Early winter’s waves

6 min readAug 3, 2019

THERE were six out when we arrived, making the most of a consistent, four to five foot right hander. As late afternoon merged into golden hour more drove into the parking lot, changed into wetsuits and paddled out. Young guys, mainly. No women among them. A couple were somewhere in their middle years, the attraction of the swells perhaps competing with the pull of family life.

A couple came in a shiny, new-looking 4WD twin cab. Another two got out of an older pale blue ute that looked like it had a hard working life. A middle aged guy came in from the swells and drove off in an old Toyota 4WD. Utilitarian vehicles, these. The types of vehicles favoured by people who live a basic sort of life between their workaday world and their love of the ocean.

These guys were out on their shortboards. Just along the coast a few kilometres, as we sat eating our fish and chips by the beach, we watched a couple boogie boarders catching the waves and knee riding. Late afternoons in early winter seems a good time to be in the ocean here on the South Coast.

Its own culture

When surfing caught the imagination of youth in the early 1960s it started to develop a distinctive culture. The malibu board became the signifier of rebellion, of a lifestyle out of kilter with the social mainstream, the symbol of a subculture which valued a nature-based pursuit over career and home life.

Surfing became very much an Anglo, male world with its share of bravado and aggression. That’s not to say there are few women in the surf. They are there. Still, surfing hasn’t shaken off its male culture nor does it attract many from other ethnicities. Maybe that will change. I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon.

Did that first generation of surfers with their malibu boards come to this minor South Coast beach in the dawn years of modern surfing? I’m talking about 50 years ago. I look around and imagine this car park filled with rusty old Holdens and clunky VW beetles with longboards on roof racks. I imagine, too, the Kombis the weekend and longer-term homes of those patrolling the East Coast on that constant search for swells. What became of those people who were so free spirited and who were so disdainful of authority? Sucked into working life, career, family and home ownership, most of them.

Maybe not all. Like those I saw at Crescent Head on the Mid-North Coast a couple months ago as summer was edging into a still-warm autumn. There they were, van after van, their rear doors open to the morning sun, men and women in Tshirts and board shorts looking onto the golden curve of the bay with its lines of swells marching in.

I spoke briefly with a guy maybe in his thirties, boogie board under arm. He was standing there, staring out over the swells. His relaxed, unpretentious manner of speech, his unkempt hair, his clothes, they were reminiscent of this type of character of decades ago. People say things change quickly, but maybe some people do not.

Creeping commercialisation blunts the rebellious edge

Just as rock’n’roll lost its rebellious edge a good fifteen or more years before those early surfers rolled up here, so surfing lost the edginess it had.

With rock’n’roll it was the creeping commercialisation of the music that toned down its raucous, rebellious image. It was about sounding socially safe and being socially acceptable to middle class people and record company executives. That was impelled by social expectation and by the acceptance of the life-pattern of career, family and home in the ’burbs that was shared even by the rebellious in what was regarded as normal adult life.

The surfing scene followed a similar stumbling into commercialisation. I’m not talking about the board manufacturers, more the arrival of the big surfing lifestyle corporations like Rip Curl, Billabong and Quicksilver with their clothing styles and the competition scene. Clothing styles, well, clothing is a signifier of belonging to a particular subculture. It was turning the clothing styles of those early surfers into fashion that led the corporations to commercial success as well as their sponsoring of the big surfing competitions. It was the institutionalisation of a surfing scene that was developing as a subculture, a way of life.

As it ever was — a surfer checks out early winter’s waves at an Illawarra coast beach.

Recognising the despair

I think it a good idea to beware of anything purporting to represent the ‘normal’, like the ‘normal’ lifeway that held such a pull fifty or so years ago. It might be fulfilling to many, that passage through marriage, career, home ownership and retirement, but it is a trap to others.

Some time or other, maybe around their middle years or a little later, perhaps after retiring from working life, those who are susceptible stop what they are doing as it dawns on them that they have lost something, something they had back when the world seemed open and your friends weren’t so focused on career and security. Some, experiencing that existential conundrum otherwise known as the middle-age crisis find their old, dusty malibu tucked away in the garage, recognise their despair for what it is and toss it all in. The open highway calls again.

I met someone who I figured was going through this some years ago. That was inland of Port Macquarie, in the town of Wauchope. He was there with his partner and his red sports car, the type of car that is part of the cliched image of men going through their middle-age crisis.

So, here was the cliche manifest. I was photographing something when his female partner came up and asked if I would photograph him and his car and email him the photos. It was a renovated older model, his sports car, perhaps an analog of himself. I wondered if, like that little red car, the woman he was with was also a new acquisition and that, somewhere in some town there was an ex-wife who hadn’t felt that tug of dissatisfaction we feel as middle age encroaches.

Will the open road call its siren song?

That, the famed middle-age crisis, is in the future for these young guys getting into their wetsuits this cold and overcast early winter evening. I’m sure the idea hasn’t occurred to them, like it hadn’t occurred to me when I was their age in a city far distant from these parts. I wonder, though, whether that social expectation, that passage through life the norm for the past few generations will be the same for them or whether the world really is changing so rapidly that their experience will be something that we can’t imagine.

Whatever, I hope that as they move into other phases of life they never put those shortboards away in the garage, there to gather dust until, one day, they repeat the pattern of earlier generations and wake up to realise that some time, back then, they lost something in life and the time has come to find it again… the time has come to dig out and dust off those old boards. Maybe, for them too, the open road will call its siren song to the dissatisfied.