The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Surfing Comes to Australia

  It must have dawned on Kahanamoku, at some point during his three-month stay in Australia, that by dodging his own troubles he’d placed himself in the middle of a troubled nation. Halfway into a three-year drought, the country’s entire wheat crop had just failed. Gallipoli’s slaughtering toll on Australian infantrymen was still a few months in the future, but the Great War was underway, and the country had already begun to mark its dead and wounded. Genocide and institutionalized racism meanwhile hummed in the background. In 1770, eight years before dropping anchor in Kealakekua Bay, Captain Cook became the first Westerner to land in Australia, sailing into what would later be called Botany Bay. The results for Australia’s aboriginals were just as devastating as they would be for Native Hawaiians. In a little more than a century, the million-strong aboriginal population was reduced to about sixty thousand, mostly because of disease, but also through massacres by colonizing British. The country’s first major parliamentary act, after federating in 1901, was to launch the White Australia Policy, helping to insure, as one official put it, “the absolute ascendancy of the white Race.”

  Still, for the Sydney-bound visitor in 1914, it’s hard to imagine that Australia came to appear as anything less than a nation of optimism, energy, and great loud good humor. It had a particular strangeness, of course. Australia sat at an enormous remove from the rest of the English-speaking world, and its map was filled with aboriginal place names—Wollongong, Tamarama, Bunyip, Boonoo Boonoo—that sounded straight out of a Kipling children’s book. But it was familiar in many ways, too. Australian nationals didn’t care for the title, but for good reason the country was still referred to as “Britain’s Little Boy.” Where America had gone to war, twice, to distance itself from its colonial past, Australia remained the Commonwealth’s single most loyal and Anglophile nation. Daily life was marked by rugby and cricket, shillings and pounds, tea and pudding, ruthlessly boiled vegetables, left-side driving, and rhyming slang. In the cities and suburbs, at least, Australian culture often seemed imported wholecloth from the United Kingdom.

  But where Great Britain faced in on itself, toward London, Australia faced outward, to the coast. The endless red-dirt moonscape of Australia’s interior was described by early English settlers as the “ghastly blank”—aboriginals called it the Outback—and almost no one lived there. With just four million inhabitants in 1914, Australia was less populated than New York City, and apart from Adelaide and Perth, the country had developed almost entirely on a semitropical 450-mile coastal crescent between Sydney and Brisbane.

  It was impossible not to be drawn to the ocean in this part of the country. Beautiful scallop-edged beaches filled the gaps between headlands and points. The climate for much of the year practically demanded the removal of excess clothing. Water temperatures often hovered around 70 degrees. Yet for most of the nineteenth century, Australian beachgoing was governed by the same Victorian code as in England. This included curfews for “sea bathing” (in general, no swimming between 7 A.M. and 6 P.M.), area restrictions (at Sydney’s Manly Beach, no swimming “in waters exposed to view from any wharf, street, public place or dwelling house”), dress codes (neck-to-knee bathing costumes for both men and women), and gender segregation, with all relevant bylaws to be enforced by city-employed “nuisance inspectors.” By the late 1880s, a small but keen group of Sydney schoolboys nonetheless figured out for themselves how to bodysurf. Arthur Lowe of Manly Beach was among the first, and decades later he recalled his autogenic discovery, at age seven, of what locals would soon call “surf-shooting.”

  At first I was content to play about amongst the rolling surf, and get the warmth that their friction and tumbling-about would engender. But as the days went on I wasn’t satisfied. There was something missing. Then, unconsciously, I found myself plunging with the wave as it rolled to the shore. And then swimming with the wave [as it] broke. And struggling to stay on it. Others watched me with great interest, and tried to divine what I was trying to achieve in this year of our Lord, 1886. At the time, I did not know myself. I was but following a certain course set for me . . . to recover man’s greatest, most thrilling, and cheapest sport ever, requiring no clubs, bats nor balls, next to no garments . . . just one’s body and health and strength. Then came the day, just before I reached the eighth year of my life, when I went for a wave just beyond my own depth, caught it, and shot with my head and shoulders well out in front, steered through my fellow surf-bathers, and grounded my chin on the shoreline. I rose to my feet. I felt very grateful.

