Wave Rider - Adventures of a surf pioneer
The sandstone cliffs glow. Centuries of sunshine seem to have given them life. Moonah shrubs crawl up the headland, forming a dark-green wave set to pitch into the ocean. In many ways, Bells Beach is as it was just over 50 years ago - on the day Peter Troy left Torquay on an odyssey that would redefine surfing.
These days, however, a wooden staircase stretches from the car park to the beach. A man in a Wallabies jersey stays just long enough to souvenir some sand. He stuffs it into a plastic water bottle, glances at the ocean, then leaves. Scrawled in black permanent marker on a wooden viewing platform that juts out near Winkipop, the surf break to the east of Bells, are the thoughts of a wannabe nomad with a spelling problem: “Not all those who wonder [sic] are lost.”
Troy wandered to more than 150 countries, and sometimes got lost. He discovered waves that would become legendary. He introduced the sport to countries that would incubate champions. But the road to Bells that Troy helped fund is paved now - bitumen lined with parking bays and rubbish bins instead of a dirt track trodden by cows and hitchhikers.
Surfing has also wandered, far from the sense of adventure that inspired Troy and every kid who has ever ridden a wave. Boards are shaped not by a bloke in a shed but by multinational companies. Surf trips no longer constitute a traipse along the coast but all-inclusive package holidays. And, for some, it feels as if every wave has long ago been found and surfed.
Sean Doherty stands on another wooden viewing platform, this one perched near Bird Rock, a flat rock ledge off the coast of Jan Juc. Four surfers, possibly teenagers revelling in the first day of school holidays, exchange waves at the right-hander below. Doherty is an experienced surfing journalist who has covered the lucrative World Championship Tour and seen first-hand the excesses of the surf industry. It was he who collated the letters Troy sent home chronicling his travels and published them in the 2011 book To the Four Courners of the World.
“There won't be another Peter Troy because that world's just not there any more,” Doherty says. “That world's gone.”
Troy was a 23-year-old accountant who left Torquay in May, 1963, with a suitcase and an almost three-metre wooden surfboard. His friends thought he was mad. This was three years before the general release of seminal surf film The Endless Summer – and Troy's journey made that trip look like a weekend at the beach house.
In a three-year odyssey, Troy gave the first short-board demonstration in Brazil, showcased modern surfing in Europe and became European champion. He surfed virgin waves – including Tamarin Bay in Mauritius and Punta Rocas in Peru – that would become world famous.
On Jersey island, two months after leaving Torquay, he partied with the Beatles shortly before they recorded She Loves You (and sparked Beatlemania) according to one of his letters. In Latin America, people asked him why he was carrying an aeroplane wing. “I have endeavoured,” he wrote from a Miami Beach hotel, “to sow the seed in the minds of those who may wish to venture out and blaze a path into the unknown.”
Surfing was documented in Hawaii after the arrival of Captain Cook in 1778. The missionaries who turned up in Cook's wake – perhaps threatened by the Hawaiians' almost spiritual relationship with the ocean – banned board riding until the early 1900s. Then, some time before 1907, an Irish-Hawaiian, George Freeth, cut his traditional board in half – and the modern sport was born. Freeth would go on to become the world's first professional surfer after being hired by Pacific Railways to ride one of their trains to Huntington Beach and perform a surfing demonstration to mark the opening of a concrete pier.
In Australia, interest in surfing had slowly built since a demonstration held by two Americans in Torquay as part of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. By the time he left in 1963, Troy was leading a band of young men who were shunning the stuffy world of surf-lifesaving clubs to devote themselves to surfing. On their doorsteps were uncrowded waves generated by some of the most reliable swells in Australia. Troy was one of the first to surf Bells, and helped organise the first surfing contest there.
Surfer and photographer Barrie Sutherland watched it all unfold, like an empty wave funnelling down an unspoiled point. Now, he sits in a gallery next to a pizza shop off Torquay's main street surrounded by hundreds of his photos. Some hang on the walls, others backed with cardboard lean against each other on the floor. Sun-bleached hair and bodies, short skirts and shorts, broad shoulders and big boards poking out the back windows of shining station wagons. Surfers are frozen on dark-grey walls of water, their faces fixed as the ocean moves under them. Troy features in many.
Most were taken after he returned from his trip, through Europe and the Americas, back to Europe and then Africa, capped by hitchhiking back to Torquay across the Nullarbor. (After all, what's the Nullarbor when you have already hitchhiked from the world's southernmost town in Tierra del Fuego to the northernmost, Spitsbergen in the Arctic Circle?) .
Along the way, Troy was picked up on a roadside in Brazil by then president Castelo Branco, who was so intrigued by the Australian's surfboard he offered him a ride in his limousine. Days earlier, about 2000 people had watched Troy carve up Rio de Janeiro's Arpoador Beach during an impromptu demonstration, a moment he later described as the most amazing of his life.
After the US and Australia, Brazil would become the third most important nation in surfing, with a string of world tour riders and a surf culture that is divided into pre- and post-Troy eras, as it is in Australia. Few outside the surf world might know Troy's name, but his influence was profound.
While Troy was off on that first trip, some of the radicals he had left behind in Torquay started to think it might be possible to make a living from surfing.
Troy had already helped fund his trip by showing surf films. Others were starting to shape boards. Brands such as Rip Curl and Quiksilver would soon appear in Torquay – an accidental multibillion-dollar industry built by surfers hoping to finance their lifestyle without having to get real jobs.
Along the way, these homegrown surf labels would feed, and feed upon, professional surfing, using the world's best surfers and swells to promote their brands through a series of global surf tournaments. “No one really sort of set out saying, ‘I'm going to make a million dollars,’” Sutherland says. It just happened.
Down the road from Sutherland's gallery is the fibro shed where Rip Curl made its first wetsuits. Sutherland says most people do not know it still exists. Nobody could miss Rip Curl's Torquay headquarters now. It sparkles in a strip of surf outlets that stands on the highway between Melbourne and the beach. Further along the highway towards the city are the Surf Coast Shire's imposing headquarters, built high enough to see the ocean.
Today, Rip Curl records revenues of more than $400 million a year. Its founders, Torquay locals Doug Warbrick and Brian Singer, stepped down from the company last August but still own a combined 72 per cent stake. The company has corporate licensees that make and sell their products in the US, France, South Africa, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile.
© The Age 2014
