Surf film archivist and director Jolyon Hoff takes his old-school, Jaffa-rolling show on the road again in October, opening in Noosa and closing the season at Noarlunga, South Australia a month later.
Even by historic standards, that’s some roadshow! And the featured film is the instant classic, 60 years in the making, You Should Have Been Here Yesterday, which combines (reads from script) “hundreds of hours of lovingly-restored 16mm footage, uncovered in the garages and dusty cupboards of our original surf filmmakers, with a salt-infused soundscape by Headland and wisdom from Australian surfing gurus, outsider artists and Intuitives”.
Adds Jolyon: “This cinematic poem tells the story of a wild community who took off up the coast and discovered a whole new way to live. We’re going back to the never-before-seen camera reels to find out who we are and where we came from.
“In 2008 I was in [surf filmmaker] Dick Hoole’s garage looking for footage of famously reclusive schizophrenic surfing legend Michael Peterson for a film called Searching for Michael Peterson. I found some beautiful shots of MP, but there were piles of other film reels. I wondered, what gold must be hiding in those other film cans? And what about the other filmmakers, what happened to their footage? During the pandemic these two ideas came together and I decided to use this ‘lost’ film footage to make a film about the side of surfing which didn’t fit the commercial mould.”
That’s more or less what Jolyon had told me when he visited me in Noosa right at the start of Covid to explain his concept for the Australian Surf Film Archive, for which You Should Have Been Here Yesterday is the latest and most ambitious project. I’d first met the guy about a dozen years earlier when he’d interviewed me – in my garage, just a few days after the revelations from Dick Hoole’s garage – for his MP doco, a well-crafted film that enjoyed considerable success, and also alerted Jolyon to a fast-rotting treasure trove of historic footage. It was back then that Jolyon started to formulate his archive concept, but in fact he embarked on a series of human rights awareness films that occupied him for a decade and truly showed the measure of the man.
And what he’s now doing for surf film history shows no less heart.
You Should Have Been Here Yesterday will open the tour at the BCC Noosa Cinema on 19 October and BCC Maroochydore on 20 October. I’ll be doing a Q and A session with Jolyon Hoff after each screening. Tickets available at: shorturl.at/ETzRh or phone the cinema
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Trashing the once-beautiful Bukit
While Noosa prepares to fight the new push for high-rise development, spare a thought for Bali’s Bukit, the once starkly beautiful peninsula radiating from the sacred sea temple of Pura Luhur Uluwatu, which dates back to the 11th century.
Trashed consistently by developers without vision or care since Tommy Suharto first brought the bulldozers in 40 years ago, the Bukit has finally reached tipping point, with more and more cliffs collapsing into the sea under the weight of resorts built at their edge. And now the provincial government appears to be aiding the destruction under the guise of a “preservation” program.
As the Bali Sun reported last week: “Construction work on the cliff preservation project in Uluwatu remains underway. ‘Preservation’ is the word of the moment, with both local communities and the international tourist community struggling to come to terms with the scale of the excavation work needed to construct a sea wall and access road to, as leaders claim, safeguard a crack in the cliff expanding further. The project, funded and overseen by the Badung Regency Government, is budgeted at IDR 82 billion (roughly $8 million).”
The paper went on to report that the first phase of the project involves excavating at the cliff top and cliff side to construct an access road for construction crews and heavy machinery in order to complete cliff conservation and reinforcement works to protect Pura Luhur Uluwatu and the surrounding area, but apparently it has begun before an environmental impact statement and other legal conditions were met.
The accompanying photo of dump trucks throwing limestone debris from the clifftop into the wave-rich ocean below is devastating, but possibly not as devastating as what is to come. For those who remember the Bukit, as I do, from a time before development, I include a couple of Dick Hoole memories to balance your despair.
FOOTNOTE: We’ve seen several good local restaurants close in recent weeks, all of them leaving their patrons with a sense of bereavement, but for mine, the sudden closure of Peter Roussos’s wonderful Eclipse on Gympie Terrace has left not only a hole in my palate but a hole in my heart.
Good-hearted, big-serving Pete has been around the traps in this town for a long time, but when he opened his simple room by the river, no airs and graces, just great Greek/Cypriot tucker with a tendency towards Med-style seafood dishes, he really hit his straps. There weren’t many better dining experiences than watching the sun set over the river, washing down a selection of share plates with a good Greek white, then sharing a cleansing ale and a few stories on the deck with the chef at closing time.
At one of those sessions just before he closed, Pete brought out a portrait painted by local artist mate Leigh Campbell of him pursuing his other passion, belting the skins with his great band, Booka Table and the Maitre D’s. Pete may be out of the kitchen temporarily, but you can catch the band at venues around town. Well worth it.
