[ Tim Winton Interview ]
[ Strong Current ][ Nat Young's Dream ]
[ The Tao of Mick Fanning ]
[ Tackling Gorillas in Peru ]
EXTRACT FROM "HIGH SURF"
TIM WINTON - THE NOVELIST
Tim Winton is probably Australia’s greatest living writer. His novels - including Cloudstreet, The Riders and Dirt Music - have won numerous literary awards, including the Miles Franklin Award, the National Book Council Banjo Award for fiction, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His work has been translated into numerous languages, and adapted for stage, film and television. Cloudstreet was recently voted the most popular Australian novel by the Australian Society of Authors. He is also a keen surfer, growing up on the WA coast and spending plenty of time exploring its southern and northern extremities, which also provide the setting for many of his books. He even made a rare foray into the public spotlight to campaign, successfully, to save Ningaloo Reef from development. An intensely private person, Tim preferred to conduct this interview by email. His answers were so articulate, as you’d expect, there seemed no point in tampering with them. Here, then is a complete verbatim transcript of that correspondence.
What are you first memories of surfing - sensations, emotions, that first child’s eye view of riding waves?
I grew up near the beach at Scarborough in the ‘60s and I guess I always saw people surfing. It was simply what people did where I came from. When I was five my older cousins, both girls, paddled me out on a longboard. I was more scared than anything, but I can vividly remember the greeny colour of the resin and the weave of the volane and the feel of the old paraffin wax and the symmetry of the three stringers. The vehicle itself, I suppose, was kind of overwhelming. And then the sensation of rushing shoreward. Oh, that was something. That was it. I was gone for all time.
From there I began riding Coolites, the way you did in those days. First without a fin and later with a waxed-in bit of plywood. The rashes we got from those foam boards were epic; it’s a wonder I’ve still got nipples. Nipples aren’t that useful in men but I would have been a little disappointed to have had them drop off at age 11. The best thing you can say about the Coolite is that you could surf it between the flags and keep your mum and the clubbies happy all at once. I surfed for hours, until my face and back were roasted and my chest was a grated, weeping mess. The last hour was spent studiously avoiding eye contact with my poor old mum who’d be madly waving me down from the beach. (Years later I’d be in her position, knowing damn-well that my kids knew I was calling and semaphoring like hell. Some days I nearly swam a snatch-strap out into the break so I could hook them up and slap the F100 into low and hoist the buggers out that way.)
My first glass board was a seven foot egg with a radical, raked fin. The shortboard era had well and truly arrived but this thing rode like a longboard and had an effect on the way I surfed. Later I went to shorter and shorter boards but I never forgot the pure, gliding feel of the longer board and the graceful way older blokes surfed them. They were the guys I watched, the blokes who became uncool. In the ‘90s I went back to big boards and I think I enjoy surfing now even more than I did when I was a kid. One of my boards, a wooden one, made by Tom Wegener, must weigh 30 kilos. It’s a cruise-beast.
How does surfing make you feel? How do you explain the effect it has on us? How has your relationship with surfing changed and evolved over time?
I guess the obvious attraction of surfing, particularly for younger people, is the sheer momentum, the experience of hurtling toward the beach. It’s a huge rush and it never really diminishes, even though you repeat this experience hundreds of thousands of times in 30 or 40 years. It’s never exactly the same, but it feels like a miracle every time you do it. I think what you can lose, especially as a younger person, is the wonder of the experience, the beauty of it. This isn’t unique to surfing; it happens in many parts of our lives where our senses are dulled by our education, by the dominant obsessions of the culture, by the speed at which we live. Surfing has its origins in Polynesian ritual and play. At one level it seems to have been about power and caste, I suppose – you know, a regal display – but it was also about grace and beauty and celebration. This was the stuff that haoles from California and then Australia picked up on. Surfing became an expression of life, an alternative to the rigid social mores of the ‘50s in particular. It was a gentle form of rebellion. Beach culture was tinged with pre-hippy romanticism which is easy to ridicule but had real things to offer a culture locked in conformity over the love of machinery and shiny surfaces and appliances and suburban dinkiness. It was tribal but it celebrated the rebel. And it honoured nature because surfing depended on the vagaries of nature and an intimacy with it that the average stockbroker lacked.
