It’s a Wednesday night in Sydney’s eastern beaches and the crowds are pouring into the Randwick Ritz for Tim Bonython’s booked out, surf film festival.
Over the course of the next few weeks Tim will take his show on the road to cinemas around Australia. While he now leans on the digital mediums to build the hype, the 63-year-old filmmaker still hasn’t let go of the more classic promo techniques. Drive around any of the towns where his film is showing and you’ll see telegraph poles wrapped in posters advertising the festival, and car windscreens jammed with flyers. “You’ve got to tick all the boxes,” insistsTim. Tim holds court at the cinema entrance alongside his wife and production partner, Sandrine, greeting patrons as they come through the doors clutching choc tops and spilling pop corn. All eagerly anticipate an evening where they will be awestruck by giant waves, some so big it will seem like they are going to come crashing through the screen. Despite the saturation of imagery on social media and the internet, audiences never get tired of living vicariously through those who ride giants. Watching ‘BIG’ waves on the ‘BIG’ screen might just be the next best thing to doing it yourself. “I also really enjoy the fact that you don’t have to be a surfer to appreciate the films I make,” explains Tim. It’s a theme endorsed by childhood friend and fellow filmmaker Monty Webber. “I go to every film he screens because I love the group experience of theatrically released films and can trust Tim to deliver a thrilling surfing movie. I don’t know any other surf film maker who constantly impresses both surfers and non-surfers alike with his high-quality productions.”
Back at the front doors of the Ritz, Tim spots one of the surfers in the film. It’s a local life-guard named Eddie who has wrangled a freak wave off the pack at Cape Solander and scored a cameo on the big screen. “Hey Eddie!” shouts Tim as the lifeguard greets the attention with an ‘awe shucks’ grin beneath his thick beard.While the world’s best are showcased on screen,Tim respects the fact the big-wave realm also belongs to the unknown soldiers who show up when the swell arrives.
Once the doors close, he’ll be up on stage, hosting a Q and A with modern day matador, Kip Caddy. Then there are door prizes and board give-aways and sponsors to plug. There is much of the old-school showman in Tim Bonython; the one-man-act who pulls together a gig from start to finish and then fronts an audience to spruik the whole thing. So, how did a kid from one of Australia’s wealthiest families fall in with the waxheads and develop the rare mix of technical nous, resourcefulness, wanderlust and front-man shtick needed to become a surf film impresario?
Tim’s Great Grandfather, John Bonython, was a newspaper baron who became owner and editor of the Adelaide Advertiser for 40 years.He served in Federal Parliament and in 1898 he and JR Fairfax were the first Australian newspaper proprietors to be knighted. At the time of John’s passing it was said that his personal fortune was the largest hitherto left by any Australian.
Tim’s grandfather became Lord Mayor of Adelaide while his father’s resume reads like a character from a Wilbur Smith novel. Kym Bonython was a decorated World War II pilot, an art gallery owner, a speed car fanatic, a boat racer, a jazz drummer, a music promoter, and later a local member on the Adelaide CityCouncil. Kym’s entrepreneurial endeavours are well-noted and his list of nicknames included‘Mr Speedway’ and the Cecil B. DeMille of Brompton.
However, Kym saw no reason why he should not marry his lust for speed with a love of modern art, and in 1972 he sold his lease as the manager of Rowley Park Raceway in Adelaide and moved to Sydney to open an art gallery. Tim grew up in a house where there was always a Jazz record playing and someone famous touring with his father. “Dad brought out alot of the world’s best jazz bands,” recalls Tim.“Like Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, MilesDavis, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, DaveBrubeck and Ray Charles.
As a kid growing up in the late 60s and early 70s,Tim remembers trying to turn his father on to more contemporary sounds. “I said, Dad, you know, this jazz thing is great, but you should get into a bit of rock and roll.”Kym responded to his son’s suggestion by tour-ing Chuck Berry to Australia in 1973 whenChuck was still one of the biggest rock acts in the world. The concerts proved a to be a lucrative turn for Kim, but Tim recalls Chuck knew his worth and exploited it. “He refused to goon stage unless he had $10,000 of extra cash in a bag from the door takings. So dad had to organise it.”If Tim’s promotional skills were passed on from his father, he will tell you that his career as a filmmaker began when he was a teenager visiting family friend and radio king, John Laws.
