[ Nat Young's Dream ]

Just gone 50, about to publish his life story, where's Nat at?

By Tim Baker

Nat Young is leaning back in his lounge, eyes clenched, head back, mouthing the words and fingering air guitar to "Bob Dylan's Dream."

"That song," he offers, "tells the story of my life better than anything."

I listen with new attention, trying to hear the lyrics. Nat's son Beau, 24, sitting next to him, observes his dad with amusement.

The plaintive, folksy ballad, as far as I can work out, is the story of a man travelling west on a train, falling asleep, "for to take my rest," Nat quotes enthusiastically, and having a dream, "concerning myself and the first few friends I had."

Bob's long, drawn-out warbles are sometimes tricky to decipher, just like Nat's more esoteric, stream of consciousness raves. There's something in there about youthful dreams, a kind of hippy idealism, that Nat reckons takes him back to what he call his "Eastern Suburbs period, drinking good red wine and listening to lots of Bob Dylan," he reminisces. But there's a hint of sadness, too, that life turned out somehow harder, crueller, with more knocks and painful compromises, than those youthful hippies might have imagined.

Kidman and I are standing in the car park after a surf in fun, three to four foot waves on the point when Nat comes riding up the hill on his pushbike. "Follow me," he bawls playfully, rests his bike against a post and takes off on a narrow track through the bush down the hill. I give chase and can barely keep up through the twists and turns and overhanging branches. We come out to a small clearing and a rough wooden shack, fashioned out of branches tied together with wire and a palm frond roof, overlooking the point. It provides a fresh perspective of this famed break and serves to immediately ground me in my surroundings.

Nat's in an animated mood, just beyond his 50th birthday, on the eve of the publication of his autobiography, entitled, inevitably, "Nat's Nat and That's That." He's just had the "Good Weekend" magazine down preparing a profile and is gearing up for the full media blitz.

We return to Nat's stylish home and holiday apartments overlooking Spookys and greet the family - wife Ti, 14-year-old daughter Nava, and eight-year-old son Bryce. His two other children, from his first marriage, Beau and Naomi, live in Sydney near their mother Marylin (who featured on last issue's cover). We've timed our trip to coincide with Beau paying a visit on his dad for a few days. Beau's just shaped his first surfboard, a single fin based on the planshape of the board Nat rode in "Morning of the Earth," and Beau wants to ride it on those same, idyllic north coast waves Nat immortalised it on.

The imminent release of Nat's book dominates the household.

"I read the first chapter and couldn't read any more," Nava tells me.

Nat reckons he's spent more than he planned on the project and needs to sell a heap of books to return his investment. He jokes about giving away the surplus as Christmas presents for the rest of his life .

The family seem to be bracing themselves for one more blast of the public spotlight into their private lives. A recent Sydney Sun Herald newspaper article, on the occasion of Nat's 50th birthday, carried the banner headline, "Nat Young has smoked pot with two of his children and plans to smoke pot with his youngest daughter." Halfway through the story, it is explained that when each of his children turn 16, Nat makes a tradition of sharing their first joint with them, so they experience it in a safe environment, rather than experimenting on their own, but the headline alone was enough to raise a few shackles in these conservative, country environs.

Nat has been telling us how he hasn't heard from his old mate Wayne Lynch for months, has left a dozen messages without response, and is wondering whether he's pissed off about something. Ten minutes later, with supernatural timing, the phone rings and it is Wayne, calling from Victoria. They rave for an hour, covering everything from the Midget feud, to Peter Drouyn and Gerry Lopez's bit of biff at last year's Oxbow Masters, to the whole concept of Masters surfing and what form such an event should take. At the end of it all, Nat says simply, "See ya'. I love you."

Nat sets us up in one of his handsome apartments (designed by old friend Paul Witzig and fashioned from timber milled at Nat's farm) and we settle easily into the Young routine - surfing on long and shortboards a couple of times a day, adjourning for Nat's obligatory 11 am coffee, afternoon games of tennis, a counter tea at the pub, or Ti's magnificent home cooking. We borrow a bunch of his old videos - "Fantastic Plastic Machine," "Fall Line," and a copy of "Evolution" (which has been rented from the Evans Head video store for $3 a week, and never been returned) - and set about immersing ourselves in the study of Nat-ology. There is a surreal moment when we are watching Nat's opening spiel in Fall Line as he sits on his surfboard talking to camera, when the man himself walks through the door of our apartment, and we glance back and forward at video Nat, age 30, and real life Nat standing before us. "Hah," he bellows, "I couldn't remember my lines and I had my notes sticky taped to the nose of my board." We stop, rewind, play, pause, and there they are.

