William Finnegan won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2015, surf-themed memoir, Barbarian Days. The book has been widely read and enjoyed in surfing circles and beyond. However, long before he achieved mainstream literary acclaim ‘Bill Finnegan’ was a Tracks contributor. Finnegan and his travel buddy, Bryan Di Salvatore, shared the writing credits on a series that ran in Tracks in the late 70s and early 80s. Below is the first article from the Finnegan/Di Salvatore series. When the duo arrive Down Under in 1978 they are shocked to find that surfing has become woven into the fabric of Australia life; a stark contrast to its treatment as an outlaw pursuit in mainland USA.
Note: Intro Copy in bold is from the Tracks editor at the time, Paul Holmes.
Whatever happened to Australian surfing’s outlaw image, when surfers were seen as a bleached and bronzed cult living on the fringes of society? In the seventies, peroxide has given way to the blow-wave, the art of the brown-eye has faded, and grubby Australian hot-rats are turning themselves and surfing into a slick, marketable commodity.
Californians Bill Finnegan and Bryan DiSalvatore, fresh off the plane from the U.S. where surfers are still fighting the grey image of respectability, suffered severe culture shock on arrival in the land of Oz. The pair have chronicled their reactions to Australian surfing culture for TRACKS. Their futile search for the good old anti-establishment days begins in the Sunshine State and climaxes with a neon lit revelation in the heart of Kings Cross.
It’s hard to teach an old surf dog new tricks – and bow wow, man, Australia is the biggest trick of ’em all. Coming here to surf from California is like walking into a bar the first time after reaching the legal age. The beer is there, cold and plentiful, and no one is going to bounce you, but something is lost – the naughty thrill, the goofy adolescent rush of feeling you’ve put something over on the world.
Being legal is safe; it isn’t necessarily fun, and somehow in Australia there’s no sense of the continual skirmish with the border guards of respectability.
In California, surfers are tolerated. They feel that if they are lucky, and canny, they will be allowed to surf. In Australia, we feel we are supposed to surf.
Surfing here is a bit like wearing a brand new set of Levis. Unwashed, off the rack, they feel stiff, shiny, separate. You feel exposed, attired, posing. Mom’s proud and isn’t that the kiss of death. One gets a nihilistic impulse to wallow in mud, blood, shit and beer, to drag the offending pants a hundred miles across a wasteland – rough ’em up a bit, you know, bash ’em.
“Surfing in California is still a bit of an outlaw activity “
Surfing in California is still a bit of an outlaw activity – Nancy Katin, bureaucratic media/sport matchmaking clucks, and earnest young pro image mongers notwithstanding. But here it’s well accepted, it’s been absorbed into the mainstream of existence. In America, shrill grump-ass citizens chase surfers with weapons and turn them over to the cops – here, grannies pat you on the back with a “Good lad, go for it.”
All we’re saying is that it’s hard to go straight.
We got to the Brisbane airport and the customs guy looked at our boards, not to pry them open or call them ironing boards, but to turn the moment into a design forum. Ten minutes later he was just starting on the finer points of fin placement when he noticed the queue behind us and waved us on. What a bonus, we thought, to find one of Aussie’s looney-tune surf rats, one of the stoked fringe, to greet us straight off. But we didn’t know the half of it.
We bought a road map in the airport lobby from a pastey blonde. She asked if we were headed for the Sunshine Coast. She looked like the nearest she had ever been to sunshine was listening to John Denver discuss its presence on his shoulders, but she opened the map and pressed a pink stump at Noosa. “When this place is working, boys – spot on!” Our laughs were nervous. This deep into any U.S. airport except Honolulu and the old feeling of being in the way of things would have returned, but here, we were a part of them.
When we told the Skennar’s driver we had boards with us we were hesitant, ready to plead for their inclusion with the luggage. He didn’t bat an eye. “Right here, mates.” He didn’t get it, and WE sure as hell didn’t. He didn’t know that no bus in the U.S. would ever take a board, and we didn’t know that no bus in Australia would dare refuse one.
Opening the road map as we rolled north, we gasped, “Oh shit”, covered it with our hands and looked around furtively. There in black and white, for all the world to see, were clearly marked Surf Beaches, with a red regular foot carving away from a fish toward a tent. These helpful Herberts had gone too far this time. True, all the spots were near towns and Caravan Parks (whatever they were) so they probably weren’t real big secrets to begin with, but still, having surf spots on an everyday commercial roadmap was like Lou Reed playing a Presbyterian picnic. It offended our sense of underground. Our easy smiles began to fade, and after a few dozen more miles, they were wiped right off our faces as the breaks passed and we saw signs saying SURF BEACH, and CAR PARK. SHOWERS. GENTS. LADIES. Besides these amenities, there were huge clean buildings, S.L.S.C’s. Whole complexes, built to house the Bronzos who snatch the children of Oz from the jaws and tubes of misfortune.
