But perhaps the most obvious explanation for surf culture’s explosive postwar growth was economic. With the massive expansion of the middle class in the 1950s there emerged a large demographic of American consumers who sought plea sure and leisure at the beach. Nearly all of them were white. For a number of these new beachgoers, especially after Gidget hit the big screen in 1959, surfing became a favorite, if still subcultural, pastime. The beaches of California—not to mention Hawai‘i, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere across the planet—soon resembled an endless sea of bronzed skin. It was, depending on one’s perspective, either a propitious beginning or a dismal end.
TWO
A World Made Safe for Discovery
TRAVEL, CULTURAL DIPLOMACY, AND THE POLITICS OF SURF EXPLORATION
PETER TROY WAS A LEGENDARY EXPLORER. His name may not resonate outside portions of the littoral world, but, to surfers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, it is every bit as weighty as those of Columbus, Cook, and Magellan. A thin, blond-haired Australian, Troy emerged as a highly regarded surfer when still in his teens, winning the Victorian novice surfing title in 1955. He might have remained a mere local figure had it not been for the postwar globalization of surf culture. In 1956, Troy’s Torquay Surf Life Saving Club hosted the International Surf Life Saving Carnival to coincide with that year’s Olympic Games in Melbourne. The carnival included teams from Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), South Africa, England, and the United States, and Troy, as the local titleholder, was asked to give a surfing demonstration. An estimated fifty thousand spectators were on hand to see the young Victorian work his way across the waves on his sixteen-foot hollow board. But it was the American contingent, riding shorter, lighter, and more maneuverable equipment—their “Malibu” boards were approximately nine feet long—that made the biggest splash. These American board designs inspired Australian replication, and the result was equipment capable of tackling breaks, such as Bells Beach, that had previously been considered unrideable.
This heralded a new era in the history of Australian surfing. The sport metamorphosed from an activity undertaken by lifesavers patrolling a particular beach to one in which individual surfers set out along the coast in search of the best possible waves. For some of these surfers, the local beaches were soon not enough. Working at the time as an accountant for Price Water house in Melbourne, Troy’s global yearnings—the seeds of which, he said, had been planted by the Americans in 1956—only intensified. “I had no desire to be an accountant but I wasn’t sure how to leave my job,” he recalled. “When I saw my first Surfer magazine, I saw a glimmer of hope. . . . I realized that here was another way of life.”1
Troy was twenty-four years old in 1963 when he left Australia, surfboard in hand, to become what Brendan McAloon called “surfing’s first vagabond.”2 Over the course of three years, he tackled Europe’s Atlantic Seaboard, surfed the warm waters of Hawai‘i, helped popularize his beloved sport in Brazil—now a competitive Surfing powerhouse—and explored the African coast. He did so by air, boat, foot, road, and rail. He toasted the children of Europe an diplomats, sweated through a South African gold mine, rode in stuffed freight cars with Peruvian peasants, and consumed his fill of cheap wine in Franco’s Madrid. Surfer christened him “one of the most effective roving ambassadors for the sport.”3 And the travel bug never left him. Troy would be back at it years later, discovering, in 1975, the world-class right-hander at Indonesia’s Lagundri Bay with two of his Australian compatriots. By the time he died in 2008, he had visited well over 140 countries.4 Troy’s travels are now the stuff of legend. In that long-ago era before blogs and YouTube, he wrote occasional dispatches for the monthly surfing press. This not only made him something of a minor celebrity but also situated him as an exemplar of Cold War surf culture.
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Surfing had come a long way from its near extinction decades before in that cluster of small Pacific islands in which people rode waves while standing. A Hawaiian tradition that had almost disappeared by the turn of the twentieth century had become, by 1945, a minor global pastime; then, in the decades following the Second World War, surfing emerged not only as a sport enjoyed by millions of enthusiasts worldwide but, significantly, as a form of cultural encounter that might go some distance in bridging national or political divides. A variety of factors contributed to surfing’s phenomenal growth. Foremost among these was the sport’s embrace by the American culture industries. In films ranging from Gidget (1959) to the “beach party” pictures of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, Hollywood appropriated surfing and its youthful, seemingly carefree lifestyle while designating Southern California the presumptive center of the surfing universe. Television likewise took to the sport. Gidget made her small-screen debut in 1965 with a young Sally Field in the series’ title role, while ABC’s Wide World of Sports, recognizing surfing’s striking visual qualities, had begun regularly pumping contests into American living rooms in 1962. Surf music became a popular genre, with performers such as the Beach Boys, Dick Dale, and Jan and Dean emerging as best-selling performers. Surfing even entered the world of American letters. Eugene Burdick published The Ninth Wave in 1956—Burdick would shortly thereafter coauthor the influential Cold War novels The Ugly American and Fail-Safe—and Tom Wolfe, that paragon of New Journalism, released his collection of essays The Pump House Gang in 1968.5
Surfing—or at least some version of it—had entered the commercial mainstream. Yet the surf culture popularized in the 1960s was essentially a moneymaking artifice. For every Bikini Beach (1964) or Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) that purported to reveal the ways of the surfer, there was a shoestring-budget documentary—a traditional “surf flick”—relegated to high school and civic center auditoriums up and down the coast. This more organic community would itself soon reach the mainstream, but not before establishing a foundational element of contemporary surf culture: the primacy of travel to the modern surfing experience. Surfers, like waves, move across and along the oceans. If the first half of the twentieth century was marked by the revitalization and growth of Hawaiian surf culture and its first tentative steps into the wider world, the second half was characterized by widespread global interaction, with surfers ready participants in the rise of Cold War travel cultures. The expansion of the white middle class in the 1950s opened up new horizons for those afflicted with wanderlust. Places that were once only reached following weeks-long transoceanic voyages could, with the growth and increasing affordability of commercial air travel, welcome wide-eyed tourists after flights lasting mere hours.
For no destination was this truer than Hawai‘i, where the tourism industry exploded in the fourteen years between the war’s end in 1945 and the establishment of statehood in 1959. But it was not just about plea sure travel. The growth of Hawaiian tourism coincided with the escalation of the Cold War, and Hawai‘i, which was already situated at the heart of American power in the Pacific, became even more militarized as Cold War tensions increased.6 If not for this militarization, however, surf history might have unfolded quite differently. The armed forces brought several major figures in the development of modern surf culture to Hawai‘i, including Bruce Brown, whose The Endless Summer (1966) made him surfing’s most influential documentary filmmaker, and John Severson, the founder of Surfer magazine. Both Brown and Severson further exposed the rich Hawaiian surf to California’s wave-obsessed youth.7 Yet even for those without military ties, Hawai‘i had become surfing’s mecca. It was the place mainlanders went to assert their wave-riding chops. By the 1960s, a surfer could not be said to have reached surfing’s heights unless he (or, far less frequently, she) had successfully ridden O‘ahu’s North Shore.
And yet, for a number of surfers, the distant trip to Hawai‘i was not enough. Surfing was increasingly about the search, the journey, the discovery. In this vein, a number of young men (and it was almost exclusively men) set out to chart something of the littoral world. Their voyages were not the “Grand Tours” of previous centuries. Yes, they revolved around pleasure. And yes, they dripped with the trappings of empire. But those undertaking the journeys were not generally