Throughout the video Nat surfs, mono-skis, jumps off cliffs and learns to hang-glide, apparently verging on disaster numerous times. "He's Alby Mangels," Kidman reckons, and we imagine a Nat action doll, complete with multiple accessories.

When we arrive at Nat's in the morning for a surf he is almost invariably up in his office, on a mezzanine level that overlooks the living area and kitchen. His voice booms out like a Godly pronouncement from above. It's pretty easy to allow yourself to get swept along in Nat's wake. He can be great fun to hang out with, though I suspect it must be a big job being Nat, constantly living up to the legend. A pair of WA surfers on a round-Australia surfari knock on the door with a copy of Nat's surfing guide book, wanting him to autograph it and suggest where they might find waves. He happily indulges them and gives them detailed directions to a little known spot down the coast. "I usually get one or two of them a day," he reckons.

Beau arrives after a couple of days, having driven nine hours north from Sydney. He looks through the proofs of his dad's book and seems impressed. "You've actually been doing something. That's not like you, Pops," he teases.

We go for a surf at a nearby beachbreak, fun and punchy, wedging off a long rock groyne at four to five feet. Nat is riding his Rodney Dahlberg shortboard, a 6'6" square tail. Rod gave him a bit of extra thickness in the latest one ("He is over 50, afterall," Rod reasoned), and despite Nat's concerns it appears to work magically for him. He goes for one enormous vertical re-entry right over Kidman, as he bobs in the water taking photos, and nearly takes his head off. Nat falls out of the lip of the solid five foot wave, lands it and surfs off down the line. "Did you see that?" Beau shrieks with familial pride. "That's the best turn I've seen him do in years."

We surf for three hours with no more than two other surfers and have a ball. Beau rides the "Morning of the Earth" replica without a leggy and has a few swims, but manages to guide it through some impressive turns. After an hour or so, he jumps on his normal shortboard and rips into the waves with a grommet energy. "All the longboarders think I'm a shortboarder and all the shortboarders think I'm a longboarder," he tells us later. Like his dad, it seems a mute point to Beau, simply a matter of choosing the right equipment for the waves.

Later that day, as the swell drops, Nat, Beau and Nava go for a late session at Spookys on longboards, sharing the tiny, rolling rows of foam as the setting sun bathes the picturesque bay in heavenly shades of red and orange. It feels almost intrusive to be in the water with them, like it's some holy family communion.

A couple of days later, as the swell drops, we surf the back beach, which is barely breaking out the back, filling up and slapping the shore in zippering close-outs. I'm the only one on a shortboard and flounder, while the others have a blast on longboards. Nat's critical of a lot of modern longboards that try to incorporate new design trends, like an abrupt kick in the tail. "If a longboard's got no flow, it's got nothing," he says. I try to develop an appreciation for the subtle bottom curves of his and Beau's equipment and decide it's like trying to detect the bend in horizon.

The fact that Nat ran away from home at 14 to pursue the far-fected notion of surfing for a living doesn't stop him from worrying about his own children's career directions and Beau, sponsored by French clothing label Oxbow, is subjected to much paternal chiding to "get serious" about his life.

Nat today is a curious mix of old hippy, freedom loving bohemia and pragmatic, at times almost redneck country conservatism. Politically, he's a Labor man through and through, has been since he donated his $600 prize money from the '74 Coke Surfabout to Gough Whitlam's election campaign. Yet, he'll express doubts about his local ALP candidate, because she's a housewife who couldn't possibly understand "the essence of Labor". He'll curse "the bloody Japs" who stuffed up a dishwasher in one of the apartments by putting a bar of soap where the detergent should go, yet embrace gay literary luminary Patrick White as one of his "absolute heroes."