I came to surfing at the peak of this period and it had a lasting effect on me. Admittedly, we thought we were special when really we were only very lucky. But we surfed, many of us, with a sense of awe and a feeling of kinship with each other and the sea that sustained us. This was before surfing became merely another occupied territory, before it was completely commercialised and just another colony of the business world. How eager surfers were to surrender their freedoms. They wanted to be like everyone else. We had years of dreary contests and chest-beating and sponsor chasing and brawling in the surf. Surfing became nasty and macho and nationalistic. How many five year old boys were introduced to surfing in the ‘80s by girls? None, probably, because women were driven out of surfing almost completely. The dominant mode was aggressive, misogynistic, localized, greedy. Surfers became jocks, morons who trashed beaches and beat the crap out of each other. For anyone whose idea of surfing was different there was nowhere to go. I just gave up and walked away out of shame, to be honest. I went diving. At least underwater you don’t have to listen to anyone’s bullshit. I’d always loved being underwater as much as being on it and it was my main connection with the sea for most of the ‘80s. But I missed surfing badly. I lived in Europe for a couple of years and when I came home I moved to the country and went back to surfing and found a bit of that old vibe among the more intelligent fishermen who were my neighbours.
Looking back I think there were plenty of people like me. They really came out of the woodwork in the mid-’90s when fun returned to surfing. Some surfers were old enough not to care about being self-conscious. Others simply rebelled against the slavish conformity of the ‘sport’ and paddled out on weird craft and did nice things with them. Women returned, thank God, and little girls took to it in numbers unseen since the ‘60s. You paddled out and people in the line-up were actually smiling, talking to each other. The slit-eyed surf-punks were still out there, slashing and snarling and scowling, but they were no longer the only game in town.
For me surfing is about beauty and connectedness. Riding a wave to shore is a lovely, meditative thing to be able to do. You’re walking on water, tapping the sea’s energy without extracting anything from it. You’re meeting the sea, not ripping anything out of it. Few other water pursuits have this non-exploitative element. As a boater, fisherman, shell-collector or whatever, I’m always taking something away from the sea, having an impact on it. But as a surfer I’m riding energy that the sea is expending of its own accord, the way a dolphin or seal or sea-lion does. The actual physical sensation of sliding down a wall of water, feeling really awake and alive and in the moment, is hard to describe to the non-surfer. It looks beautiful and it feels beautiful. Knowing that you’re not doing any damage just makes the feeling better. For some men in particular, whose lives require a kind of utilitarian mindset that can be pretty unfulfilling, this is one of the few activities they undertake in which they can do something pointlessly beautiful. There’s no material result, nothing they can show themselves or the boss. There’s just a bit of a rush, an elevated heart rate, a buzz that lasts all the rest of the day.
Surfing isn’t the only human activity that offers people this natural high. Nor is it the only sustainable recreational activity at our disposal. But I believe that if more surfers tapped into that feeling of connection with the sea, the planet, each other, then their lives and those around them would benefit. There’s the roll-on effect of simple happiness, for one thing. And people who love surfing often educate themselves about the sea itself, and those who learn how fragile it is, and how it’s effected by our other activities will likely change their behaviours and attitudes to keep it alive. We still use the sea as our sewer. Many people don’t realize just how much trouble the world’s oceans are in. Water quality, the temperature of our water, the levels of over-fishing, the health of coral reefs, these things have global implications. Surfers should be at the forefront of doing something about this, of saving the sea for our children. We should know, better than anybody, what there is to lose. And if you’ve been surfing for 30 years or more you’ve had time to figure out what there is to gain.
Any peak moments in the surf, when the wave riding experience has seemed most profound, moved you most deeply, maybe helped pull you out of a difficult time or helped you see things more clearly?