  Two or three years later, a more advanced form of bodysurfing was introduced to Australia by a Vanuatu islander named Tommy Tanna, who worked as a staff gardener for a Manly Beach family. At daybreak, after setting his fish traps on a nearby headland, Tanna would jump directly from the rocks into the water, catch an unbroken wave, and ride in with arms tucked to his sides. Arthur Lowe and Freddie Williams were among the locals who befriended Tanna, copied his wave-riding style, and then introduced the sport to other Sydney-area beaches, where it quickly caught on. The famous Australian Crawl swimming stroke was likewise appropriated around this time, at nearby Bronte Beach, from a ten-year-old Solomon Islands houseboy named Alick Wickham. A future champion swimmer for Australia, Wickham also helped spread the word about bodysurfing.

  Frustrated Australian bodysurfers and beachgoers, mostly from Sydney but also from Queensland and Victoria, made up the “all-day surf-bathing” movement in the 1890s. Fairly or not, credit for the movement’s success went to a self-important British immigrant named William Gocher, who owned a small Manly-area newspaper. Gocher was a latecomer to surf-bathing and probably didn’t know how to swim. Still, in 1902, after receiving basic surf zone instruction from a few locals sympathetic to the cause, Gocher ran a notice in his paper stating the date and place of his upcoming illegal midday swim at Freshwater Beach. He entered the water as promised and rode a small wave back to shore “breathing salt, spray and defiance” (Gocher’s words; other sources claim he didn’t ride a wave at all). He was then promptly escorted off the beach by police, questioned—and let go without charge. Swimming restrictions, by the early years of the new century, were apparently viewed as too ridiculous for local governments to bother defending with any vigor. Beaches remained segregated by gender. Nuisance inspectors still prowled about, making sure that bathing costumes were of appropriate length and cut. But surf-bathing was now open to one and all.

  Predictably, the number of beachfront drownings shot up at once. Locally funded lifeguard organizations (“surf clubs,” as termed by the Australians) were soon chartered, and lifeguard clubhouses were built front and center on every popular beach. Volunteer club members in matching swimsuits drilled like military units, grimly working the hand-spooled belt and reel device, sprint-swimming with cork-filled life jackets, and rowing their high-prowed wooden surfboats out across the hedgerows of broken surf, only to turn around and ride the waves back to shore. An early version of Surf Life Saving Australia—originally called the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia—was formed in 1907; within three years there were SLSA chapters in Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia, as well as New Zealand. Saturday afternoon “surf carnivals” were held, in which club members competed in a newly invented set of beachfront games and events. Each carnival opened with a bit of vestigial British pageantry (club members lined up in formation behind their flag-bearer for a solemn march and review), and closed with a lot of backslapping cheers as competitors all retreated to the local clubhouse for beers and a long recap of the day’s events.

  While still a junior member among English-speaking nations, Australia proudly took the worldwide lead in beach safety—with hundreds of lifesaving rescues made each year—and the bronzed clubbie, with his rubber swim cap and tiny pectoral-hugging swimsuit, soon become the country’s first iconic figure.

  * * *

  “Surf-shooting” on a board wasn’t entirely new to Australia in 1914 whe
n Duke Kahanamoku visited on his swimming tour, although misfires had been the rule up to that point. Years earlier, Pacific Island swimming marvel Alick Wickham had lugged an oversized piece of driftwood off the beach and carved it into a surfboard, which sank not long after Wickham’s first test run. Manly resident Charlie Paterson shipped a plank-style board back with him from Waikiki in 1912, but he had no luck riding it in Sydney’s irregular beachbreak surf; he retired the beautiful redwood craft to the family laundry room, where it served as an ironing board. A few local bodysurfers, however, made copies of Paterson’s board and began riding already-broken waves, usually prone or kneeling, but occasionally pushing up to their feet. Queenslanders had meanwhile taken to riding smaller cedar or pine “prone boards.”

  Australians saw photographs and newsreels of Hawaiian surfing, which helped push things along. At a 1912 surf carnival at Freshwater, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph noted that sailor Tommy Walker gave “a clever exhibition of surfing shooting . . . coming in on the breakers standing balanced on his feet or his head.” But the sport hadn’t caught on in general, and the surf-board, according to another newspaper, remained “an instrument of pleasure that Australians have so far been unsuccessful in handling to any degree.”