He's big on heroes, who include, of course, Gough Whitlam, whose famous "crash through or crash" style of politics seems to epitomise Nat's personal style too. That evening at the Opera House in '74, when he sat on stage alongside Gough and other Labour Party luminaries and supporters such as Patrick White and Tom Uren had a profound affect on Nat. Kidman and I, leftist, pinko sympathisers from way back, who can barely recall the outrage of Gough's dismissal as schoolkids, are enthralled by Nat's recollections of the night.

"I got a little tongue tied because I was slightly overwhelmed. I tried to just speak from the heart," Nat says. "I felt like I was a bit out of my depth ... Basically I was surrounded by academics or people from the arts. I had a really good discussion with Patrick White because the 'Tree of Man' was one of the most influential books for me in my reading ... The Tree of Man tells about a family growing and being taken over by a city, and the few shacks on the edge of town turns into a big town which turns into a city, and it's sort of like a real mirror of what happened in Australia. And whether you could grow to be able to understand this and live with this or whether it was going to absorb you and roll you ... Patrick White was a very important person on that level."

This unlikely pair discovered they had a connection that went back 25 years. "He was living down at Werri at that stage, him and his boyfriend, and they were very much in love and they used to spend a lot of time walking on the beach and he said he used to watch surfing and watch waves. Werri, from my childhood, was very important because there was a golf club and it was abandoned and we used to go in there and just stay there. And that's where Patrick was living so he understood. And he said, 'Oh, we used to laugh about the way the golf club had turned into a derelict place and the surfers were squatting there on the weekends,' and so he knew exactly where my head was at."

Where Nat's head has been at, of course, is an issue that occupies a giant place in our surfing history. Not content to simply let his surfing do the talking, Nat has always explained himself to the surfing public, through his own personal journey. Some call it grand egotism. I don't know. If often comes off as a genuine sense of filling some need of our surfing culture for leaders, orators and elders.

He matter-of-factly proclaims Makaha patriach Buffalo Keaulana the one Kahuna of world surfing. "We need to have a Kahuna. Everyone goes, well, what is one. IT'S A SURF GOD," Nat very nearly roars. "We need one. We're a different culture. We have diffrent values ... Buffalo, it's like that's his gift."

Nat launches into a tale of Buffalo rescuing him at the '65 world titles in Peru, when Nat got too drunk at the awards night. "They were all trying to dress me in a tie and suit and stuff in the back of the Waikiki club in Peru and Buffalo just came and picked me up like a sack of potatoes and put me over his shoulder and took me out there and said. 'On behalf of Nat Young I'd liked to say aloha, and we're very pleased to be enjoying your country,' and just gave them all a look at me over his shoulder and then just walked off."

As if to strengthen the case for Buffalo's appointment, he plunges into another story of Buffalo quelling hostilities between the Hawaiians and the Peruvians. "The Hawaiians and Peruvians were at each other's throats, and there was this big meeting and George Downing and Eduardo Arena are just screaming at each other. Buffalo just pulls a ukelele out and starts playing 'Pearly Shells,' and they're talking, and Buff says, 'I think best you quiet Georgie.'"

At this point in the tale, Nat starts singing in a deep, Hawaiian voice, mimmicking Buffalo: "Pearly shells, Pearly shells:"

Nat continues: "He sings, and then he goes, 'I think it best you sing with me, Georgie' and makes George sing 'Pearly Shells' with him. And by the end of that thing, all of us, he gave each of our countries a turn to sing, 'Pearly Shells.' He reminded us that we were all together... And it just worked so well."

The intervening years have been well documented. The glorious overthrow of the noseriders at the '66 world titles. The shortboard revolution. The country soul '70s. The growing entrepreneurial ventures in the '80s. Books. Films. The surf shop. Run-ins with police. Political aspirations. Plane crashes. The glorious sweep to victory in the new age of pro longboarding in the '80s. Nat seems to have kept up a pretty frenetic pace, kind of like Madonna, always finding ways to re-invent himself, keep himself relevant to the wider surfing world. Except, that is, for the last few years of relative quiet, brought on by a serious snowboarding accident in the US five years ago. Coming down the mountain with Ti and Nava at the end of the day, he decided to go for one more run while his wife and daughter waited at the bottom for him. When he hadn't appeared after 20 minutes, Ti took the chair lift back to the top, skied down, and found him unconcious and bleeding from a major head wound next to a tree.

