by Phil Jarratt
Phil Jarratt lives in Noosa Heads and is the leading writer on surfing and surf history in Australia, having published many books on the topic including Salts and Suits, Hottest 100 Surfing Legends, Mr Sunset, (General Publishing Group), Kelly Slater: For the Love (Chronicle Books) and Surfing Australia: The Complete History of Surfboard Riding in Australia. A former editor of Tracks magazine, he was also a senior executive at Quiksilver and is well connected in the industry.
To the memory of Isabel and Duke, and those who rode in their wake.
Contents
Author’s Note
Part 1: Spring
1 Kalia
2 Waikiki
3 Huge Deal
4 The Club
5 Our Cecil
6 Stockholm
7 Duke
8 The Hui
Part 2: Summer
9 Boomerang
10 He’s Here!
11 Isabel
12 Kahanamoku Did Not Show
13 Christmas Day
14 Boxing Day
15 Showtime
16 You Can’t Smash Records Every Time
17 Kahanamoku in the Surf
18 Queensland
19 Dee Why and Cronulla
20 Billy
Part 3: Fall
21 Honolulu Maori
22 Home
Epilogue
Sources
Notes
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
In the first summer of the Great War, while thousands of young Australian men left their factories, offices, schools and farms to sign up for the ‘Grand Adventure’ on the other side of the globe, the most exotic athlete in the world met a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl on a lonely beach near Sydney. It was a meeting that was to change both of their lives forever.
In the century that has passed since that summer at Boomerang, much has been written about the 1914–15 Australasian tour of Duke Kahanamoku, the world’s fastest swimmer and best surfboard rider, and of his demonstrations of the surf-shooting art with young Isabel Letham striking an elegant pose in front of him on the board as they sped across the face of mountainous waves. In the context of what was happening in Europe and North Africa at the time, the Kahanamoku tour was hardly noteworthy, and yet it came to symbolise Australia’s coming of age as a sporting and leisure culture in which all men were supposedly equal under the referee’s whistle.
The mythologising of Kahanamoku took many forms. He was said to have introduced surfboard riding to Australia and New Zealand, which he did not. His tour was said to have proven that the White Australia Policy did not discriminate against men of colour, which it did. His tour was said to have opened up trade and tourism links between Australia and Hawaii, which it might have done had not war and depression intervened. Duke’s visit was said to have created a romantic image of the surf-rider that has fuelled our beach lifestyle and surf culture to the present day, and this may well be true.
I grew up with the image of Duke Kahanamoku embedded in my brain. By the time I was a teenage surfer, he was an old man with a mop of white hair and a kindly smile, and he cropped up in the early surf magazines, books and movies, handing out trophies and spreading the good spirit the Hawaiians called aloha. He was the godfather of surf: that much I knew. And I wanted to know more.
Later in life when I began to study Australian surfing history, I learned of the role that Duke had played in establishing the sport here, but in the specific accounts of him swimming and surfing in the Antipodes there was very little detail and no real analysis of his impact on Australia or, for that matter, Australia’s impact on him. Nor was much written about Isabel Letham’s encounters with the handsome Hawaiian nine years her senior, even though during interviews in her declining years her eyes would sparkle at the mention of his name.
The more I researched the events of 1914–15, the more I felt drawn into a world where nationhood and automobiles were very new, where swimming in the ocean had only just been legalised and women did not yet have the right to vote. Yet Australia was a place full of hope, even as its best and finest marched onto the troopships that would take them to hell and, in many, many cases, not bring them back.
Duke’s world was different, yet there were similarities between the two emerging beach cultures: a promenade along the boardwalk between the Seaside and Moana Hotels at Waikiki was not so very different to one along the Steyne at Manly. In both places I found that while the past had been effectively buried under layers of so-called progress, its ghosts still lurked in unexpected places.
This book is the culmination of many years of fascination with that brief period in history when fun was young. With nationhood and prosperity, we had surfaced from the cloud cover of an age of austerity and discovered fashion, theatre, the cinema, the car, the lure of travel, the beach and the raw sexuality of lying in a swimsuit on the sand with the sun beating down upon you. True, the curtain was closing on that time—the slaughter at Gallipoli began just days after Duke’s return to Hawaii—but its excitement would re-emerge, and the sun-bronzed figure on the beach would become our defining motif.
What began as a surfer’s mission to find out more about a surfing hero developed into an obsession with uncovering what really happened to all the protagonists during that summer so long ago. And, of course, in describing the events I have had to move back and forth in time to depict who these people were and how and why their lives crossed paths at a humble bungalow called Boomerang.
In the following pages I tell the story of Boomerang and of Duke and Isabel and their milieu. This is not a work of fiction: all the events depicted actually happened and all the characters are real. However, in many cases I have ‘joined the dots’ in amplifying a sparsely reported event or in creating a personality from a faded photograph and just a few lines of reported speech. Likewise, while many of the direct quotations have come from letters, documents or secondary sources, in some cases I have imagined conversations based on the known facts about the people involved. In this, my rule of thumb has been, did he say it, or might he have said it?