In Sydney, the Bonythons were regular guests of Laws and his wife, Caroline. Teenage Tim had already had his first photographic exhibition when he spied a video camera gathering dust on the floor of the Laws home one day.
“I said, ‘John, you know that movie camera, I’ve seen it sit there for quite a while. Is there any chance I could – if you’re not using it – can I borrow it? He said, ‘If you put it a good use, you’re welcome to have it’.”
Equipped with the loner, Tim started shooting surfing footage of his mates at Bondi and the eastern Sydney beaches and then showing it to them on a projector at home. At Rosebay’s exclusive private school, Cranbrook, Tim fell in with a crew of rebellious surfers, which included the older Webber brothers – John, Monty and Greg. Together they helped cultivate an environment that encouraged creative pursuits.
“The Webbers were into filming too,” explainsTim. Monty was shooting a lot up at Angourie and we always looked up to John because he was quite a smart guy, and he shaped boards too. Then Greg started shaping boards with Cheyne Horan and they had a company calledHoran/Webber surfboards. Cheyne was the new hotshot, and he was the man, and that was right around the time I started shooting footage in 1976… That was a pretty special time in our lives.”
After school Tim returned to Adelaide where he secured a gig as an assistant news cameraman. However, he had also inherited his father’s passion for music and moonlighted as a DJ at a popular new club inAdelaide called Bombay Rock. It was only later that Tim became aware of the owners’ criminal connections, but as the club boomed Tim had both a disposable income and free time to explore the South Australian coast. “I used to walk out after doingThursday, Friday, Saturday nights with about three or four grand cash – cleaning up. I’d just go to the York Peninsular Monday, Tuesday,Wednesday, and then come back on Thursday for the next weekend’s gigs.”
Flush with cash from his DJ job, Tim travelled to Hawaii in 1979 to pursue his other passion –filming surfing. After seven weeks on the NorthShore he had enough in the can to put together a movie. Back in Australia he edited the footage, and self-promoted the movie, showing it at a couple of clubs around Adelaide and the university.
With his confidence growing, in 1981 Tim propositioned a local surf shop owner to stump up a couple of hundred bucks to fund a trip to Sydney to film The 2SM Coke Surf about and Bells. Bells was famously colossal and shooting in super 8, Tim captured Simon Anderson winning both events. The real prize was the earlier round footage of Simon descending the giant, clean walls of Bells and carving turns with unprecedented authority on his revolutionary thruster design. “I’d never been to Bells in my life and it was like the birth of the future of surfing,” recalls Tim.
Well aware that he’d captured something ground-breaking, Tim bolted back to Adelaide after the contest. Opportunities to see surfing action were still rare and two weeks after he’d finished editing there was a queue a mile long outside the Victoria Hotel to see his foot-age of Simon slaying massive Bells on the new three-finned design. His DJ-ing skills proved crucial when it came to supplying the soundtrack. Armed with a selection of the latest music cassettes – Santana, Steve Miller Band etc. – he simply hit play while the movie rolled.Tim recalls sitting with one hand on the slow motion control of the projector and the other on a microphone as he narrated the action for an awestruck crowd. Thus, the Tim Bonython, D.I.Y movie tour model was born. “It was a pretty simple formula you know,” explains Tim.Go away, shoot, come back, and then make a film, and then promote it, put an ad in the newspaper. And then basically charge five bucks a ticket and people come and drink beers in pubs and clubs. I had my projector, my super 8 and my four by three screen to set up and I had a sound system with a cassette deck.”
As the 80s kicked into fluoro-splashed overdrive and ‘bums on beaches’ was the staple marketing mantra for surf contests, Sydney emerged as an epicentre for pro-surfing. Now in his 20s,Tim moved back east to be closer to the action.Chiselled, blonde and blue-blood handsome he signed with the distinguished Chadwick agency and took casual modelling jobs. Booking bands for the fabled Manzil Room in Kings Cross, provided a more steady income and a gateway into a golden era of Sydney nightlife. Shooting surfing was still part of the picture and a couple of cult, underground surf films – ‘WaterSlaughter’ and ‘Strike Force’ came out of the era. However, there were plenty of times in that 80s window where Tim recalls watching the sun come up and then following his adopted urban tribe to another party or day club. “There was alot of great clubs around and many had bands as well. It was definitely crazy times, and it was the peak of Kings Cross.
