Owen and Eleanor Make Things Up

by H. M. Bouwman

  When I was born, our house was on the water at Sylvania, but we soon moved to South Cronulla and a small reef break called Sandshoes. (In the early days you had to wear sandshoes because of all the sea urchins and reef.) There was a good little community there, and I began catching the waves that broke over into the rock pool on a foam board with mesh on it that would tear your skin off like a cheese grater. I can still remember the feeling of riding those first waves when I was really young. I soon graduated from the pool to surfing the ‘shories’ down the road – small waves that reform between the broken surf and the beach.

  Then I graduated to the smaller waves at Sandshoes. It breaks with a right-hander that comes in on one side and a little left that sometimes comes back into it on the other. There was always an older crew there, and everyone used to look after us grommets. I thought I was pretty cool now that I was surfing a reef break. If we weren’t surfing we’d climb along the rocks that lined the ocean from Sandshoes to our home, which was only a few hundred metres away.

  Those first few trips out into the real waves didn’t always go to plan, despite the waves being pretty small by adult standards. On one of the first times paddling out there on my own, a massive piece of seaweed got stuck on my leg-rope, acting like a big anchor – all my paddling was getting me nowhere. Because I was only a little guy and had no strength, I was stalled right in the impact zone, getting hammered with every wave. I remember thinking, Aw, no. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna drown! Because I was so young and inexperienced, it took me a while to realise why I wasn’t moving.

  With all this fear rushing through my head, I still managed to think, Shit. What do I do? Then I worked it out: Okay, there’s something on my leggie. I’ve got to dive behind the board and rip it off so I can get out of the impact zone.

  That’s one of my first memories of surfing: being shit-scared, alone in the water. But once I was out, I felt really satisfied, proud of myself because I fixed the problem and got out on my own. I was still alive.

  Peter Townend stayed in Cronulla for years working at G&S, living with my uncle Mick and aunty Sue. My cousin Danny and I were the same age. PT, along with uncle Mick, who was the Australian skate-board champion, would take us to ride skaties at a new complex being built up the road. It was a huge structure with no-one around; the concrete was super smooth and flat, perfect for skateboarding. That structure ended up being the Miranda Fair Shopping Centre.

  PT gave me my love for the colour pink – his surfboards were always pink. As I grew up, a lot of my boards ended up being pink for that reason. (I still see PT once a year at different contests, and he’s still wearing something pink. I love it.) He was the stunt surfer for William Katt in the great Hollywood surf film Big Wednesday, which is still my favourite movie and I can quote it word for word. PT, along with Ian Cairns and a young Cheyne Horan, were the first surfers to take on professionalism and try to turn it into a brand by calling themselves the Bronzed Aussies, a marketing approach designed to garner more corporate sponsorship.

  So I was lucky enough to be one of the grommets running around event sites like the Surfabouts, Coke Classics and Beaurepaires. I got to hang out in the areas that were roped off from the spectators. I revelled in the excitement, zooming around meeting all my heroes and idols like a super-charged grom. The head of the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) at the time was Graham ‘Sid’ Cassidy, a good friend of Dad’s and part of the Sandshoes crew. I’d sometimes sensed that Sid had the shits with us; he was trying to run these international contests and we’d be getting in the way.

  Because we lived right on the beach, when the pro tour came to Sydney a lot of the surfers would stay with us and friends. Names like Rabbit Bartholomew, Hans Hedemann and Tony Moniz, these guys stayed at my house. I was only seven or eight, but I was fully aware of what was going on and who they were. We used to have parties where the whole contest would come back to our place. We had a pretty big house and backyard, and the who’s who of surfing were all there. I had no chance of not being a surfer. My love of surfing was built into me from day one.

  Sometimes my feeling of belonging to the surf world led me into awkward situations. I would forget I was just a young grommet and get carried away. I was on the beach early one morning while Dad was working on the contest site – he used to give us days off school so we could hang out on Cronulla Beach. A few of us went to mess around in the water. I was only about eight and the surf was big, so we stuck to surfing the shories. I watched the pros paddling out in the rip channels, where you get a pass through the break, and I recognised one of the guys as Jim Banks, a Cronulla surfer who was on the pro tour at that time. He was headed out to where I dreamed of being. I thought, I’m just going to follow him.

  I paddled behind Jim all the way out, somehow lucky enough to get through the channel without any problems. It wasn’t until I got out there that I realised just how big the surf was. As I sat up on my board I knew I was in a lot of trouble: This is heaps bigger than I thought. If something comes through here it’s going to mow me down. What am I going to do?

  I started crying.

  There I was, out the back, a little eight-year-old with all these pro surfers warming up for the day. Today there’re so many young kids surfing, and surfing really well; back then it was pretty odd to see somebody that small in the line-up. Thankfully, people took notice.

  I was sitting there shit-scared (again), thinking that I was going to drown (again), crying. Jim Banks spotted me and could see at once that something was wrong. He pointed me out to Peter Crawford, a famous kneeboarder who was also one of the best surf photographers of his generation. They all knew who I was, so Peter came over, grabbed me and asked if I was all right.

