Angourie in their Hearts

To paraphrase voltaire: If Angourie did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. The images of the place are so iconic they seem seared into our brains, at least here in the Antipodes. We feel them rather than see them, like they are our own memories: Baddy Treloar, dust-covered in the autumn sunlight, sander in hand, carving out a new shortboard, then running around the Point to the strains of John J. Francis’ song “Simple Ben.” A lone surfer walking down the steep track with an empty lineup in front of him, and a hand-painted “mullet for sale” sign indicating the nourishment from the sea. Steve Cooney throwing a fishing line into a sunlit river. Chris Brock reclining post-surf in his tree house, built on an uninhabited headland. Backlit waves, full of migrating schools of baitfish, bending around a point into a rocky bay.

Seminal photographer John Witzig named his 1969 photographic exhibition of the Angourie area “Arcadia,” after a mythological Greek wilderness famed for its pastoral innocence and contented peoples. But the surfers who claimed the region weren’t the first to find a vision of utopian life here. 

Angourie was the homeland of the Yaegl people for thousands of years, long before white settlement. Its rich river flats, estuaries, lakes, and headlands—filled with fish and shellfish and medicinal plants of the low coastal heath—supported thriving communities at much higher densities than many places in Australia. 

Indigenous populations and white settlers managed an uneasy coexistence here for longer than almost anywhere else on the continent—a peace based on the abundance of food available for the aboriginal people and the difficulty white settlers had in establishing agricultural communities amongst the coastal ranges, swamps, and thick scrub. The region was mostly marginal, hard-scrabble land for a small population of farmers, many of whom turned their backs on a coast that had supplied such easy living for the Yaegl for fifty thousand years, a period of deep time that saw ice ages come and go and the coastline shift many miles seaward and inland. 

During the last glacial maximum, Angourie Point was a low green hill situated miles inshore from the sea’s edge. Important to the Yaegl, it was home to meetings held each season that coincided with the collecting of abundant resources, such as when the mullet would run from the river to the sea. Other tribes also gathered here, invited by the Yaegl, and would stay for weeks or months, depending on the availability of food. In addition to sustenance, the meeting place served as a forum for discussing issues as well as for instruction. The young were taught to track and hunt, climb to collect honey and bird eggs, and were imparted with lessons on the mood changes of ilina, the wind.

It was a quirk of historical circumstance and fortuitous timing that, many millennia later, Angourie became a mythical surf spot and a cultural touchstone for Australian surfers. 

Despite the early twentieth century labeling of the North Coast as a “land of plenty,” it was not a prosperous area of economic growth. Such rhetoric ignored the impediments of distance from viable markets, floods, a lack of understanding of the subtropical climate, and the uneven fertility of the soils for cropping. These factors meant that North Coast farmers continually struggled for anything beyond subsistence. 

A steady depopulation of the area, beginning with the Depression and continuing into the War Years and beyond, saw rural people flock from the Angourie countryside toward urban centers in search of gainful employment. Grafton-based activist Ulrich Ellis, a long-time spokesman for the Country Party and New State Movement, estimated 48,000 people were “spirited away in one decade, dribble by dribble” to the cities between 1954 and 1964. This migration from the rural North Coast of New South Wales was paralleled by surfer migration out of Australian cities, Sydney in particular. 

Those surfers who stumbled across the coastal nooks north of Sydney in the 60s and 70s effectively found an abandoned, agrarian, industrial site instead of pristine nature. Despite what the soft-hued photographs of the era suggest, Angourie itself was also the location of a rock quarry used to construct the Clarence River’s southern breakwall, beginning in 1893. The miners of this project lived in tents until the quarry closed in the early 1900s. Afterward, the area had no permanent inhabitants at all until 1940.

Beyond that, the beach heading south from Angourie Point had been sand-mined for heavy minerals between 1920 and 1937. Fortunately, in response to local opposition to the practice, the New South Wales Government used the Land Acquisition Act to decree Angourie a national park in 1975. By 1980, Yuraygir National Park was established, and Angourie stood northern sentinel over the largest coastal national park in New South Wales.

