Wow, 600 hundred issues of Tracks! I’m happy to have enjoyed an association with the masthead since some of the first pages were printed in 1970. Now the magazine has reached a milestone in global surf publishing that’s difficult to match. When pressed by current editor, Luke Kennedy, to come up with a fitting submission for the celebratory issue, I had to think. Then I remembered I still had the original images that appeared on consecutive front covers – September and October 1975 – both featuring two of the best surfers on the planet at the time. Yes, the covers were embellished by some pre-photoshop manipulation but they bring back some of the best memories of being employed on the mag, working out of the original Tracks house in Whale Beach on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. Back then, we organised our magazine duties around optimal conditions for the two waves that bookended ‘Whaley’. At the north end of the beach was the reliable summer left known as ‘The Wedge’. Meanwhile, the southern corner was home to a fickle right-hand wedge that relied more on the southerly swells of winter. Each was a high quality wave on its day and both were distractingly visible from the windows of the house, making it easier to time our tide/wind run between Tracks tasks.
To say the least, the environment in the house was liberally creative… and irreverent. The ground floor was equipped with a dark-room to process and print black and white negatives. Meanwhile the top floor housed the design area so we could photograph a concept, process it and put it straight onto pages. Known as ‘layouts,’ the cardboard sheets, which were printed with light blue guides, emulated a page of the mag. Spray glue would hold the sheets of type on the boards long enough for the printers to scan an image, create large sheets of film, transfer that image to metal plate and stick them on the printing machine (usually a precision Heidelberg press) to create a magazine. To come up with sufficient material to satisfy the nominated number of pages and conjure a cover to satisfy the newsstand competition, we had to get ‘creative’ at times.
Michael Peterson.
September 1975. Issue #60.
Cover price: 60cents, 4 pages.
Who is this surfer and why doesn’t he want to be recognised in a crowd?
“I think I’m a natural born salesman, one of those guys who doesn’t blow anything just right on.” Michael Peterson
‘Morning of the Earth’ and the Feb 1972 cover of Tracks immortalised MP’s cutback, and to this day it is touted as the benchmark for all cutbacks. Three years after MOTE came out, the self-shaped, single fin, squaretail disk MP surfed so well at Kirra in the movie inspired collaborations with various surfboard labels. His alignment with Shane surfboards brought him to Sydney and while here he agreed to an interview with Phil Jarratt. I took MP up to Palm Beach on the Northern Beaches and shot a couple rolls for a Shane ad to run in Tracks, however, due to Michael’s claims in the interview Phil and the crew decided to run it on the cover. Peterson’s mid-interview boast of being ‘A born salesman’ was the cue for a little editorial mischief. Tracks cartoonist and Captain Goodvibes creator, Tony Edwards, was tapped to paint a briefcase in MP’s hand on the original print. This way he looked every bit the travelling salesman. One of my photos from the original selection is adjacent. To a sharp eye you can notice a slight difference in the images but it’s blinking obvious it is the next frame from the same shoot. As with a lot of images in the day they would end up in the bin, known as ‘the cutting room floor’, after the magazine printed.
Terry Fitzgerald.
October 1975. Issue #61
Cover price 60cents.
UFO Found in Suburban Yard. Surf star in shock.
Terry also featured in ‘Morning of the Earth’, travelled up and down the east coast and spent a lot of time around the Tracks team and office. I knew him well from surfing North Narrabeen. An expressive, larger than life character with looks the camera loved – and he loved the camera too. At the time of these covers the irreverent streak of the team was in full swing and no staff member or surfer had impunity from a bit of a bagging. It’s fair to say everyone and anything was fair game. Taking the piss out of each other was regular fodder. The layout table featured a pile where photos were coupled with snappy lines. Often these were published before the subject knew anything about the satirical treatment. TF was on the receiving end more than once. He had a passion for fins and was producing them in the backyard of his Brookvale factory. When this photo was taken, I think he was earnestly pointing out some of the finer points of his fin designs. Once the image appeared on the layout table, it didn’t take long for the Tracks creative team to go rogue, manually deep etching a weird surfing construction by a Mr. Mebane. The magazine had gone to print before the TF fro’ had dried from his next surf. Being a perfectionist when it came to surfboards, TF was horrified to be associated with this unlikely surf craft, but the damage had been done; the mag was in the newsagents so he had to cop it on the chin. I have to say that given the amount of ragging that went on there were very few instances where anyone remained genuinely upset. Oh yeah, there was one time when a barrister from Western Australian was really unhappy about the caption placed near his daughter’s topless photo… I might save that story for another time.