By way of explanation, measures are described throughout as they were at the time, for example, 100-yard and 100-metre races. Where I am noting a measurement I have used only metric.
Finally, Duke was, and remains, an iconic figure in the surf and swimming cultures and the most famous Hawaiian in history. Isabel was essentially a local hero, although at times in her interesting life she was a news story wherever she went. The intimate details of their relationship are unknowable, but what we do know is that it was special. My aim in this book is to respect their legends while presenting them both as real people with feet of clay, just like you and me.
Phil Jarratt,
Noosa
Part 1: Spring
Hula dancers, c. 1880s. Photo courtesy Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library.
Chapter 1
Kalia
Turn of the century surfing at Waikiki. From the “Hawaiian Scrapbook”, University of Hawaii, Manoa, creator unknown.
Duke Paoa crouched behind the hau tree and watched his father sitting cross-legged in the sand not fifteen yards away. He was so close that he thought perhaps the men would hear his breathing, but they were not listening. They were watching Papa, and Papa was watching the checkerboard, willing the pieces to magically move and offer him a way out. But checkers do not move alone, even on the magical shores of Waikiki.
Duke Halapu Kahanamoku was trapped. Whichever way he moved David Pi’ikoi had him by the short and curlies, and this was the decider.
This looked like pau for the canoe in the halau—the end for the canoe in the boatshed—up on the Kalia. And what was Momma going to say about that! Uncle David let out a holler, clapped his hands and stood up and performed a little ritual dance in the warm sand. The other men slapped themselves in amusement as they whooped and laughed and swigged from small flasks they dug out of the deep pockets of their dungarees and passed around.
Paoa had no idea what had just happened. The men were laughing, so it must be good. But Papa wasn’t laughing. He sat morose in the sand, looking at the abandoned checkerboard. Then he stood up, slowly, not the way he usually flipped to his feet as he pushed his alaia board into a breaking wave. He stood in the sand, plunged his hands into his pockets and looked his cousin up and down. He said: ‘You got my last fockin’ canoe, Dave! Where is this gonna end, brudda?’
Papa was much taller and fitter than Uncle David, who was, not to be disrespectful, short and fat. Maybe Papa was going to hit him. But no, Paoa held his breath for just a few seconds while his father slowly withdrew big, bony fists from his pockets and accepted David’s in a clan shake with one hand and took the flask with the other. Soon the two men were locked in an embrace, shaking with laughter. It was okay, thought Paoa, this is how it was when you grew up. Papa disentangled himself from David and looked towards the hau tree.
‘You can come out now, boy. Come here, Paoa.’
Papa held Paoa’s hand as they walked along the shore towards the Kalia mud flat, beyond which was home. It was almost dark and the wind had dropped to just a whisper, fluttering down from the Ko’olau Mountains, off in the misty distance behind the village of Waikiki. The tide was on its way in and fishermen were setting their nets in the twilight. A chorus of quacks from the duck ponds greeted them as they drew closer to home and stopped to roll up their trousers to wade across the mud.
‘Papa, why is Uncle Dave going to take our canoe? He’s already got two of his own.’
‘Your Momma know where you was just now, boy?’
‘I finished my chores after school so she said it was okay,’ Paoa lied unconvincingly.
Papa winked at him. ‘I tell you what, boy, you cover my ass, I’ll cover yours. We got us a deal?’
Papa did a little dance like Uncle David’s and threw a mock left in Paoa’s general direction. He ruffled the boy’s hair and laughed, and they marched on into the warm night, the young boy clutching his father’s big, calloused hand. Paoa wasn’t quite sure what his father had meant, but he got the general idea: what happens under the hau tree, stays under the hau tree.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Waikiki, a tiny community wedged between mountains and sea and staggered around a patchwork quilt of rice fields, was a place whose time had not yet come, at least not for the masses. The native families who eked out a living from the sea or in small market gardens knew it as home. The happy few—planter barons and royalty among them—knew it as a paradise at the end of the road. Sugar magnate J.B. Castle’s white mansion jutted out into the sea in front of Diamond Head, the estate of the late Princess Bernice and her banker husband, Charles Reed Bishop, was further up the beach, while Princess Ka’iulani and her father, the Scottish merchant (and briefly governor of Oahu), Archibald Cleghorn, resided in the gracious garden estate of Ainahau, encircled by shady hau tree lanais, back off the beach a little, beside the rice fields.
Until the beginning of the 1890s, a single-lane gravel track known as Waikiki Road was the only connector to the city and port, but as the planters began to control the island, Waikiki Road was widened and street cars started to ferry people from downtown to the beach. The coming of public transport transformed Waikiki almost immediately, exposing the beach village to the most extraordinary polyglot community of the Pacific.
Honolulu at the turn of the century was a city (to use the term loosely) of about 45,000 people of whom some 10,000 were native Hawaiians, 8000 were Portuguese, 5000 white Anglo-Saxon and the rest Oriental. Honolulu’s Chinatown was the biggest in America, her Japanese quarter the largest outside Japan. ‘Where the Occident and the Orient meet,’ was how the boosters put it. Virtually all of Punchbowl Hill was Portuguese while the Anglo-Saxon haoles had made downtown and Waikiki their own. The city had four Japanese-language newspapers, three in English, two in Chinese and one each in Portuguese and Hawaiian. The social structure was quite simple: the Portuguese grew, the Chinese and Japanese bought and sold, the haoles owned everything and the native Hawaiians worked for them.
