by Phil Jarratt
In Australia in the first years of the century, the terms surfing, surf shooting and surf-riding all meant body-surfing. As early as the 1890s, Alick Wickham (the Solomon Islander regarded by many as the originator of the crawl stroke) had used a piece of driftwood held in his hand to help him plane along the wave, and on one occasion he was reported to have attempted standing on a larger piece of driftwood, crudely shaped, and sinking on his first wave. Wickham was possibly emulating boardriding techniques he had seen on his island home, although he seems to have had no knowledge of the surfboard design principles in use in Polynesia for centuries. Nevertheless, short, flat boards no longer than half a metre began to be seen around Sydney from 1903 or 1904, used purely for assisted body-shoot launching.
According to turn-of-the-century Manly resident and somewhat unreliable chronicler of village history, Arthur Lowe, surf bather Frank Bell had caused much amusement at Freshwater in 1902 when he and his brother, Charlie, attempted to use a church door as a surfboard, with no success whatsoever. Lowe’s reminiscences, written in old age a half century after the events described, are suspect in a number of areas, but the church-door story does have a couple of other supporters, and it may have come before Fred Notting’s ‘painted slabs’, which he named ‘Honolulu Queen’ and ‘Fiji Flyer’ and attempted to ride also without success at Manly in 1904 or 1905.
At Manly in 1907 Alexander Hume Ford had been shocked to find there were no surfboards to rent or borrow, and in an article titled ‘Australia through American Eyes’ he claimed to have been told they were ‘banned’. What happened next has long been a subject of conjecture in Australian surfing history. It has generally been reported that Charles D. Paterson of the NSW Tourist Bureau and soon to become the president of the Surf Life Saving Association, travelled to Hawaii in 1908 or 1909 and brought home a redwood surfboard that he could not ride and subsequently consigned to the family laundry to be used as an ironing board. There is no doubt that Paterson ended up with a board he could not ride, but he didn’t have to travel to Hawaii to get it.
Under the headline, ‘Australians to try Hawaiian Surfboard’, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser reported:
Surfboarding will soon be indulged in at Manley [sic] Beach, Sydney, Australia. The promotion committee has had a surfboard made for the colonials and soon the implement will be shipped to Australia for the enlightenment and enjoyment of those south of the equator. When Secretary H.P. Wood of the promotion committee was in Sydney he made the acquaintance of C.D. Patterson [sic], manager of the government tourist bureau at Manley Beach and temporary president of the beach life saving crew. The Australians are in the habit of shooting the surf, but not with boards, so Secretary Wood explained the working of the Hawaiian surfboard. Mr. Patterson at once became interested and as a result asked Mr. Wood to prepare a surfboard and send it to Sydney. Mr. Wood agreed and the surfboard is now ready to be shipped.
Percy Hunter, Paterson’s boss, did travel to Hawaii in 1908–09 and later wrote about the experience of riding a surfboard there, so perhaps Ford, the president of the Hawaii Promotion Committee, also had a hand in sending the board to the NSW Tourist Bureau to help repay a debt to Hunter for having introduced him socially around Sydney. But there is no evidence that Hunter, a ski enthusiast who was largely responsible for the establishment of the Kosciuszko Chalet, ever repeated his proud feat of riding a board at Waikiki: ‘I have enjoyed the glorious American Fourth riding down the white-capped billows at Waikiki on the elusive surfboard; in July in Australia we ride down the great snowy billows of Mt Kosciusko, and the sensation is the same.’
Since Charles Paterson cannot have tried, failed and subsequently dispatched the gifted surfboard to the laundry of his home before the middle of 1910, how do we explain the solid-wood boards that began to appear at Manly in the summer of 1909–10? Tommy Walker, born in Marrickville in 1890, was one of a family of brothers associated with surfing at Manly in the early twentieth century. Although Bill and ‘Busty’ Walker both became competent board-riders, Tommy was recognised as the most talented and adventurous member of the family. A merchant seaman, he regularly sailed the Australian east coast runs, but also signed on for a few trans-Pacific voyages and found himself in Honolulu in 1909 where he purchased a redwood surfboard: ‘I … enclose a photo of myself and surfboard taken in 1909 at Manly,’ he wrote in a letter to the editor of The Referee. ‘This board I bought at Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, for two dollars, when I called there aboard the Poltolock. I won my first surfboard shooting competition on it.’