  ‘No,’ I sobbed.

  He swam me through the break and in to the safety of shore. I was wailing with my tail between my legs as he walked me up the beach to Dad and said, ‘Better keep him in the shories.’

  Meanwhile, my brother, Dylan, who is two years younger than me, was scared of the waves at an early age. He was getting pushed to surf because all of his friends and family were doing it. We both loved surfing as much as each other, but whereas I was totally gung-ho despite a few setbacks, Dyl was so afraid of the water that he often stayed on the beach. And now? He’s made a living being known around the world as a crazy big-wave surfer, and while I liked big waves, they were absolutely nothing compared to what he rides.

  In Cronulla, our whole life revolved around surfing. I loved hanging around the G&S surfboard factory almost as much as surfing. I always wanted to go to work with Dad and ride skaties out in the car park or cruise around the back of the factory, watching the shapers, many of them pro surfers making their own boards. I’d sit on the old seagrass floor in the showroom and watch them come and go. They’d all say, ‘G’day.’ I knew who they were but was too frightened to say anything.

  If the surf was pumping, the call would come in and they’d go, ‘Righto, finish off the boards. We’re shutting down the shop for a couple of hours.’

  Just up the road was a takeaway place that would come and deliver salad sandwiches, so I’d be sitting there, this little grommet eating lunch with the guys from the factory and the surfers, thinking that I was really part of the crew, same as I did at Sandshoes. To this day, whenever I eat a salad sandwich I’m instantly taken back. I loved feeling part of it all – and it wasn’t just being Dad’s son. It was the fact that these guys shared an obsession, something they understood in each other, something that took over their lives.

  Out in the water, it’s your mates you rely on. And on the Indonesia trip years later, when I was facing the toughest challenge you can imagine, it was my crew who I called on, and they responded.

  3

  What’s Plan C?

  As we made our way back to the boat, the immediate danger passed. The shock of what I’d just discovered and the sudden drop in adrenaline caused me to drift off. From then on, the others had to make all the decisions
as a team. The boat’s captain, Johnny McGroder, a legend surfer himself and one of the pioneers of boat charters in the region, and a bunch of other surfers had to figure out how to get me to safety. I was flat on my back, and they didn’t want to come to me with questions. We were in a Third World country, twelve hours by boat from the mainland, no airports, no nothing.

  Because I was drifting in and out of consciousness, I wasn’t part of all the conversations that took place. My mate Craig Sparkes has filled in a few of the gaps in my story. Some of the details I only learned years later.

  The first decision to be made was how to get me back onto the boat. Access was usually by an eight-rung ladder. I was well into the longest day of my life, but it was still only around 9.30 am, and some of the others in our group were just waking up to the news that something serious had happened.

  Sparkes: I remember hearing Dwayne wake up, and then he started yelling, ‘Get up! Get up! Dazza’s hurt!’

  By that time Daz was on the sled at the back of the boat. We had to lift the sled up about three or four feet, and it took around fifteen minutes with us lifting and using the jet-ski crane. There was a big table on the back of the boat; we slid him onto that, and that’s where he stayed.

  At that stage we all knew Daz had hurt himself but not how seriously – he was talking to us, cracking jokes.

  I watched, as if from a distance, seeing snapshots of what was happening. I was lying on the board, trying not to move while the others found a foam neck brace and put it on me, all the time taking turns to hold my head still. Since everyone else was in shock, I just concentrated on my breathing, trying to take everything in and keep everyone else settled. It was happening to me, and I thought I could be strong enough to deal with it. I’d rather it happened to me than to one of my friends or a member of my family. I knew it was serious but I kept quiet for a while, so as not to freak people out. At the same time I thought, I’ve hurt myself, but things are going to start getting better soon. By taking this approach I was able to stay calm. Relatively calm.

  I was stable and safe on the boat, so the phone calls began.

  Sparkes: Once we’d lifted him onto the boat, I got the insurance papers and the satellite phone and rang the insurance company, briefly explaining what had happened. They put us straight on to a doctor back in Australia. Then John must have put the call out to all the other boats in the area, in case there were any doctors around.

  A little bit of time passed before two French doctors came aboard from another boat. They sat with us the whole day. We all kept saying to them, even Daz, ‘Just go, it’s all right.’ But every twenty minutes they would check his vital signs, and we kept thinking, What are they doing? We had no idea what could actually happen with this kind of injury. It was hard to communicate because they didn’t speak much English.

  We had a doctor in Sydney on the phone for pretty much the whole day too, and they had worked out where they thought the break was along the spine by doing simple tests: Can you move your fingers? Can you move your wrists? They worked out what range it was.

  People kept asking me all these questions, especially Prezzo: ‘Keep trying to move your fingers.’ He was continually shaking my hand, trying to interpret what was going on, and he reckoned he could feel movement in my fingers – a grip. I knew there were things I couldn’t do, but I was pretty blasé about it, because even though I thought, Shit, I’m paralysed. This isn’t happening, I also thought, I’ve hurt something, but the feeling is going to start coming back. It was like a broken leg or something; I’ve just got to get to a hospital and get it sorted.

