By Phil Jarratt
The surf memoir I published this week is my 36th book in just over 40 years, so you’d think I’d be used to the drill by now.
But in fact it’s always a little embarrassing to stand up in front of a group and start spruiking your wares … until you get into the swing of it again, that is.
I’ll be in fine storytelling form by next Thursday, when we launch Life of Brine (the book version) at Halse Lodge, I can promise you.
I hope everyone will come along, but here’s a story I may not get around to.
Straight out of the book, recalling a time 45 years ago, while working as a political reporter, I escaped the Canberra winter to catch a swell in Noosa – Canberra was getting cold, freaking cold, when suddenly after a long parliamentary session I found I had five days off for time in lieu.
It was late in the season for a Coral Sea low, this much I knew, but the national weather map in The Australian clearly showed one moving west from a position north of Fiji.
Its trajectory indicated that southern Queensland would feel its impact in about three days.
When the Houses of Parliament got up for the winter recess very late the following night, I headed not for the Non-Members Bar, but for my Beetle.
I climbed onto the front and pissed the frost off the windscreen, picked up my surfboard, sleeping bag, wetsuit, and a box of food from my flat in Campbell, and hit the road.
Somewhere out on the freezing plains of the Newell or Olympic Highway, I pulled off the road and slept for a couple of hours, then drove hard all of the next day, pulling into the car park at Noosa National Park about an hour before dark.
Nothing. Nada. Flat as.
There were a few carloads of surfers sitting around, drinking beers and moping.
I walked along the track until I could see dots off Tea Tree Bay where a few hopefuls sat in wait in the bleak, grey afternoon.
This was my first impulsive surf trip, driven purely by my own forecast, and there was nothing.
I was monumentally depressed, but too tired to turn around and drive the twenty-two hours back. Instead I drove up Noosa Hill to the pub, where I sat by a red brick wall and drank schooners of Castlemaine beer while I read my book, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, a gift (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) from a Canberra girlfriend. It did nothing to lighten my mood.
I was woken from an uneasy sleep in my car when the large pebbles on the shoreline below started to rumble.
I climbed out and saw in the moonless dark, lines of whitewater rolling to shore where there’d been none ten hours before.
I could sense more power in the ocean. The swell was coming.
I got back in the car and pulled the sleeping bag over me, but I didn’t sleep. At the first sign of pre-dawn I waxed my board and made my way along the track to the top of the point.
I launched myself off the flat rock between sets and paddled into a scrum of surfers already waiting.
We nodded and smiled in anticipation.
It was another hit and run on Noosa’s points – more than two days on the highway for a mere day and a half of actual surfing – but it was worth every pothole and kangaroo dodge.
On my way out of town I picked up a surfer hitch-hiking at Cooroy.
We babbled so much about the quality of the waves that I drove him out of my way to the Gold Coast.
Then I babbled to myself until I was west of the Divide and drawing a straight line back to the cold heart of the capital.
There was one wave I couldn’t get out of my mind afterwards.
I’d taken off just inside what we now call the Boiling Pot (if it was called that in 1972, no-one had told me).
I turned hard to make the first section, but the wave grew as it curved into the bay, and the fast-breaking section just kept coming at me, the power of the breaking wave threatening to fling me from my board, but letting me just squeak through, again and again.
As I drove along the plains, I found myself leaning into the gentle bends of the empty night highway, still riding the wave, still beating the sections.
The launch party for Life of Brine: a Surfer’s Journey will be held at Halse Lodge from 6pm, Thursday 10 August.
Live music with Band of Frequencies’ OJ and Shannon Unplugged, plus video and author talk. Admission price of $20 includes welcome drink and finger food.
Tickets available from Annie’s Books, anniesbooks@bigpond.com, phone 5448 2053, or at the door.
FOOTNOTE: As this column went to press, word came through of the tragic death of Garth Prowd. As well as everything else he squeezed into a life cut way too short, Garth was a keen and committed surfer. It was a privilege to work with him and his team at USM in creating the 2008 Noosa Festival of Surfing, but beyond the professional relationship, I knew Garth as a man of great integrity and great heart. He will be sorely missed.
