By Phil Jarratt
Everything comes to those who wait … even those who wait for a swell in Noosa in springtime.
And so it came to pass last week, when the points fired up for the best few days since midwinter. Having spent most of the past three months elsewhere, I couldn’t claim to be as surf-starved as many, but considering the size of the crowd on Biggish Wednesday, I thought it was relatively mellow where I surfed.
Photographer Ian Borland counted more than 80 people at First Point that morning, but the sweetener was that the ferocious sweep kept most of them off the take-off most of the time, leaving the way clear to sneak a few. But oh boy, I can tell you that some of us old fellers had spaghetti arms for the rest of the week!
Anyway, the first good swell of the season gave us another thing to be thankful for on Thanksgiving last Thursday evening. May there be many more.
Stompin’ at Freshie tonight!
Tonight I’ll be celebrating the first day of summer in Sydney with family and the crew from Panga Productions for the launch of our documentary film Men of Wood and Foam, which premieres on Foxtel’s History Channel on 14 December. The Band of Frequencies will be playing all the songs they wrote for the film’s soundtrack, and Little Pattie Amphlett will be dropping in from the 1960s to perform a guest spot of stompie-wompie tunes. Oh yeah, big night all round at the historic Freshwater Surf Club.
I just wish that more of the Brookvale Six, about whom the film was made, were able to attend, but jumping on a plane is a bit beyond Billy Wallace, who is recovering from a broken hip. Joey Larkin doesn’t leave the Tweed Coast much these days, Gordon Woods is hard to get out of his harbourside penthouse, and Scotty Dillon is in lockdown in his nursing home at Coffs Harbour. And Midget Farrelly, of course, is sadly no longer with us.
But Barry Bennett and Denny Keogh will be there tonight, representing the pioneers of the surfboard industry. With most of the originals now in their eighties and nineties, I’m just so glad we got the film made while they were able to contribute, and to see the end result.
Back to the Band of Freq’s, tonight will be their first live performance of a suite of songs they wrote for the film, covering musical styles that range from 1950s modern jazz through surf to acid rock and beyond. It’s a real tribute to the diversity of one of the Sunny Coast’s greatest musical assets. You can catch up with the theme song, Days of Wood and Foam, on Youtube either directly or via Facebook pages for the Band of Frequencies and the Noosa Festival of Surfing. Panga’s Shaun Cairns filmed the boys recording the song at the Tanuki Sound Lounge in Brisbane a few months back.
The Freqs will be touring with the film later in the summer. Stay tuned for local dates, including a special appearance at the Laguna Real Estate Noosa Festival of Surfing.
Barbarian wins again
Just when you thought William Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning surf memoir, Barbarian Days couldn’t get any more successful, it wins one of the richest awards in British publishing, the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.
“That was a nice kick in the arse,” Bill emailed me from London last weekend, having just picked up a fat cheque for 28,000 pounds (I presume he meant that in a nice way!).
Barbarian Days is now easily the most successful surf book ever published, so I was very chuffed when Finnegan, with whom I shared a book promotion tour in Bali last year and became friends, agreed to read my own modest memoir (named Life of Brine, after this very column, and due out mid next year) and provide a cover blurb.
He wrote: “In the not-so-small world of surfing, Phil Jarratt has seen it all. Luckily for us, he’s a fearless, funny storyteller, with a reporter’s unsentimental eye and an endearing modesty. But his memoir is, above all, a haunting self-portrait: the boy practicing drop-knee cutbacks in his mother’s full-length mirror in mid-century Wollongong becomes a man.”
I’m not so sure some one of “endearing modesty” would have reproduced the above here, but what the hell! I’m stoked, and I’m sharing. Thanks, Bill.
FOOTNOTE: Please note, irate reader who took to social media to berate me for my politics, no anti-Trump rant here this week. I’ll hold fire until he takes office, but if you want to read more about the sad state of the States, seek out the above-mentioned Mr Finnegan’s column in the New Yorker on line this week.