Although it was little more than a grid of half a dozen blocks across the port and a dozen heading inland towards Punchbowl, Honolulu had elegant hotels, fancy restaurants, theatres, an opera house, and dozens of sleazy bars and brothels. It was a town of some character and some genuine characters inhabited it, but it was no longer the untamed frontier town of whaling days. Even after the arrival of the missionaries, it had taken Hawaiians some time to take up the temperance cause, principally because many of their leading lights enjoyed a tipple and were making a bit on the side from importing grog, but also because the Kamehameha royals were prodigious consumers and several high chiefs ran sugar-cane distilleries. Eventually grog shops like the South Seas Tap, The Blonde and the Indigenous Grog Shop disappeared, but as the missionary influence began to decline in the final years of the century, saloons such as The Beehive and the Union Grill began to emerge, and with the increased military presence, the Chinatown red-light district expanded rapidly.
Since the Chinatown fire of 1886, building permits had been required for all constructions between the Kalihi and Kalia Streams (from downtown to the edge of Waikiki) and inland for three miles, leading to a more organised approach to development and construction. It still wasn’t enough to save Chinatown, which burned down again in 1900, but elsewhere modernity was beginning to appear in the form of Hawaii’s first skyscraper, the Stangenwald building on Merchant Street (six storeys), first elevator (in the Wilder & Co building) and first flush toilets at the downtown Hawaiian Hotel, the Opera House and Iolani Palace. Honolulu was growing up fast, and as ships began to bring more tourists than traders, the rate of change accelerated.
The Hawaiian flag comes down, Iolani Palace, 1898. Photo courtesy Hawaii State Archives.
Duke Paoa Kahanamoku and his father shared a name—Duke—that few used, and a passion for riding the waves that in the last years of the nineteenth century was still frowned upon in certain quarters. Although there had never been an official ban on the sport, the missionary elite that came to dominate Hawaiian society after 1820 did its level best to stamp it out, along with traditional dress, dance and songs, as part of its war on ‘savage culture’. It seemed that Duke Halapu Kahanamoku and his first-born, Duke Paoa, were men outside the boundaries, full-blooded Hawaiians who followed the beat of their own drum, even in a community that, in the year of Paoa’s birth, was still close to its lowest ebb, down to just 80,000 from almost a million a century earlier, decimated by haole or foreigner diseases introduced by merchants and traders.
Now the haole was king, and although Duke Halapu was respected throughout the full-blood community for his values and for his retainer lineage, which went back to King Kamehameha, he was nevertheless an object of quiet ridicule when he drove his hackney into the grounds of the Arlington Hotel to make grocery deliveries to the ruling class. To them he was just another Kanaka with a fancy name. The haole elite did not understand and made no attempt to learn the complex communal system of high chiefs—or ali’i—that prevailed in Hawaii under the monarchy. Under this system the high chiefs (ali’i nui) were to serve the people, and their primary concern was for the benefit of those under their care, starting with the retainers (kaukau ali’i), who performed service tasks for them and were rewarded with a kin relationship that extended to their families and often provided land entitlements as well as prestige. The Kahanamoku and Paoa clans from which Duke Paoa Kahanamoku descended were both kaukau ali’i.
The Arlington, the childhood home of the dethroned Queen Lili’uokalani, was now the US Marine barracks from which Commander Lucien Young enforced an uneasy peace over the city of Honolulu while the US government debated whether to annex the island republic and support its provisional president, Judge Sanford Dole, or annex it as a monarchy and restore the queen. Either way, it seemed the Americans were calling the shots.
Duke Halapu was of course in no way responsible for the self-important moniker bestowed upon him at birth, although perhaps he could have fought harder to protect his son from it. The honour of naming Duke Halapu went to the daughter of Chief Abner Paki, Princess Bernice Pauahi Paki Bishop, who was the first to hold the baby after his birth at Haleakala, the grand downtown family home of the Paki clan, which later became the Bank of Honolulu. Bernice’s mother, Konia, was a direct descendant of the Kamehamehas, who had ruled Hawaii for a century from 1782, and for whom the Kahanamokus had been kahu (family retainers) for at least three generations, while her late father, Abner, had been the kahuna or chief surfer of Waikiki in the years before the missionary prohibition.
On the day that Duke Halapu was born in July 1869, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, the second son of Queen Victoria, sailed into Honolulu on a state visit, and while the Hawaiian nobility had no particular reason to thank the British, whose Captain James Cook had opened the doors to a century of disease, servitude and religious persecution, they were suckers for a title and a good parade. As a volley was fired to welcome the HMS Galatea, Princess Bernice held the baby in her arms and named him ‘Duke’ in honour of the royal visitor. According to Halapu’s own written account of the circumstances of his birth, the Duke of Edinburgh heard of the naming and came to the house a few days later and ‘tooke me in his arms’.