Tim was obviously having lots of fun, but some kind of intervention was needed to pull him out of the party scene. When a friend advised him to go and see motivational speaker, Anthony Robbins, he made his opposition to the idea apparent. “I said ‘Why am I spending friggin $1800 to let some guru tell me how to live my life?’” Anthony Robbins may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the persuasive speaker’s seminar worked as a kick-starter for Tim.
“I came out so fucking pumped. I was so excited about what I could do with my life that within a month I locked in a $50,000 contract with Mattel and started making bodyboard videos for Morey boogie boards.” Tim eventually upsold the contract to 80K for two vids and soon he was travelling the world on a Bodyboard budget, shooting surfing on the sly.
Bill McCausl and and Brian Weedy from SurfHardware (FCS fins) pegged Tim as a ‘can do’ kinda guy with energy and vision and setup the next, unforgettable phase of Tim’s filmmaking career. After ‘Gripping Stuff’ he made the celebrated Hawaii 9-0 series. The films were a montage of high-octane footage that gave a platform to an an eclectic assembly of surfing identities. Often the films were interspersed with the kind of bikini-clad cutaway shots that might draw scathing disapproval when watched through a modern woke lens. Not surprisingly, the VHS releases were inhaled by grommets and grown men alike.
If you were ballsy enough to go to Hawaii they were the ideal psyche-up tool, and if you weren’t then the Hawaii 9-0 series was a great way to live vicariously through the surfers who owned the North Shore in the 90s– Slater and his Momentum crew.Tom Carroll at Pipe, James Labrador and his dizzying chop-hops, heavy locals like Johnny Boy andPerry Dane. All of it delivered in a raw unfiltered fashion.Tim leant heavily on his music industry contacts when it came to the soundtracks, while emerging bands saw the films as a great way to get exposure. The end result was widely released VHS surf vids featuring tracks by the likes of INXS, Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains – unimaginable today. “You would spend 20 grand on the soundtrack, but that would guarantee that the music we had would be as good as any music on the planet,” recalls Tim. The inclusion of advertising between surf segments was less popular with some viewers but it helped pay for the hefty soundtracks and guarantee the investors a return. All-in-all there were seven era-defining films in the Hawaii-Nine series. You can bing the clips online for a zany trip down 90s nostalgia lane.Tim was also still making music videos on the side and perhaps his most distinguished credit is the Midnight Oil Classic ‘Surfs up Tonight’.Shot at a Texas wave pool it boasted an all-star cast that included Tony Hawk and Terje Haakonsen who was one of the best snowboarders in the world at the time.
While the 9-0 series was successful, the real pay-dirt moment in Tim Bonython’s career asa surf filmmaker came right at the start of the new millennium and was almost a case of classic misadventure. Bonython had just purchased a Millican video camera from one of the NorthShore’s legendary lensman, Dan Merkel. The camera was so complex to use that Merkel insisted that Bonython sit with him for several hours learning to load it. The licker in the deal was a tip-off from Merkel about a wave that he insisted was bigger and better than Waimea, located on the island of Maui.
When the next appropriately angled swell hit Hawaii, Bonython was suppose to partner up with Merkel and jump a plane to Maui. However, the rendezvous never happened, so, armed with his new camera and some rough geographic coordinates, Bonython flew to Mauialone.
Upon arrival he walked into a backpackers where a gay couple were enjoying a romantic escape. The affable Bonython convinced them to drive him out to the location where he figured this mythical wave was located. Eventually Tim arrived at a spot where he was separated from the ocean by a seemingly endless plantation of cane fields. While the couple went walkabout, Tim set-about bulldozing through the sugarcane. Eventually the dense crop gave way and he found himself standing near the edge of a cliff. Seconds later he was accosted by a noted Japanese photographer. “He looked like he wanted to snap my head off. He was like,‘What are you doing here?’”. But by then Tim was prepared to deal with whatever heat came his way because he had already sighted the holy grail of big-wave surfing for which he was searching. Beyond the cliffs of Pe’ahi there were giant, perfectly shaped, blue pyramids of water scratching at the sky. A few minutes later LairdHamilton and his tow crew came speeding into view aboard their Jet Skis. Tim set up his new camera that was still loaded from the Merkel demo’ and prayed that it would work smoothly.It did, and he soon had a monumental session in the can.