  Duke Kahanamoku took up lodging at Freshwater Beach a few days before Christmas, ready to perform in a series of hotly anticipated demonstration swim meets—or “Kahanamoku carnivals,” as named by the local press. Meanwhile, he was feted and toasted, interviewed and photographed. Government officials and event planners did not discuss it openly, but it was understood that White Australia policies didn’t apply to Kahanamoku. He was the world’s best swimmer, and Australia was a swimming-crazed nation. He was also American, a global celebrity, and had made friends with the best Aussie swimmers two years earlier in Stockholm. Dark skin, in this particular case, didn’t matter. “Athletically and socially,” one biography put it, “Duke was accepted [in Australia] as a quality human being.”

  It was Kahanamoku’s idea to put on a surfing demonstration. At his request a lumberyard delivered a heavy rough-hewn slab of sugar pine (he asked for redwood, but none was available), which he planed down to a crude but serviceable 80-pound plank—local reporters variously referred to it as a “raft,” “canoe,” or “coffin lid.” On Tuesday, December 22, two thousand spectators arrived at Freshwater to watch the “Bronzed Islander” shoot the surf, but in a mean bit of shorefront politics, the event was blocked at the last moment by New South Wales swimming officials, who by contract had final say over all of Kahanamoku’s performances. Two days later, when Duke finally took to the waves in the officially sanctioned performance, the crowd was less than a hundred.

  MANLY BEACH SURF CLUB, SYDNEY, AROUND 1911; A FOUNDING MEMBER OF WHAT IS NOW CALLED SURF LIFE SAVING AUSTRALIA.

  It was a clear midsummer morning, and waves were shoulder-high, choppy and ragged, but adequate. Kahanamoku muscled his board into the water, then quickly outdistanced a few local swimmers, who joined in for an impromptu race through the surf. In what was probably a half-hour display, he rode straight to the beach, cut along on a slant, and pivoted around to ride backward. “Kahanamoku’s control of the improvisation was wonderful,” the Sydney Sun wrote, further noting that the Hawaiian at one point dropped prone on his board and “caused it to describe a turn completely round without spoiling the shoot.”

  Several more Sydney-area surfing demonstrations followed in January and February, with the number of spectators reaching as high as three thousand. The best-remembered event, and certainly the most photographed, was a January 10 return visit to Freshwater, when Kahanamoku encored by riding tandem with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl named Isabel Letham. After shrieking at Kahanamoku to let the waves pass, Letham fell into stunned silence after he caught a small roller, stood, reached down, and hoisted her upright before him. (In later years, Letham became a Jazz Age adventuress who taught swimming at the University of California at Berkeley and worked in a San Francisco hair salon. She continued riding waves into the 1960s and was often described as the First Lady of Australian Surfing. When Letham died in 1995, at age ninety-five, her ashes were scattered at Freshwater.)

  At every stop on his surfing demonstration tour, Kahanamoku patiently and pleasantly talked to the locals about wave-riding technique and showed them in detail how to make their own boards. There were also lessons in beachboy comportment—at a formal dinner in his honor, when asked to say a few words, Kahanamoku delighted the room by instead playing his ukulele and singing a Hawaiian song.

  During a side trip to New Zealand, Kahanamoku gave two more surfing exhibitions, one in Wellington, the other in Christchurch. He also spent several days with the native Maori, who were Polynesia’s southwestern-most settlers. Like the Hawaiians, the Maori had board-surfed during the warm summer months, but this ended after Christian missionaries arrived in New Zealand. Surfing would return here following Kahanamoku’s visit, but just barely—the weather was too cold for much of the year.