  It all seemed helter-skelter while I was lying there, with the guys taking shifts to come down and see me. I was out on the back deck in the open. Belinda, John’s wife, was there, and just hearing a female voice calmed me. She sat with me for what felt like a long time, exchanging stories and having a joke, asking, ‘Why does this kind of thing always happen to the person who organises everything, and not one of the others on the trip?’

  Then the guys came down, and I could hear John coming in and out with the phone as he paced the deck. The boys were giving me snippets of info. I felt distracted, like I was reading a book and someone was having a conversation with me at the same time. I was trying to hear everyone, but at the same time I was trying to focus in on myself and keep calm; I couldn’t really do anything else.

  All I could hear were disembodied voices – ‘Do you feel this? How about this?’ – so I concentrated on my breathing, trying to stay as calm as possible. If I were to start freaking out, everyone else was going to freak out even more. I didn’t take very much notice of the questions; I assumed that it would only be a matter of time before I started to regain feeling.

  Sparkes: The insurance company put us on hold while they worked out what the plan was. Then they came back and said, ‘We’ve got a helicopter, but it’s in Jakarta, which is a five-hour flight away.’ We all thought, Five hours? That’s not good.

  The French doctors were concerned that there could be a blood clot in my neck that could move into my brain and cause a stroke. So Plan A, the insurance company helicopter, felt like it would take too long. That scared John into action, and he began ringing everyone he could think of, but our options were limited. To motor back to the harbour would take even longer. Plan B was to take me in a small runabout with an outboard motor that we used to dart between surf breaks quickly but, being lightweight, it would have bounced and slapped off the water. Keeping me immobile would have been impossible, especially given the distance that we needed to travel.

  Sparkes: Then one of the deckhands said that he knew someone who had a helicopter about an hour’s flight away. So we said to the insurance company, ‘Look, the deckhand knows someone nearer who has a helicopter.’

  And they said, ‘Get the helicopter there as soon as you can. It doesn’t matter what it costs. We are already organising the medevac plane from Singapore to Padang. You’ve just got to get him back to Padang.’

  We could load Daz up and he’d be getting to the medevac plane in about an hour and a half. So we rang this guy called Michael. He was a doctor from New Zealand who ran a small volunteer medical service, and he said, ‘That’s fine. I’m coming. It’ll take about an hour.’

  But it didn’t turn out that way. In hindsight, if we’d all just swapped vessels and put Daz on one of the smooth luxury fast boats – and everybody would have done that for the day – and then gone, he could’ve been back in Padang in a few hours. But instead we’re all thinking, Helicopter. That fits.

  Dwayne’s a lifeguard and he was very concerned, but he didn’t say anything; he just kept to himself. That’s Dwayne – he’s a very quiet and humble guy. He said he was getting a bit upset; everyone kept asking Daz if he was all right. He told me later that he sat behind Dazza and held his head still the whole time, because he found it too upsetting to look him in the eye.

  Time passed. Some guys from another boat also came and sat with me. They were from Gerringong – Werri Beach – the next town along the south coast from my home in Kiama. A good old friend, Allan ‘Faz’ Farrell came and sat with me and nursed my neck for a long time. We talked of this and that, of waves and travelling, and life back in Australia.

  Kiama and Werri Beach have always had a friendly rivalry through their boardrider and footy clubs. Both have had their successes and produced some great surfers. There was always banter about who had the best surfers, who had the best beaches and breaks – even over who had the best bakery. You could name any topic and there’d be a raging debate, and with me lying there unable to move and Faz cradling my neck, we didn’t let the tradition down. Dropping back into that world somehow brought me closer to home.

  4

  The move south

  When I was eleven, we moved out of Cronulla and my world turned upside down. I was used to living right on the beach, surfing whenever I could, running down the esplanade, most of the family being around the neighbourhood, hanging arou
nd the surfboard factory. I was lucky to have that experience so young.

  And then we moved down the coast to Dapto, a suburb of Wollongong – the absolute opposite of a place like Cronulla. I took the news pretty well, not knowing where Dapto was and still being young. Then we moved and I asked Dad where the waves were, because I was so used to running down to the beach, and he had to tell me, ‘It’s a twenty-minute drive that way.’

  That’s when the bottom fell out of my world. I couldn’t go surfing whenever I wanted to.

  We moved to Dapto because of squash. My parents loved the sport, and it was becoming really big in Australia. They wanted to run their own business, so when four squash courts attached to a house became available there, they decided to give it a go. Mum’s side of the family has always taken that kind of risk and set up their own businesses, so it was already built into her. (That trait would be passed on to me as well; I run my own businesses now.)

  Dad was still glassing at G&S, but he had also started working with Mike Davis Surfboards down in Kiama, while Mum ran the courts. I got thrown into another school and had to make new friends. There weren’t many surfers around, and whereas five per cent of kids in Cronulla played soccer, in Dapto it was probably less than one per cent. Everyone else played Rugby League; it was a big footy town. If you played soccer you were seen as a bit of a ‘sheila’. So here I was, the new kid in town, a surfer and a soccer player. I had a lot of dramas over the years.