Walker apparently took the board with him as he worked on shipping runs along the Australian coast, and is documented riding it at Yamba in northern New South Wales every season from 1911 while working in a local sugar mill. In January 1912 he rode the board in the ‘surfboard display contest’ at the second annual Freshwater surf carnival: ‘A clever exhibition of surf board shooting was given by Mr. Walker, of the Manly Seagulls Surf Club. With his Hawaiian surf board he drew much applause for his clever feats, coming in on the breaker standing balanced on his feet or his head.’
This account mentions no other competitors, so perhaps Walker won by default. However, the fact that surf carnivals were including surfboard events at this early stage, and that the standard of surfing was evidently high, indicates that boardriding must have been entrenched along parts of the east coast by 1912. Walker, however, was widely acknowledged as ‘the first to master the art of assuming the perpendicular’ on a surfboard.
In early 1913 it was reported that Alderman Neale of Manly Council had seen ‘no fewer than 10 surf-boards among the thick of the bathers’ and was urging council to enforce the ordinance relating to ‘board-shooting’. While the newspaper held back from naming the offending surfers, anyone else in the emerging Manly surf community could have done so. It is doubtful that there really were ten surfboards to be found in Manly at the beginning of 1913, but if there were, they were most likely copies of Tommy Walker’s board, built by Fred Notting or Les Hind, and they would have been ridden by the Walker brothers, Steve McKelvey, Jack Reynolds, Basil Kirke, Norman Roberts, Geoff Wyld and Isma Amor, the first Sydney woman to stand on a board. That was about the extent of surfboard riding in Australia before Duke Kahanamoku landed on our shores.
At the beginning of July 1914 Duke and several of his teammates from the Hui Nalu, plus George Cunha from the Healani club, travelled to San Francisco for the Pacific Coast Invitational Championships at the Sutro Tank. While the Hawaiian representation wasn’t as strong as it had been the previous year, when Hui Nalu had sent all of its top-line swimmers—in fact the cash-strapped Hawaiian AAU had had to raise 500 dollars by public subscription to get a team of six to the mainland—Duke and Bill Rawlins were still confident the Hawaiians would dominate. When they landed, however, Duke found himself immediately distracted by a controversy not of his own making.
While Bill Rawlins and the officials of the Mid-Pacific Carnival had been thorough to the point of obsessive in measuring the course at Alakea Slip so that no-one could question the times swum, they had not been as thorough in reporting the results and times to the Amateur Athletic Union, and now the mainland media was accusing the Hawaiians of deliberately holding back times so that San Francisco’s Bob Small would not be recognised as having broken Duke’s Hawaiian record and equalled the world record in the 50-yards sprint at the Slip in February.
‘This is just an oversight,’ Duke told chief statistician Otto Wahle, a friend from the Stockholm campaign.
‘Well, it’s an oversight that’s going to deny Small his place in the record books,’ Wahle responded.
As the AAU officials tried to sort out the mess, another media controversy erupted, with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporting that Duke was being courted by the Orpheum Circuit and looked likely to accept a lucrative offer to go professional. This was by no means the first time that scenario had been floated, but now there were new elements that add
ed weight to the story. One was that the Berlin Olympics, scheduled for 1916, might not happen at all. This was sheer speculation, but Germany and Austria had been making increasingly war-like noises, and there was growing concern amongst Olympic officials that if there was war in Europe the Games might have to be cancelled. If this were to happen, Duke would be long past his peak as a swimmer when the next Games were scheduled.