  Australia’s surf-shooters, before Kahanamoku’s visit, had doubted whether their homegrown waves were of suitable quality for what was sometimes referred to as “Hawaiian” style riding—as if the local version of the sport, thanks to geographical bad luck, was destined to be a lesser version of that practiced in the islands. For a long time it was. Aussie surfers wouldn’t be on equal footing with Hawaiians or Californians until the early 1960s. Yet Kahanamoku clearly demonstrated that the waves were just fine, and that wave-riding here could be performed at a level miles above the going standard. The message was instantly embraced. As he left the water after his first Freshwater debut, Kahanamoku was mobbed by a group of teenager boys who were hopping up the beach shouting, “Give us a try!” Duke handed his board over, and before he was done toweling off, one of the boys was on his feet, wobbling toward shore, his mates scrambling along in his wake, each one determined that he’d get the next ride.

  California Surfing in the Jazz Age

  For a 1918 public service photo, Duke Kahanamoku sat on the beach in Waikiki in his woolen two-piece bathing suit, solemnly knitting a sweater to be care-packaged off to American troops on the Western Front. It’s a touching, if discordant image. World War II, a generation later, would inadvertently reshape surfing from top to bottom. But the Great War was as psychologically removed from the world’s fledgling surf communities as Verdun and the Somme were removed from Honolulu. The entire five-year catastrophe of World War I did little more than create a brief pause in the sport’s development.

  After the war, Waikiki remained the undisputed capital of surfing. But the Southern California surf scene developed quickly, and in many ways independently of Hawaii. The region had already gone car-crazy, and surfers were motoring up and down Highway One to ride an ever-expanding selection of breaks. Crowds in the lineup were unheard of. Great adventure could be had with just an hour or two’s worth of travel. In the fall of 1927, Tom Blake and Sam Reid, both Santa Monica lifeguards, loaded their boards into the rumble seat of Blake’s Essex roadster and drove a few miles north to look for what was rumored to be a good wave on a private track of land known as the Rancho Malibu.

  Everyone in Southern California at that time wanted access to Malibu. The beachfront was lovely: warm and sage-scented, mostly protected from the ocean wind, with hills and sycamore-lined canyons angling down to the shore. The Rancho itself, originally a 13,300-acre Spanish land grant, was owned by May Knight Rindge, the imperious and long-widowed “Queen of Malibu.” The Rindge family businesses—cattle ranching, citrus farming, pottery—depended on trade with Los Angeles, just to the south; to that end, merchants and wholesalers were admitted onto the property, as were residents who lived on adjacent lots. But May Rindge furiously believed that her vast Malibu Rancho was a preserve to be enjoyed only by family members and friends. For the better part of three decades, by means legal and extralegal, Rindge did everything possible to block public access. Armed guards on horseback were stationed along the p
erimeter. Locked gates turned up on what were supposed to be county-controlled roads. Right-of-way lawsuits were fought all the way to the Supreme Court.

  Rindge finally lost her case, and by 1927, the road that would become the Pacific Coast Highway was already surveyed. When Blake and Reid arrived at the Rancho’s south gate, however, it was locked, with a “No Trespassing” sign hammered into place for good measure. The surfers expected this. Nobody was around, Blake U-turned and parked, and the two quickly stripped down to their swim trunks, unloaded the boards, picked their way across the rocky beach, hit the water, and stroked two miles up the coast, toward a big sandy cobblestone-lined point of land.

  Reid later recalled that the first ridden wave was a team effort. He claimed it was an eight-footer; Blake said it was less than three feet. “We caught it together,” Reid said, “not a yard apart, and turned into a steep, parallel slide to try and beat the continuous wall rising ahead three hundred yards to the beach. That was the game!” The wave in fact was a bit too racy for the finless wide-tail planks Reid and Blake had brought, and it was left to postwar generations to identify the break as the original “perfect wave.” But Malibu was now on the surf-world map.

  California surfers in the 1920s were more interested in Corona del Mar, a break next to the Newport Harbor jetties, in Orange County, about ninety minutes south of Los Angeles. Waves here were gentler, not so acutely-angled, and better suited to plank boards. Surfing competition as it exists today is often traced back to Corona del Mar, site of the inaugural Pacific Coast Surf Riding Championships, held in 1928. Of course, surfing events of various kinds had already been held in Waikiki, and the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia was awarding board-riding titles as early as 1921—but the top Hawaiian surfers often didn’t participate in the Waikiki tournaments, and the Australian competitions as a rule were more concerned with paddling than riding waves.