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WHAT TO SAY TO A ROOM FULL OF SCHOOL PRINCIPALS?
How a humble surf writer came to deliver a keynote address to the Australian Primary School Principals' Association
Category: General
Posted by: tim
As mentioned previously, I was asked to address the Australian Primary School Principals' Association, at their national conference on the Gold Coast back in September. I have only just discovered you can listen to my talk on their website, if you are so inclined, have a spare 45 minutes, and need convincing about the health promoting properties of surfing. Listening back to it, it is a fairly evangelical style delivery in which I try and convince the assembled primary school principals that the best thing they could be doing for the sake of our children's education is immerse themselves in salt water at fairly regular intervals. It seems to be enormously ironic that surfing, once the bane of truancy officers everywhere, is now considered to hold the secrets to good health, happiness, and general psychological well-being. I think we can consider this a victory of sorts. I was invited to speak at the conference largely on the strength of my 2007 book, "High Surf," and discovered to my slight astonishment that I thoroughly enjoyed standing up on stage and talking to an assembly of around 700 people for 45 minutes. They were a great audience, listened attentively and applauded enthusiastically at the end, then lined up and bought lots of my books, so it was all a thoroughly pleasing experience for me. I am well up for more of this sort of carry on, so if you would like to fly me to exotic locations, put me up in luxury hotels and pay me enormous amounts of money to speak at your next conference or convention, please drop me a line. If you'd like to have a listen, here's a link to the APPA website. Just scroll down a bit until you find my name and click on the little audio player thingy.