"The turn around was the accident in Sun Valley," Nat says simply, "I was sick. I'd been hit very severely in the head and I actually had some brain damage, and so I was on heavy medication to try and get me back to a position to where I could think again. "

He suffered shocking migraine headaches, had to give up air travel and working for French clothing label, Oxbow. He recalls getting off a flight to Europe in Singapore because he was in agony. In all, a very humbling experience, he says. "You really have come to a point where you're going, I really need some medical assistance because I'm feeling like I can't go on one more second and I have to have sedation. And I was actually laid out and sedated and flown to Sydney and Ti came down."

Of course, a Nat interview wouldn't be complete with some discussion of his well-publicised drug dalliances. It's part of why we love him. Nat will talk about it all, break down taboos and conventions with the passion and bluster of his opinions. "I never stuck a needle in me," Nat declares at one point. "The only time drugs ever consumed me was when I was grieving, living in Darlinghurst for six months."

Despite what the neighbours might think, there are no wild, drug-fuelled parties at the Young household these days. Ti is vehemently anti-drugs and Nat, apart from the occasional choof with old friends, doesn't touch the stuff. Still, he remains a passionate supporter of relaxing drug prohibition. "Everybody says we've got to protect people from drugs," Nat starts. "BULLSHIT! Give everybody as much drugs as they want. If they want to kill 'emselves, so what? All you're doing is taking people off the planet and leaving it to people who really want to live."

Which brings us to Nat's abiding personal philosophy. "Make it a beautiful life," he declares bluntly, numerous times during our stay. "You've got to make it a beautiful life 'cause if you don't there's no point. It's totally up to you."

Is he religious, I wonder? "My religion is the religion of surfing and nobody can tell me that what I and everybody I know does, and what we did yesterday , is not a religious experience ... When you practice something regularly, what you are doing is practicing union with nature in order to become aware of the things that are important to you and the things that a lot of of other like minded people happen to believe."

When a whole lot of us do it, Nat explains, we become a formidable vibration on planet earth, able to influence and inspire others, maybe even help save the planet. "I feel very strongly that surifng has been underrated from the religious side," says Nat. "I think it's been sold very cheaply, surfing. It should have been sold as an artform, ... and people would have got away from, well, who's the fucking winner, because this is what creates all the animosity, and it also creates the problems. Why do we need a winner? I don't need a winner. Needing a winner is a very crude way." Those who have witnessed Nat in the midst of competitive fervour might be surprised by such ideals, but Nat is just getting warmed up.

"And you want me to tell you, the blame even goes back further to that, to the companies now, Billabong, Quiksilver. They're very strong in the world and those people know and understand. Greasy (Billabong boss, Gordon Merchant) is one of my neighbours here, a very good surfer, understands absolutely that surfing's not a fucking sport, the same as Greeny, the guy that owns Quiksilver, understands that surfing's not just a sport. They should make sure that the artistic end of this is covered more so than the sort of, we've got to have a winner ... It doesn't have to be the whole end-all and be-all. It's bullshit. Right now, they're selling it cheap. They should be trying to let this thing get stronger through artistic, religious connotations."

I'd been a bit taken aback by the nostalgic melancholy of "Bob Dylan's Dream," the sense that the idealistic fancies of youth will inevitably fade and slip through your fingers. After a week at Nat's, though, I'm starting to get the idea that all those rose-coloured, hippy days stand as a bit of a benchmark of how high and stoked on life you can be, which Nat's uses to this day as a reference point to keep him stoked. And if he's weathered the years a bit easier than old Bob, it's because he's a surfer.

"That's what's so nice about surfing," Nat agrees. "We have this continual thread. No matter how depressed you get on the beach, you go through all these problems associated with women or with children or with life in general, there's this thread, this unbelievable reality that we've got running through our lives that I don't think a lot of people do. They talk about what is the despair out there, and I think surfers are so lucky to have this reality because it can stave off despair. We all had it yesterday, we all got to ride unbelievabe waves yesterday and we just did it and it's always going to be there, and you can think about it in five years time and go, I remember that, we had a really good day, just cruising and riding waves. You know, you do that with so many people through your whole life and it's a special thing, and we're just so fortunate to have that possibility."