The second element was reported rather harshly by the Honolulu press on 2 July: ‘Another reason Kahanamoku might consider the offer is that he lost his job at public works yesterday.’ The idea that public works would fire the world champion while he was away on a campaign to bring more glory to Hawaii is a little ridiculous, but it was true that in consultation with Bill Rawlins, Duke and the department had decided to part ways at the end of June to enable Duke to focus on his upcoming tours. A third element was the fact that Duke was talking to the Orpheum people. Hell, he talked to everybody. He was without guile.
Despite all of these distractions, Duke performed well at Sutro, winning the 110 yards and the 220, but going down again in the 50 sprint, which was proving to be his Achilles heel. While he and Ludy Langer were the undisputed individual stars of the meet, the Chicago team proved strongest overall, with Illinois State defeating Hui Nalu for team honours.
Feeling somewhat depressed about his media treatment in Honolulu, Duke caught the train down to Los Angeles after the meet to hang out with his friend, George Freeth, at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where George had just accepted the job of swimming instructor at the club’s luxurious third-level plunge. George would be sorely missed at Venice and Redondo, but the truth was, he explained to Duke over breakfast in a Downtown cafe, that for all their money, fat cats like Kinney and Huntington didn’t give a damn about athletes like the two of them, even though they brought in people by the thousands.
‘It’s different at the LAAC,’ George said. ‘These people have got money, no question about that, but they care about their club and the people who work here. You know what it is? Redondo Plunge is a business, and this here is a club, and we’re all members.’
Selective vision and the relatively light colour of George’s skin may have shaded his view of the equal-opportunity institution that the LAAC wasn’t—like everywhere else in LA, black people and Latinos scrubbed floors and peeled potatoes for substandard wages—but it was certainly true that from his position as the celebrated Hawaiian waterman, the LAAC was the most comfortable home he had known since leaving Honolulu.
Duke was welcomed back at the club and given the use of an upper-floor studio apartment in return for performing celebrity lifeguard duties at the plunge. Although he was disappointed to find that Charlie Chaplin was no longer in residence, he met Hollywood stars, bankers and politicians on a daily basis. When he and George mentioned their desire to ride their surfboards at Palos Verdes on George’s day off, Douglas Fairbanks Jr provided a car and driver for the outing.
In the weeks he spent at the LAAC Duke began training with the elite squad that George had put together, drawing largely from his young protégés at Redondo Beach. Ludy Langer was, of course, the star turn, but George also persuaded Pacific Coast diving champion Cliff Bowes to join the team. Freeth had a vision to make LAAC the star swimming club of the United States, eclipsing new champions Illinois State and even the Hui Nalu, and the key to achieving this was to recruit Duke.
The club committee was starry-eyed, cashed up and ready to provide whatever incentives they could slip by the AAU, and in Downtown LA it was no secret that Duke was in their sights, so it was almost inevitable that the Los Angeles Times would report on 21 July: ‘Kahanamoku to live in Los Angeles … Duke is expected to join the LAAC along with Ludy Langer, making the team hard to beat.’
But Duke had made no such commitment. In fact he was still mulling it over when he took the Wilhelmina back to Honolulu in early August to discover that the Outrigger Canoe Club had burned down in his absence.
Just before midnight on 1 August, as last drinks were being called at the Seaside Hotel, a fire had broken out in a bungalow on the grounds closest to where the property adjoined the grass house village that was the Outrigger. Fire fighters were on hand quickly and worked hard to contain the blaze, but it had soon spread to the Women’s Auxiliary dressing rooms and from there to the thatched roof of the dance pavilion. The club’s Japanese-born caretaker, Sasaki, who slept on the grounds, climbed onto the roof with a garden hose but could do nothing to prevent the roof from collapsing. Then he and committee member Richard Quinn hauled canoes and surfboards from the edge of the fire to safety at the water’s edge.
The morning after his return, Duke surveyed the damage with Dudie Miller and club captain Dad Center. While some structures had been left untouched, the fire was a serious blow to the club. Duke said: ‘We know how to raise money at Hui Nalu, Dad. We can help you with this, can’t we, Dude?’ The band leader nodded.
‘Oh, so you’re still with the Hui, then Paoa?’ Dad laughed.
