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It might have been dad who pushed me into my first wave, but truth be told my formative surfing years probably owe more to my mother. Indeed, had my mum not surfed I might never have come to be. The story goes that it was the late 60s when a young ca

SURFER: HARRY BRYANT PHOTO: DUNCAN MACFARLANE Although photographer, Duncan Macfarlane, had been on a couple of trips to South Africa before, it was his first time in J-Bay. Travelling with Creed McTaggart and Jai Glindeman, Dunc was posted up in a u

Like his mates and contemporaries Matt rode shortboards and drunk in the cocktail of surrounding surfing influences. However, from an early age he developed an interest in the rich surfing history of the Northern Beaches. Soon he was experimenting wi

It was an amusing, and it must be said, charming, slip in syntax trigged by the 17-year-old attempting to recount where’d he been over the past two months while chasing waves. Perhaps compounding the confusion is that Ned had also not long returned h

It’s bewildering, but there’s a kind natural order to the chaos. It just seems to work. Nothing to do but embrace it and keep riding. On, into the dry country; everything, brown and mountainous, horses and goats chewing at weeds beside the wide and p

So writes Phil Jarratt in the introduction to his recent title ‘The Immortals of Australian Surfing’. Jarratt admits he was vexed by the question of who to include in the book after the publishers insisted he narrow it down to 12 names, but ultimatel

Did your parents detonate your childhood dreams? Or just adult all over them? Seven-year-old Christa Funk returned home from the aquarium with tales of blue ringed octopus and dancing dolphins. Despite growing up more than 1,000 km from the nearest o

The day Lahaina burned Matt Meola was out bow hunting with his friend Lucas Nelson in a forest on the slopes of Haleakala. Lucas had never been, and Matt felt like putting a bit more country in the singer/songwriter (if it’s possible for a child of W

With his latest soiree, The Source, Smith takes a gander at the ingredient list to that tasty piece of the pie he’s found himself comfortably situated in; figuring out whether curating an online persona may have led to a little dose of self-induced-l

Surfing was introduced here in 1956 by Doc Paskowitz, and since then, the popularity of the activity (I won’t call it sport) has grown immensely. If you speak with many Israeli surfers they will tell you with pride that considering the inconsistency

Every year I flock to the cliff face looking over it to watch local chargers tame the beast. I think to myself maybe one day I will paddle out. Surfers have an uncanny ability to imagine and project a fantasy before it is carried out – huge, graceful

Your favourite left-hander in Indo officially shielded from any kind of man-made threat; treated like hallowed ground in the same way Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon is. Every effort made to give the natural environment primacy, whilst cultivating

While the nascent phase of Pro Surfing, in the early 70s, was not always glamorous, it was a time when unique characters with equally distinct surfing styles learned to love the bumpy road to surfing success. It’s difficult to remember exactly when I

The first time I visited was with my then girlfriend, Tracey, in a camper van. We spent a month travelling around the island, and wish we’d allowed for six months. There are white sand beaches with turquoise water; rugged mountains with snow gums and

This was a morning I’ll always remember. Mid-winter, freezing cold, and I was the only soul on the beach. There wasn’t a breath of wind, just these perfect silent lines rolling in, lit by a beautiful, hazy sunrise. These front-on shots of unbroken wa

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