We were spaced, not sure whether to laugh, cry, shit or scream. We remembered our misspent youth – Huntington, which might be Surf City, but ain’t convenient, no way. You pay many pesos to park far from the water. You can actually surf only in a small, cordoned area (and not even there after 11 a.m. in the summer), and you risk your very life stepping into a public toilet.
We thought of Malibu, another well-advertised spot, where, although you don’t necessarily have to re-finance your car to park it, you still have to cross one of the busiest, most dangerous four-lane high- ways you’ll ever want to see to reach the beach. And once on the famous strand itself, the chances of your board remaining yours are at least 50/50 . .. provided your hand never leaves it.
We thought of Trestles, where the U.S. Marines hounded surfers for years, in jeeps, tanks, helicopters and presidential launches, and now, since the Skate took over nearby San Onofre and Nixon got his ass kicked, for $2.50 you can wait in line for two hours to reach the parking lot and find yourself only two miles from the place. We thought of The Ranch, where armed goons still smash any board that gets to the beach, regardless of the fact that you may have reached the waves by boat. Legal, illegal, impossible or improbable, in California there are miles and miles of less spectacular surf barred to John Q. Tube by that curious predator – Private Property.
-So it isn’t that these well-marked, well-known, officially blessed and eminently accessible Australian beaches were not a welcome sight to our old trespassers’ eyes. It’s just that after whole careers spent cultivating the grapevine of localism for hot tips, of driving all night to sneak and streak across guarded pastures and over spiked fences, under living room windows and by snarling dogs, this Oz open air takes a little getting used to.
“We heard a Gold Coast granny regale her family with a tale of how she talked a kid down on a lovely old Michael Peterson shape he was trading in that day “
But, as we’ve all been told by the magazines, surfing is not just a sport, but a state of mind bla bla bla, and you don’t just surf at a surf spot, but live in a world, and here is where Australia gets even kinkier to our old-fashioned way of thinking. We heard a Gold Coast granny regale her family with a tale of how she talked a kid down on a lovely old Michael Peterson shape he was trading in that day while she minded her: son’s surf shop; we’ve seen posters for Coke and Old Spice with old shots of Sunset or Scott Preiss tube views providing the background; been surfed at by a guy on a Milo can; read the Treasurer describe Australian export opportunities as a “rising surf.” There seems to be no end.
We walked into a Maroochydore McDonald’s, and, sitting under one of two hollowed-out V.W. buses, each with four brand new boards on the roof, flanked by eight airbrushed beauties hanging on the wall, we munched Big Macs staring at 20 posters of hard-driving Aussies on 20 waves of every color. Talk about carrying the fight to the enemy! McDonalds – home of the family.
We dove into a pub, where, giddy with middies, we mumbled about the final sanitization of fun and other arcane matters. We watched the television in the corner. A guy paddled up to the camera with a bottle of wine on the nose of his board. Of course. He wanted us to buy this wine. We wanted him to drink it. And drown. Then a face we recognised. He’s selling us pants. Mark! Mark Warren is selling us pants! That does it. We absolutely have to get back down and dirty. We need a nice mean fix of anti-, of bad. King’s Cross here we come. Past banks with gleaming displays of the latest twin fin shapes in the lobby. Through Speedo checks where by now we’re sure that if we aren’t wearing those bunhuggers they wear down here we’ll be busted. Out of Sunshine Utopia, down to Sydney town.
King’s Cross at last. All right! Grot! Degeneracy. Peace. Mark Warren wouldn’t show his clean cut mug around this joint for love or money.
We’ve finally escaped the Surf God. It seemed impossible while tramping through the South Pacific, but we’d had it – a surfeit of surfness. In America and the islands we were the hunters; in Oz we were the hunted. We were once the haunters; here we are the haunted. We who could dig the occasional stuffed bikini had found ourselves in a giant nudist camp. We had to leave this Oz surf table, belching and bloated. Like Pinocchio at Pleasure Island, we got what we thought we wanted and it was too rich and thick.
A few minutes of sweet, unsurfed air in King’s Cross then a dash to the airport. But before we go, our eyes are drawn up, past the whores and leather boys, past the junkies and the sex show barkers, above the steamy cold lust of Times Square South – and there is a sign, one of those giant, signs where all the panels turn every few seconds and while we watch, they turn, and a huge cigarette pack becomes a goofy foot powering under a twelve-foot Pipeline lip. And we know that every derd, nerd, metho, scago, kink-out, creature on the street below can look at the sign and supply us with all the details.
Ah take us back, take us back, down to Gasoline Alley where we started from. We don’t want to return to the ‘old days when greaseball car guys called us surf faggots, we just want to live in margin land, where surfers aren’t as much a part of things as golfers, post offices and soft drinks. Back to where, to most people, surfing came and went, somewhere between L.S.D. and the twist. Back to where people just don’t care that much, where the sport is just a tiny threadbare sociological pocket. Back to where, to most people, an off the lip refers to that area where Helena Rubenstein sometimes goes astray. We wanna stray!
Stay Tuned for more from the Finnegan/Di Salvatore Files.