‘For now, brudda. For now.’
Dudie gave Duke a sideways glance.
Two days after the fire all the newspapers reported that America’s ally Great Britain had declared war on Germany after it had failed to meet demands that it withdraw its invading force from Belgium. Duke felt saddened that the friends he’d made in those countries might soon be fighting each other, but it never occurred to him that this might be the end of his dream of defending his gold medal in Berlin.
Duke returned to California in October and, after swimming (and winning two events) at the Portola Festival, he again travelled to Los Angeles where it was announced he would join the Los Angeles Athletic Club swim team under the captaincy of George Freeth, and spend as much as half the year training and working at the club. Freeth went to work immediately on his star signing, paying particular attention to his turns and his short-course sprinting. Although he knew that the 50-yards sprint was never going to be a race he owned, Duke enjoyed training with his old friend and he felt that George was really bringing new technical thinking to his swimming.
Duke was elated when he boarded the Matsonia for the voyage home. He had a new club, a new source of income, a trainer who knew how to work with a champion, and a tour of Australia and New Zealand coming up. He spent the days working out, writing in his journal and occasionally sparring in a makeshift ring on the top deck with some college boys from Stanford.
On Saturday 7 November, it was announced at breakfast that a stowaway had been located on board and that the Matsonia would rendezvous with the Wilhelmina later in the morning in open sea so that the individual could be taken back to the mainland. As the two big steamships pulled alongside in rough seas, more than 500 passengers lined the railings of both ships to watch the transfer affected in a tender lowered from the Matsonia. On an uneventful voyage, this was quite an event.
On a whim (and perhaps spurred on by the Stanford lads) Duke stripped to his workout gear and without warning dived from the deck. Amidst cheers from both ships, he began swimming towards the Wilhelmina, some 300 yards distant. He started out well, too, until it became apparent that both ships were minimising the roll of the swell by running their propellers at the same speed. The ships were moving on parallel courses at about ten knots, and Duke soon became a small figure way off the port bow, swimming beautifully to nowhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
A second boat had to be sent to fetch him and, although his return was cause for another round of wild applause, Duke looked somewhat sheepish as he was summoned to the captain’s office and read the riot act about conduct at sea. When the Matsonia docked in Honolulu three days later, both men made light of the incident to the portside press, the captain suggesting that Duke had provided ‘wonderful entertainment’ for his passengers, although he would not condone a repeat performance. But one who was not amused was Bill Rawlins, who told his protégé: ‘Made a damn fool of yourself, Paoa.
Don’t do the same in Australia.’
Part 2: Summer
Boomerang Camp, 1915. Photo courtesy Freshwater Surf Life Saving Club.
Chapter 9
Boomerang
Her eyes shut tight, her palms splayed, her back arched, her pursed lips betraying a serious and ongoing battle between fear and euphoria, Isabel pushed forward, launched into the body of the wave and used her hands and the weight of one shoulder to angle along the green water. She gathered speed as the wave pitched along the shallow sand bank, but she remained high on its face until it began to shut down along the beach like a vast roller door, and with another deft shift of her weight, she straightened her body and allowed herself to glide along the foamy white water as it crunched over the rough sand and carried her towards the beach.
‘Bravo, old girl! Bloody marvellous!’ Claude cried from the shallows, where he had been waiting since catching his own death-defying shoot from the green water beyond the break. ‘Tommy Tanna would be proud of you.’ (Tommy, a New Hebridean Islander who had worked as a gardener in Manly, was regarded as the godfather of the body-shoot, having taught the locals his tricks since before Claude and Isabel were born.)
‘Do you think so, Claude? Do you really think so?’ Isabel asked, feeling giddy with excitement at the completion of her best ever body-shoot. Although she had a well-developed sense of humour, and was, by her own account, ‘a gregarious child’, Isabel was not a giggly girl. In fact, her demeanour was generally quite serious—until, that is, she was overcome by the sheer physical joy of doing something she felt was beyond her. It had happened when she swam through a rough sea to win her first surf race, and it happened again now.