It was a strange experience. To climb into my car and drive away from the beach on a day when summer had finally announced its arrival and sun-kissed three-footers were were rolling into my local. On the drive to Olympic Park, Homebush there was only the authoritative voice of google maps to keep me company. As an east coast surfer, all my life this is what I had avoided – driving west. In Sydney the western suburbs represented endless suburbia, inescapable ennui and most importantly, no beach. I admit, it’s a snobbish and narrow-minded attitude , but like most people with the good fortune to grow up on the coast I preferred to keep the scent of salt-air in my nostrils.
However, the wave diviners from URBNSURF had pledged to build a new wave pool and today they were officially announcing that construction had begun. ‘Turning the soil’ was the phrase used in the invitation. I’m sure the symbolic terminology is correct but it was certainly an odd sounding group of words for the origins of a surf break.
In truth the drive wasn’t so bad. I was more or less barrelled most of the way, travelling through the intricate system of tunnels that now link Sydney. Mind you this was outside peak hour. The organisers had wisely selected a time that would allow invitees to avoid Sydney’s choking traffic.
After passing through a boomgate and finding a park, I arrived to find people gathered beneath a marquee, dressed in suits and collared shirts and long pants; making me feel a little out of place in my shorts, t-shirt and open-toed shoes. I’d expected something, dare I say, a little more beachy, but these were investors and politicians and CEOS and TV networks gathering for the big announcement. Of course Tom Carroll and Luke Egan and Richie Lovett were on hand to lend a little surfing cred’ to the whole set-up, but even Luke had a crisply ironed, collared shirt and pants on – this was serious.
It was interesting to arrive at a new surf break (well, one under construction) and be welcomed with good coffee and an assortment of pastries and a grinning URBNSURF employee who was pleased to meet me. From my experience, first time ventures to new breaks often involve being met with the cold shoulder of localism. Certainly no one offers you refreshments upon arrival.
It wasn’t long before URBNSURF CEO Damon Tudor approached the rostrum and proudly announced that he had not grown up by the beach and that a $50 million facility like the one he was overseeing might have made life easier to become a surfer. Tudor didn’t try and oversell the site in its current form. “What you see is a big hole in the ground, which is really exciting because it wasn’t there a couple of months ago,” he announced honestly.
The real frame of reference here was Melbourne’s URBNSURF pool, which was built using the same Wavegarden technology that is being applied at Homebush. Tudor told that crowd that despite six COVID inspired closures since its opening, the Melbourne wave pool had delivered “250 000 sessions to 100 000 guests, including 20 000 school kids.” Obviously this was a speech designed to reassure investors, appease politicians and give the mainstream press some numbers to quote. However, it reaffirmed the idea that wave pools are all about the language of metrics and quantifiable experiences.
How many waves can you deliver? How many people can you service? What are the costs? There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just very different to how you think and talk about a typical surf or surfing experience. At a beach car park someone might ask, “How was it?” and a surfer might respond with trademark understatement. “Yeah there’s a couple.” At the pool you will say, “I got my ten allotted waves in my one hour time slot.” Don’t get my wrong. I’ve surfed the Melbourne wave pool and it was a blast, but the cultural ambience is radically different.
After the speeches I got chatting to a couple of local politicians who had been invited along to the soil-turning ceremony. Approving a wave pool had to be a vote-winner in your electorate and they were excited about a project that will feature not just a wave pool but a “high-performance centre, working spaces, licensed café, rooftop bar, yoga studio, leisure pool for families, skate park, surf academy staffed with expert coaches, beach cabanas, surf shop, kids’ playground and more”.
URBNSURF will no doubt create jobs and bring new life to the Olympic Park setting that has struggled to find purpose in a post-Olympic era. On a community level, the politicians hoped that the pool would function like an accessible substitute for a day at the beach for the nearby suburban population. It was easy to picture kids from the burbs playing on the shorey and hosting birthday parties while surfers got barrelled out the back. School groups will pour through the gates and provide the bread and butter for the URBNSURF business. Wave pools are not just about creating more options for hard-core surfers. If you can deliver a genuine, beach/surf experience for people far removed from the coast then that’s socially transformative urban planning. If it works in Sydney’s west it can arguably enhance the quality of life for land-locked communities around the world.
I suggested to the politicians that they all should watch ‘The North Shore’ the cult surf movie that tells the story of Rick Kane, a kid who learns to surf in an Arizona wave pool before conquering the North Shore. Who knows, maybe the Homebush URBNSURF set up will foster the development of a kid who graduates from the pool to the beach and goes on to bigger things. The facility will certainly be used by elite surfers from greater Sydney to dial in their moves. Despite the fact male and female Sydney surfers dominated the world tour in the 80s and 90s, Connor O’Leary (originally from Cronulla) is the only Sydney surfer in the CT ranks right now. Maybe the pool will make a difference as a training facility.
We were invited to overlook the site from a raised deck, behind a fence. It certainly wasn’t like checking Lennox. It was, as you might imagine, a pile of dirt the size of a cricket ground with a puddle in the middle. The two gentlemen beside me were discussing the site in detailed terms and soon revealed that they were part of the engineering team that had been entrusted with interpreting the Wavegarden designs and transforming the space from an empty paddock into a field of surfing dreams. One of them assured me that the bathymetry of the pool-bottom at Homebush will be slightly different to Melbourne. While the Melbourne pool is no doubt a success, surfers who have been there will likely expect an improvement or at least a twist on the concept. Why make two surf breaks exactly the same?
Of course there is that one other elephant in the room when it comes to wave pools – power. One of the engineers conceded that the pools require a helluva lot of juice to operate. Apparently a solar farm would have to be too grand in scale to make it a viable power-supply alternative. Purchasing green energy could be an option. Either way the issue of energy consumption is a question that wave pool companies may have to confront as surfers and the general public grow increasingly interested in sustainable solutions to modern problems.
The Homebush URBNSURF site is scheduled to open in early 2023. If nothing else, it’s going to be an interesting social experiment. Homebush is a little different to the Melbourne set-up, which is a long way from the coast for Victorian surfers and is utilised as a fly in and fly out experience for travelling surfers. Unlike Sydney, Melbourne doesn’t have a big suburban population close to the pool.
Will Sydney’s surfers, who are spoilt with so much coastline, be willing to drive an hour or more west, through traffic, to surf in a man-made lagoon? If it’s been a long, flat summer I dare say they might be, but if the surf’s pumping it may be a little harder to drag them off the beach. And what will happen when born and bred surfers find themselves alongside the new locals – in this case the western suburbs masses? Who knows, perhaps the wave pool will help break down the great divide between east and west in Sydney. Imagine a guy from Narrabeen hooting a girl from Penrith as she exits a barrel at the pool. Wouldn’t that be cool?
