Tides of Cultural Change

I recently spoke on the podcast, We Shouldn’t be Friends, about my new novel, A Catalogue of Love. It’s a podcast about surf culture: an appropriate platform for this conversation because my new novel is about a surfer, who is also a woman. The conversation itself was incredibly enjoyable, and the questions were nuanced. A reel was then posted on Instagram, a short clip in which I reflected on how I think traditional white, masculine tropes don’t adequately express what surfing actually is – it’s not man v nature, it’s not about dominance or control; it’s about moving in a state of flow with the ocean. As one of the podcast hosts, Hannah Anderson, suggested, surfing is play.

I don’t know if I was surprised or completely unsurprised when someone commented on this reel: ‘I wonder if she ever spent endless days at the beach as  12-year-old having older crew shit in her boardbag… Boys become men at the beach, they pay their dues to get their place in the line up. [A] Lot in the soul of surfing is being lost in quick and easy I’m a surfer “sport” now. Maybe some need to pay their dues’[sic].

Now, I think the maths on this is: boys become men when other men poo on their stuff, and so if someone didn’t poo on my stuff I’m not a man. Except obviously, man is code for surfer, and only boys who have been punched down on by older men become true surfers as they have “earned” their place in the line-up. Ergo, he was telling me—as many other men have before—that as a woman I don’t belong in the water and, in the context of the reel he was commenting on, that I don’t have the right to speak authoritatively about surf culture.

This man was articulating nostalgia for a certain image of surf culture, one that has become nearly obsolete as both the demographics in the water and general notions of what it means to be a decent human have shifted. This kind of hazing used to be commonplace, an aspect of the grotty, larrikin, counter-cultural side to surfing in Australia.

Surf culture (as something distinct from the act of surfing) began as a rejection of the stranglehold the surf clubs had on the beaches, with their institutionalised post-war attachment to duty and discipline. Surf culture, in contrast, held individuated fun and freedom at its heart, along with rebellion – it was, as Pikelet, Tim Winton’s protagonist in Breath, commented, “men doing something beautiful and pointless”: the antithesis of paternalistic responsibility. But as it became mainstream along our coastlines, it gathered an increasingly toxic edge.

In response to the comment on the podcast reel, Dustin Hollick, a man who was half a generation older than me and arguably the most talented surfer of his generation in Tasmania disclosed that as kids in the same community I grew up in, he and his mates were routinely “put in board bags and tied up in trees and [had] pinecones thrown at [them] until [they] started crying. At which point [they] would get bashed.” This—like pooing in boardbags—isn’t counter-cultural; it’s beating down on (let’s be honest, probably cocky) ocean-loving children in an attempt to indoctrinate them into toxic patriarchy: a society where men earn their place through structured violence inflicted by other men.

Of course, women were dealt with differently by this culture that, over the decades, gathered its own set of unwritten rules which it used to interpolate some as subjects. This is because patriarchy is invested in treating men and women differently. Due to the fact that it operated by convention rather than writ, the tools of surf culture used to exclude women were insidious, and one of its favourites was the exclusionary violence of objectification: the figure of the bikini-clad woman on the beach; the soft porn spreads in surf magazines.

When I was twenty-one, I worked in a surf shop, where I mostly sold clothing—including one charming line of Reef board shorts that were poisonous green and adorned with images of sand-dusted, g-string threaded, women’s buttocks; they flew off the shelves—while I wished I could sell surfboards instead. I’ve written elsewhere about my experience of this, along with other experiences of being a young woman surfer in a culture that tries to exclude women.

What I haven’t written about was sitting in the tearoom out the back of the store, flicking through a copy of Stab Magazine, and idly reading an interview with a male professional surfer (I don’t remember who). One of the questions he was asked was whether he preferred fake boobs or real boobs.

And I thought, this.

This is what surf culture tries to do. It dismembers women’s bodies into cuts of meat: we are not surfers, we are chunks of chum, buoyed by salty foam.

So no, man-on-the-internet, I did not earn my place in the line-up as you did, through being defecated on. I earned it through my own rites of passage: piecing my body into the shape of a subject whose shoulders are broad and strong, who moves in motion with the surf.

Recently, I was asked at a book event to reflect on how my new novel explores the intersection of gender politics and surf politics, and further to this, if I could reflect more broadly on shifts in surf culture over the last decade. I answered that as I was writing, I contemplated the catalogue of memories I have of moments when men have condescended to me or sexualised me in the water. But I decided, for the most part, I didn’t want to document them in a novel that is, at its core, a love letter to the ocean. I touched on them, yes, but more pressingly, I wanted to write beyond masculine tropes that have dirtied or diminished or just plain misrepresented that thing that I love so much. I wanted to write a woman whose relationship with the coast and weather is her own, and that this is my act of defiance and hope.

I also said that I think surf culture is changing, by virtue of the fact that there are more and more girls and women in the water every day. We are defying a culture that spent years trying to exclude us, and in doing so, we are remaking it with our joy.