Indonesia is a place where the currency of waves tracks high and chaos runs rampant. I recently made Bali my Indo base for a year and a half of my life; a time span that seems at once remarkably long and somehow short – a sort of fever dream that has

The 10 bucks in my pocket would cover my bus fare, Amex had my flight, and freelance writing gigs trickling into my inbox would fund the rest. It’d been two weeks since I’d seen the sun, and even longer since I’d surfed anything with shape and qualit

Kelly Slater, however, takes off in the white-water, lying prone on a 5’3” Cymatic snub-nosed quad. He simultaneously stands up and does a bottom turn and heads towards the lip before the wave closes out. He performs a tight, technical, and theatrica

Take the North Coast of NSW. It is a geographical Disneyland for surfers, especially natural footers, with some of the finest right point breaks in the world scattered like sparkling jewels between Crescent Head and The Pass. People speak of these sa

I am a solo artist by the name of Abraham Kenny (aka The Diamond Blow), a musician currently on tour in Ukraine, playing shows in an act of solidarity with the Ukrainian people against Russia’s invasion. In 2007, I left Australia with one hundred cop

To pinpoint when I first met and surfed with Peter Townend would be a guess. In the late 60s/early 70s I was surfing North Narrabeen and would be onboard Col Smith’s VW Combi for the annual sojourn to the Coolangatta area, so that seems to make sense

In six months he traversed 22 countries in total. It was an odyssey replete with hollow waves, hard lessons, dramatic revelations and occasional calamities. Much more than just a surf trip, it was a transcendent experience, which took Lachie across b

It’s arguable the average Australian surfer has a better understanding of Indonesia than most of our politicians. For us, Indo almost feels like an extension of our own wave-rich continent – a seventh, surfing state if you will. Geographically, this

Our actual honeymoon in December 2021 was a rained-out few days on the NSW south coast. Both of us are surfers so this could have been a laidback trip in old stomping grounds where I learned to stand up; were it not cut short when the Airbnb flooded.

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Imagining which of the Mentawai’s 50-plus waves you will bank and glide across enlivens a thousand pre-departure dreams. The excitement begins the minute you book your charter and only grows. Soon enough you will be navigating a tropical wonderland,

Never thirsty, always dry, said Nath, a brash, long-haired Aussie out in the surf. And yeah. It feels fitting riding this empty, scorched 500km long road, through barren corn-fields and half-baked fishing villages. I’m in a hurry to get across this i

SURFER: RUSSELL BIERKE  PHOTO: ARTHUR PICARD Photographer, Aurthur Picard, had pledged to traverse Scotland and Ireland by train rather than be complicit in the airline industry’s contribution to fossil fuel emissions. Public transport made timing hi

Blood is seeping down Dave’s arm from a shallow fin chop. Behind him, another peeling six-foot Nihiwatu set goes unridden like the archetypal surf mirage. Dave’s shifting his feet unstably up the sand. I wonder how bad this one’s going to be. He coll

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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