tracks in every decade over the last fifty years. His expressive surfing attack and natural charisma always made him a favourite amongst surf photographers and scribes. However, Bugs is also an astute observer of surf culture and the various threads of its evolution. He’s written several columns for Tracks over the years and now makes a welcome return with his new blog, ‘Rabbit Tracks’.
Dear Fellow Tracks Tragics
Wow, where do I start. The beginning featured Captain Goodvibes so let’s go to my anticipation of the next monthly issue in 1971. Each issue celebrated surfing’s bohemian lifestyle, each story told with irreverent colour.
To get your mug in Tracks in ’71 meant that you were truly a counterculture rebel. Obviously the surfing lifestyle was pretty hardcore and society, in particular the police, took a dim view. It probably didn’t help that an entire generation was still coming down from the 1967 Summer of Love and the hippie movement was in full flight. Surfers were closely associated with flower power, pot and the odd mushroom omelette, and Tracks connected so heavily with the youth that they wore all this public ostracism as a badge of honour.
Meanwhile in 1971 the evolution of surfboards had refined to a point where Michael Peterson, Peter Townend and I were paddling out to proper Kirra on all kinds of experiments. Up at the Dick Van Straalen factory the same metamorphosis of short-board barrel riding boards was taking place courtesy of the Dick Brewer Hawaiian influence. Design innovations were exploding on both sides of Sydney Harbour, and in Torquay and Margaret River.
Joe Larkin had a factory at Kirra where shapers the calibre of Terry Fitzgerald, Brian Austin and Peter Glasson created revolutionary boards. If there was ever a meeting of the inspirational soup it was at Kirra. When Gordon Merchant tucked that back edge under the rail what followed was a seismic moment. Sent out to Kirra on experimental craft once again, we were able to ride the place, slotting that rail and surfing the George Greenough line, deep in the barrel, and at Kirra, that meant two loops behind the curtain.
There was so much experimenting going on. The Bob McTavish inspired shortboard revolution where boards went from 9’6” logs to 8’0 V-bottoms, malibus and plastic machines had reached ridiculous proportions in this second phase of the shortboard revolution. Boards went to 6’0 then 5’4” and it was out of control by the time the McCoy team tried to surf 4’10” twin fins at hollow Kirra Point, with disastrous outcomes. Tracks captured all this outrageous innovating, the good, the bad and the ridiculous!
The interviews with famous surfers were always just that bit more colourful inside the pages of Tracks. I found this out on my first interview. I wasn’t into drinking but when they poured me a beer I loosened up. Little did I know a tape recorder was hidden under a pillow and this expletive laden piss rant became my interview.
It actually became a pattern of mine that just as my latest expose was about to be published in Tracks I would hop a plane to Hawaii before my sisters showed mum the latest issue.
This regular blog of mine is going to meander back and forward over the decades, delving into readers’ fascination with those years directly before and after Tracks creation, piquing the interest of those who wonder about goings on towards and after the turn of the century, even raising issues and objectives I was aiming at in my run for State Parliament in 2020.
You could say it’s a blog about nothing, or something, or anything. Bravo Tracks. May the odds always be with you on your wild ride through surfing’s fabled, mythological ages.