Meanwhile, back on the North Shore, a select crew of tow-in zealots, including Ken Brad-shaw, Ross Clarke-Jones and Tony Ray, had ridden the same swell at Outside Log-Cabins.When Bonython got back and heard about the session on the coconut wireless he was able to wrangle the footage from Flipper Hodgson and Scott Aichner. Then he ran around ands hot interviews with the guys who’d been out at Logs. When he combined the Outside Logs action with his fresh footage of Jaws, Tim knew he had the raw ingredients for a surf movie blockbuster. Employing a perfect, post-modern slant he dubbed it The Biggest Wednesday. It was released in 2000 and the surfing masses couldn’t get enough of it. “We sold 150 000 copies in Australia,” recalls Tim.
The win didn’t come without its struggles.Laird wasn’t happy that his name had been used on the VHS cover to promote the film. “I’d get angry phone calls from him in the middle of the night,” recalls Tim. And once the shonky operators saw how successful the film was they couldn’t resist ripping it off and selling it cheap.Despite the piracy ‘The Biggest Wednesday’s till made him enough cash to get his foot in the door with a property on Sydney’s NorthernBeaches where he still resides.
Tim’s first touring movie event of the modern era was back in 2002, when he released‘Blackwater’. Between the cartoonish kegs it touched upon the history of the region around Teahupo’o long before it was hallowed surfing ground.
For the last two decades Tim has been traversing the globe on the whim of synoptic charts.He has been on location for many of the major swell events at Shipsterns, Teahupo’o, Cloud-break, Jaws, Mavericks, and a host of the other locations that are now bona fide big-wave destinations. He’s currently up to festival number fifteen and each time he tries to give his films a loose theme. In the 2022 incarnation he brings Tom Carroll in as a narrator and zones in on the interplay between tow and big-wave paddle surfing; and the perennial debate around when it’s better to do one or the other.
More recently it is Nazare that has become the focal point for the big-wave community and like many others, Tim has become obsessed with the almost gothic quality, of the enormous, toothy peaks that shift and bend ominously thanks to a unique combination of swell and bathymetry.“I first went there in 2015/16, I went there and stood on the headland and straight away, I was just like, hooked. I just felt this energy in this fucking power of this crazy wave breaking literally, you know, 100 metres in front of you.” Tim soon purchased a unit in the little, Portuguese fishing village with the ginormous wave. It meant he had a base for filming Nazare, while his French wife Sandrine was close enough togo home and hang out with the family when she wanted to.
As Nazare became increasingly popular with surfers and filmers, the challenge for Tim became securing footage that offered a point of difference. “You really want exclusivity on your angle so you’re never gonna get it if you’re shooting from the land. I love to shoot from the water, but it comes with sleepless nights anda lot of scary moments. If shit happens there you’re gonna have to deal with like a 60-foot wave on the head. You don’t want that to happen to you, but I’ve fallen off a ski out there four times.”
Tim admits that Nazare has also opened up the door to the rest of Europe’s potential.“Now there’s Mullaghmore, the Azores Islands,Morocco, the Canary Islands, like all these amazing spots are suddenly on the radar inEurope. People are starting to realise that big-wave surfing is a lot more than Australia and Hawaii.”
Tim’s next, long-form project may be his most ambitious yet. He wants to make a new, big-wave movie where the soundtrack is supplied by live musicians. “I want a real feeling of the music,” insists Tim. “If it’s really dramatic and scary, then the music needs to be dramatic and scary. If it’s pumping, it needs to be kind of a real cool electronica… Ideally, I’d love to have someone like Tom Carroll reading out, you know, a 40-second poem to introduce the segment. I’ve actually created the rough cut of what it is, and I’ve shown it to a few people, and we’ve got some really good investors that want to put money into it.”
It also brings him into a full-circle connection with John Laws, who gave him his first camera and has agreed to do the opening dialogue for the symphony project.
In the meantime keep an eye out for Tim, tear-ing around a lineup on the back of a ski, a RedCamera perched on his shoulder like a bazooka and a steady stream of excitable commentary pouring from his mouth as he gets as close to the action as possible. Tim may have blue-bloodroots, but he’s devoted his life to capturing a tribe who have salt-water coursing through their veins. He remains that classic kind of surf-movie maker who is equal parts show-man, filmer, adventurer, producer, promoter and entrepreneur. He may also be the last of his kind.