I guess surfing and the sea got me through the grimmer parts of adolescence. When life gets overwhelming it’s incredible what a few hours in the brine will do for you. It’s as though the ocean is this vast, salty poultice that sucks the poison out of your system. I still feel that now. Admittedly it’s addictive, but there are more destructive addictions to be had. I just think it’s a way of slowing down and processing stuff without consciously addressing it. A lot of the time we’re forced to live in the future or the past. Surfing is something that keeps you in the present tense. Some of that is just the immediacy of the problems it sets you, physical adjustments you make every half second to stay on your feet or avoid physical injury (or discomfort, at least). Some of it is just the energy required that dulls much of your other problems. And some of it is the pure dance of it, the sensual pay-off, the feel of the water, the shapes of waves and the colours of the sky and the reef and the water itself; all these things are like money in the bank mentally for me. And even though I’m mostly a solitary surfer these days, there are social payoffs even for a grumpy loner like me. Sometimes you’ll be sliding down this beautiful long wave and you’ll hear some person you don’t know, some man or woman sitting up in the channel just hooting for you, happy for you. Man, that’s nice. I’ll take that to the bank, too. There are people whose names I don’t know who I see in the water or on the beach nearly every day and we smile at each other and say hello and talk simple, civil stuff and I value that.
I think surfing has, at times, saved me from doing self-destructive things. It’s pulled me out of depressions the way only nature can. And for me, the sea really helped me to be a parent. It gave me something precious to share with my kids and my wife. It’s a fabulous thing, if you’re lucky enough, to be able to paddle out with your family and laugh and fart about. It’s not always about the quality of the waves; it’s that feeling of being in it together. You have to treasure the things you have in common. My wife took up surfing at 40. Nowadays we’re keener than our kids. I think they’re pretty amused at this. We’re two stoked old farts who spend far too long wondering what the weather will do. Honestly, I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without the water, without surfing.
What lessons do you think surfing and the ocean have imparted to you? Do you agree the ocean can be a powerful teacher and metaphor for life?
If there’s something I’ve learnt from surfing it’s about connection. When you sit out in the line-up you’re bobbing in seventy percent of the earth’s surface. Seventy percent of your own body is water. Water connects you, internally, to yourself, and it links you externally to everyone else. I really feel the gravity of that. And I think feeling joined to nature, knowing how much I depend on it, and how it’s effected by me and my species, has been very important. And as an artist, as someone who writes stories and tries to make words into beautiful forms, it’s vitally important to me, especially in a culture that’s forgotten the value of beauty. It’s a primary source or inspiration, I guess, when so much of what goes on around you is only about money and big swinging dick capitalism. It’s important for blokes to be able to do beautiful stuff, impractical stuff, that adds to life. That’s an early life-lesson from surfing.
Watching a little girl or a middle-aged woman smiling like a maniac as they come cruising by on a one-foot wall of mush. Or a pod or dolphins doing jumps off an empty pointbreak. Or surfing with a couple of whales spouting and tail-slapping just behind the break. All this is good for the soul. To me it’s not a sport. The professional sport side of it bores me to death. It’s mildly more interesting than golf. To me, surfing has always been soul-business. It’s the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they’re what keeps life from being meaningless. Catching a wave and turning and dancing and looping in toward the beach is one of the nicest forms of pointlessness I can think of.
I’ve heard you described as an “indigenous” writer because of the way you evoke the Australian landscape. Do you think surfing can be a way of enhancing your connection to a place? Have you ever marvelled at those surfers who seem to almost magically appear and paddle out at the precise time and place to snare the wave of the day, as if they are picking up some unseen signals the rest of us miss?
I don’t make any claims about being indigenous. Never have. But I am interested in the mysterious business of belonging. People who take note of where they find themselves and make a commitment to that place, a compact that demands something real from them, have a chance of feeling properly at home. Yeah, you’re right about some surfers, the way they know what the sea is about to do, how they show up at the right place and the right time so often. This is experience becoming instinct; it’s intimacy. But it requires more than just time. It requires respect, I think, a bit of humility, the ability to watch and wait and listen and learn. That’s wisdom. We should celebrate these people, value them. There is a tribal sense in which this knowledge can be passed on to younger surfers, but we need to go back to fostering a culture that values wisdom and age and experience rather than youth and ‘attitude’. Surfing is only one area where this is needed, I think. You see it more readily now in music. I think it’s beginning to happen in surfing again, but I’d love to see it grow faster. Surfers need to broaden, I think, to see the bigger picture, and there’s more hope for this now that we’re not forced to pretend we’re all fifteen. Much of what comes from the surfing media is deadly embarrassing, but I think men and women who are passionate about surfing can bring something grown-up to the wider culture. I’m talking human wisdom here, not market share.