By Phil Jarratt
SO, documentary and memoir complete (well, near enough), I downed tools for a few days last week and took off for the Northern Rivers and the Goldie to catch up with some old friends. And I do mean old. The baby of our group, Karen, was turning 60, while the patriarch, Craig, is entering his middle 80s.
There’s nothing you can do about getting old, and it sure beats the alternative! On this little drive down memory lane, I was delighted to find that the old mates are still sharp as tacks, funny as ever, even if some aren’t paddling out as often as they would like. John Witzig, who was our first port of call, hasn’t surfed for more than 30 years, but I can still recall his beautiful positioning and graceful style from sessions we shared at Whale Beach, Avalon and The Point at Angourie all those years ago. And even in retirement at his beautiful bush hideaway, the spirit of surfing is still very much a part of him through his incredible archive of photographs that document a wonderful and unique period in Australian surfing history.
Although we communicate regularly, I’d seen John only fleetingly since we celebrated the opening of his exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra two years ago. I’m happy to report to his many Noosa friends that the old bugger looks two years younger, not older.
Next we headed back up the coast to Byron for a memorable lunch with another mentor of mine, a man I hadn’t seen for almost a decade. I first met Craig McGregor in the back bar of the old Hotel Canberra in 1972, before it had a facelift and became a Hyatt, when it was always pulsing with pollies and journos. A well-known writer who also happened to be a surfer, Craig had ghosted This Surfing Life for Midget Farrelly in 1965, and then gone on to write critically acclaimed social criticism and political essays, as well as paeans to his hero, Bob Dylan. Craig was about the closest thing we had in Australia to Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson, so naturally he became my role model.
I remember the late photographer Peter Crawford and I stayed with Craig and his wife Jane at their property in the Byron hinterland on one of our North Coast runs in the late 1970s, and over dinner I was whining that I really wanted to write a good book but working always got in the way. Craig put his wine glass down on the table and looked at me almost angrily. He said: “Stop making excuses. Quit work and write the book. If you’ve got any talent, the money will come.”
It took a while for the message to sink in, but I think it was the best professional advice I was ever given. When I flew off to London for the obligatory rites of passage a few months after meeting Craig in Canberra, I had a copy of his Up Against The Wall America in my bag, and I don’t think I’ve missed a book of his since. Over lunch last weekend we traded our latest, and I’ve just started dipping into his, a novella about love and lust in the Byron hills called Motel, and it looks like a beauty.
Craig doesn’t get about so well since he had a stroke a few years ago, but I was delighted to find at the bottom of an extract from the book published in Rusty Miller’s Byron Guide that he still describes himself as “a writer and a surfer”. Long may he ride … and write.
The caravan moved on to the southern Gold Coast where friends had gathered from far and near to celebrate the 60th birthday of Karen Neilsen. Seems like only yesterday that Big K had just been crowned Miss Teen International in Japan and become the new squeeze of my buddy and pro surfer Paul Neilsen. Well, it was 1976, and 40 years later, they’re still happily married and K still looks like Miss Teen.
It was a great party among good friends, and Paul, Rod Brooks and I managed to survive a recovery surf the next morning, so we must have been well behaved.
Vale Richard Neville
A frequent subject of conversation at the lunch and dinner tables during our trip was the sad decline of our friend Richard Neville, suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s at a care facility near Byron. We’d had dinner with Richard in Byron, along with Rusty and Tricia Miller a few years ago, not long after he’d been diagnosed, and found him in good spirits and as wickedly amusing as he’d always been.
I first met the former enfant terrible of publishing in Byron not long after the London Oz trials, where he’d been represented by the young silk Geoffrey Robertson, had turned him into an international celebrity. We were all spending Christmas at a friend’s property and were given jobs to do to pay the rent, as it were. That was how I found myself digging a latrine in the hot sun with the avant garde filmmaker Albie Thoms and the protest porn superstar Richard Neville.
We became friends and although I saw him infrequently, Richard had such warmth and wit that you could always pick up where you’d left off. But not anymore. We were driving home on Monday morning when we heard the news that he’d died on Sunday, aged 74. Another tragic loss.
