Well, not quite, but for mine the best thing to come out of a surfless last week of 2024 was an agreement between feisty pro longboarder Lucy Small and the Noosa Malibu Club, one of the best longboard clubs in the country, to end a ban on her competing in events held under the club’s sanction, including the upcoming Noosa Festival of Surfing in March.
On Christmas Eve businessman and chair of the Noosa Festival of Surfing John Finlay emailed the following message to Lucy Small: “We note that you are currently ineligible to enter any surfing competitions where Noosa Malibu Club is a stakeholder. Accordingly, we are unable to accept your entry. A full refund of your fees will be made as soon as practical.”
There isn’t enough column space for me to go into the detail of how this came about, so suffice it to say that Sydney-based Lucy has been waging a campaign (one of several) for equal prize money in longboarding events, the last bastion of surfing inequality, for about four years now, utilising whatever prize-giving platforms and supportive media organisations she can find. This hasn’t endeared her to a few event directors but as far as I’m aware none of her politicking for equality for women has involved her in unlawful or even unethical behavior.
As the co-founder of the Noosa Festival of Surfing, which grew out of the Mal Club’s Noosa Malibu Classic, in 1998 and event director of about a dozen festivals up to 2018, I can also say that in my recollection this is the first time in the event’s history that a competitor has been banned for voicing an opinion. This is potentially dangerous territory for any sporting organisation to enter into, and between Christmas and New Year there must have been more positional moves made than on your average chess board.
Although the club had noted on social media that “her conduct in creating and promoting a false narrative (via media channels) brought the Club into national disrepute”, it also opened a door by saying that it had never received an apology for this. Lucy responded with a formal apology (sort of), the ban was hurriedly lifted and her entry in the 2025 festival accepted. Crisis averted.
I could probably count the number of conversations I’ve had with the polarising and aptly-named Small on the fingers of one hand, but I’ve always had a grudging admiration for her style, in and out of the water, and for her undoubted writing skills, partly, if I’m honest here, because she reminds me of a young fella who was always rubbing up the surfing establishment the wrong way half a century ago, campaigning in a national magazine on issues like apartheid and the banning from competition of Victorian champ Maurice Cole after he’d served his time on drug offences. Didn’t win him many friends then, but the foes of then are still firm friends now.
Born in Denmark, WA to adventurous Kiwi parents, Lucy grew up addicted to surfing and travel and by the time she was out of her teens she was expert at both. Although she told the travel website Escape.com.au that her primary reason to travel was to surf, the search for solitary perfect waves has landed her in unlikely and sometimes dangerous places. At 22 she found herself on the West Bank of Palestine, having travelled there alone from Egypt. That experience changed her life.
She told Escape: “I didn’t know much about the politics and I was welcomed into people’s homes and had such an unexpectedly fun time there. I partied in a cave under a palace in Bethlehem and drank coffee late at night with new friends in Hebron. That trip has really stayed with me.” And since the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza in 2023, she has added Palestine to her laundry list of campaigns.
Lucy and I sit side by side in a list of regular contributors to Pacific Longboarder magazine, and when my mag arrives in the old school mail I always turn to her articles first and I am rarely disappointed with her adventures in Africa or Asia or Mexico, or her new takes on old and more local themes, such as this acerbic intro to a piece on the 2021 Byron Bay Surf Festival:
“I’ve been wondering lately about the state of Byron as the value of property careens into the outer lining of the atmosphere and the people who’ve traditionally showed up around town to play different varieties of bongo drums on The Wreck foreshore get pushed further and further out of town, who’s going to work in the shitty paid jobs on the bottom rungs of the capitalist system? The salary of someone swiping groceries would barely scrape close to what you might pay for a room in a house in Byron and as Netflix culture takes over from influencer culture, which took over from whatever culture there was before growing in the tropical petri dish that is the region, it makes me wonder, is Chris Hemsworth going to work at Woolworths?”
Can’t wait to read her take on Noosa come March.
