By Phil Jarratt
We certainly hit the ground running last week! Within 36 hours of landing home from Los Angeles our Noosa National Surfing Reserve committee was hosting the launch of our 2017 campaign to become the tenth World Surfing Reserve at Halse Lodge – a fun gathering of the local surfing tribe, with wonderful hospitality provided by Drew Pearson and his staff.
The launch is covered elsewhere, so I won’t go into details here.
Then it was back on a plane and down to Newcastle for the Australian Surfing Awards, this year held in conjunction with the Nudie Australian Clubs Championship. I travelled down with my filming partner Shaun Cairns from Panga Productions and former Surfing Australia chairman Norm Innis and made directly for the contest on a stormy afternoon at City Beach.
Practically the first thing we saw was 11-year-old pocket rocket Sabre Norris take off on a howler and milk it all the way to the beach. As the global television talk show sensation (Today, Ellen etc) ran up the beach to tag the next surfer and put the Merewether club in the lead, she was joined by a throng of adoring fans pounding along the sand with her, while the big crowd in the stands cheered her on.
A complete unknown a year ago, the little schoolkid who rips in the surf and tells it like it is in front of the camera has become a bona fide superstar.
Shaun and I were in Newcastle to pick up the Surf Culture Award for our film, Men of Wood and Foam, but the main business of the night was the long overdue posthumous induction into the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame of that great surfer, photographer and character, Peter Crawford. “PC”, who was my friend and colleague for many years, passed away in Bali in 1999, apparently from the effects of a spider bite.
His death, like his life, was shrouded in mystery, but whenever I think about our adventures together, it brings a smile to my lips. PC’s sons Justin and Scotty asked me to join a group of luminaries on stage, including former world champions Peter Townend and Rabbit Bartholomew and the legendary Simon Anderson, to tell a few stories about our wonderfully eccentric friend.
I recalled the time when we were designing the cover of my very first book, The Wave Game, which documented the birth of professional surfing. We wanted to use a sun-sparkled photo of Simon turning off the top at Dee Why Point, but somehow it seemed a little lonely by itself. PC had the great idea of getting a vast pile of bank notes from somewhere and scattering them around the floor for a background picture. We didn’t have a vast pile of bank notes, of course, but somehow I talked the manager of the Avalon Commonwealth Bank into allowing us to throw $50,000 around in an empty office at the rear of the bank.
PC got the shot from halfway up a ladder, then, as we scooped the notes up and started putting them in a canvas cash bag, he looked at me furtively and said: “There’s gotta be a back way out of here!”
A multiple Australian kneeboard champion, PC’s major focus in photography was the surf, but he could turn his hand to anything, so when I left Tracks to pursue my journalistic career elsewhere, I hired him as my photographer whenever I could. On one memorable occasion, Australian Playboy hired us a Kombi campervan and sent us up the coast to report on hippie communes.
We loaded up with cameras, a typewriter (yes, this was a while ago) and of course, surfboards. On the first day out I managed to slam the sliding door shut across PC’s shutter fingers, preventing him from using a camera for almost two weeks. Fortunately he could still surf, so we chased a swell up the coast, finishing with a few days of perfect Agnes Water surf to ourselves while we camped in a two dollars a night fishing shack on the lawn above the beach, surrounded by strutting peacocks.
Because of his unconventional lifestyle, PC was probably a controversial choice for the Hall of Fame, but I think a good one. His competitive record as a kneeboarder is unsurpassed, his body of photographic work stands the test of time, and the way he lived his short life is a reminder of what the true surfing spirit is all about.
Surf festival coming up!
Oh my god, it’s getting very close. The team at Laguna Real Estate Noosa Festival of Surfing is working around the clock as this year’s “8 days of pure stoke” draws near. The site building will be getting underway as you read this, and last minute entries are pouring in for the few remaining divisions with vacancies.
Sam Smith’s team has done a fantastic job this year in creating a full week of great free entertainment on the sand as well as in the water. All we need now is surf! After a lacklustre season so far, the good news is that there appears to be some motion in the ocean from the beginning of March, with the possibility of a solid east swell over the first days.
I’ll run through the entire program in this space next week, but for now visit noosafestivalofsurfing.com for information.
