Reading Time: 4 minutes

Writer Gill Hutchison discovered surfing by accident. She was in her mid-30s, drinking beers with girlfriends on a beach holiday in Mexico, admiring smooth Chicanos drawing figure-8s through turquoise breakers out back.

In the foreground of this glittering picture was a woman swapping pesos with a local over a longboard. The pair bartered for a second, then turned in agreement and waded into the surf, board bobbing over whitewash between them. Within an hour, the tourist was balancing crouched on the board – hands forward and teeth gritted in concentration – as puffy white rollers carried her on her first waves to shore.

“I sat there and watched this woman learn to surf within like two hours,” Gill tells Tracks. “I thought, if she can do it, I can do it! I want to learn to surf!”

She started on that very trip by renting a boogie board in Ecuador. After she returned home to her inner-city flat in Melbourne, she began the slow progression to standing on waves by convincing friend and photographer Willem-Dirk du Toit to let her carpool with him when he went cruising for waves on Victoria’s surf coast.

As she toed the learning curve’s narrow line between elation and terror, it was Willem – plus the salty new characters she met in beach carparks around Victoria – who inspired her to write her debut book.

Surf Life was published in October 2022 by Thames & Hudson and interviews 28 Australian women surfers from Tasmania to Noosa. First and foremost, it’s a visual feast for fans of surf culture. Each woman’s personality and lifestyle are stunningly captured by Willem’s brooding photography. He’s an architectural photographer by trade, which comes through in his stark and whimsical frames.

Spend a little longer on page, though, because reading the accompanying text is like paddling into a foreign line-up and getting to know fascinating locals via snippets of chatter between sets. Few of the women featured are extraordinary by social media or competition standards – but all are individually captivating. A diverse bunch of enthusiastic wave sliders who simply sound like they’d be great company in the water.

Some recognisable faces crop up, including that of professional surfer Lucy Small, who is the co-creator of the Equal Pay for Equal Play campaign and also appeared on the cover of Tracks Issue 583 in December 2022. Lizzie Stokely, the youngest woman to surf Shipsterns Bluff in Tasmania at just 18, and popular surfing podcaster Lauren Hill also feature. But the uplifting revelation of the book is its focus on featuring everyday women who would not otherwise show up in surf media. All shapes, sizes, skin tones, ages and lifestyles appear: from 75-year-old Noosa surf club member Sue, who started surfing at age 56, to Jessi, a Wiradjuri woman who’s been riding waves since she was five years old.

This focus on everyday women was a very deliberate choice by Gill and Willem. “When I first moved to Anglesea [a Victorian town on the Surf Coast, a 15-minute drive from Bells Beach], I was working in the marketing department of a major surf brand and just really resented the marketing imagery that was going out for the women versus the men surfers,” Gill says.

“It has improved since then, but 10 years ago, the women team riders were only ever shown posing in bikinis. Whereas photos of men always showed their best turn. It was making me so cross.”

“I was bitching and moaning about it until one day Willem just turned around to me and said, ‘Why don’t we do something? Why don’t we go down somewhere we love to surf and interview women in the carpark?’”

Willem agreed to take photos and Gill would put down the words; the concept for Surf Life was born. The original idea was to introduce these everyday surf queens to the world by publishing their profiles and photos on a website. But Gill had worked in print publishing for most of her career. It seems the idea was always destined to become a book. But the finished product would take eight years from concept to completion.

“We did our best to travel and shoot between lockdowns during COVID – Noosa to Tassie, Sydney. We would have loved to go everywhere but COVID made it hard,” she admits.

“It was pretty stressful, but the opportunity to meet all these women has been amazing. I’ve felt so inspired. These are women who just have such a zest for life.”

Since the book launched in October, Gill has been on the frontline of sales in her local bookstore in Torquay. She’s a bookseller there and she says the most surprising purchasers have been men in their 40s buying it for their young daughters. Grommets from the new generation of female surfers who can finally “see what they can be” in surf media.

“Social media is always about showing exceptional people. But there are everyday people who absolutely love surfing, who are kind of good at it – but they’re never gonna get sponsored. Maybe they don’t want to be sponsored. Maybe they don’t want to do what that entails,” Gill reflects.

“The women in this book have interesting lives and they’ve all got something they’re really passionate about, which is integrated into their lives. I just find that worth celebrating.”