Unlike California’s Hollister Ranch—Angourie’s American doppelgänger—natural regeneration and isolation seemed to be baked in by government decree, which outlined that the land remain in the commons for perpetuity, rather than held by private ownership. That difference seems fundamental in understanding the back-to-nature ethos of Australian surfing that developed with Angourie as a touchstone. Californians fleeing from rampant overdevelopment, and Sydney-siders escaping the rat race, felt like it was a place where they could live off the land and sea. And so they did.

Angourie transplant, and 1966 World Champion, Nat Young first laid eyes on the tombola known as Angourie in 1962 while on a filming trip with Surfing World founder Bob Evans. Evans was a first-rate media mover and shaker, who became a principal and primary cause in the ensuing discovery phase of the Australian East Coast. He’d heard about the surf from his brother, Dick Evans, a nearby Yamba resident and keen bodysurfer and fisherman, who had spent a recent afternoon at Angourie Point, eating fresh snapper cooked on the beach and then bodysurfing by himself, the first recorded surf session at the Point.

Accompanying a teenaged Nat were hot surfers Bobby Brown, from Cronulla, and Kevin Platt, from Queensland, both now deceased in tragic circumstances. On that first trip, the surfers had to “push the car through the sand dunes that covered the road,” says Nat. When they finally arrived, they parked down near the “blue pools,” an abandoned quarry which had filled with rainwater. They then climbed over the bluff and “looked down on the waves and couldn’t believe it.” 

David “Baddy” Treloar, another Angourie transplant, similarly made the trek north from Manly. “In the early days of Surfing World,” Baddy says, “the magazine had a column called ‘Check it Out.’ Like ‘Check out Crescent Head,’ or ‘Check out Angourie.’ The first shot I saw was a little blue photo, about 3 inches by 3 inches. Then, there was a beautiful photo after the ’64 World Titles of George Burgess standing in front of the Point at 10 foot.”

In the ensuing years, the tone of Angourie’s reputation for country/soul magnificence was largely set by Bondi surf urchin Chris Brock, who by the autumn of 1969 was ensconced in an Edenic tree house in the area. Brock appeared on the cover of the first Tracks magazine in 1970, riding a short displacement hull at Angourie Point with a headline that read, “Roll the bowl on the tiny hull.” 

“I opened the cover,” says Baddy, “and there’s Brocky on the second wave of a set. I thought, ‘I’m gunna fucking live there.’ When I got here, Brocky was in the water and I thought, ‘Well fuck this, if I can find a house with running water and electricity I’m staying.’ And that’s what I did.”

Brock only gets a one-word mention in the exhaustive Encyclopedia of Surfing, despite pivotal roles in both Morning of the Earth and The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun, not to mention his contributions in translating some of the more radical Greenough Velo kneeboard design-influences into stand-up surfboards. The board he rode in Morning of the Earth was a futuristic, flex-tailed, short-hull design, which he built and tuned by painstakingly adding and sanding away fiberglass tail panels. An argument could easily be mounted that, in the crucial period between 1968 and 1971, as the shortboard revolution raged through the surf world, Brock, along with Wayne Lynch and Jock Sutherland, was in an elite group of the most progressive surfers in the world. 

At the time, not everyone in Angourie was enamored by this new, alien-like intrusion of working class bohemians. Like elsewhere on the North Coast, conservative, rural people felt under threat. In one instance, a local family, the Causleys, bought a block of land on the hill near the top of the headland at Angourie, where they planned to retire. But by the early 1970s, Shirley Causley said she would not live there any longer. Things had changed so quickly since they bought it, with the “surfies” moving in, that she felt displaced. Nothing had been stolen or vandalized, but the coast was now full of strange, long-haired, scruffy young people sleeping in their cars, and they scared her. Her family stopped going to the beach, and she remembers that the “surfies” seemed to control the headland from that point forward.

Angourie, and the rest of the North Coast’s idyllic pointbreaks, had entered the international arena with the release of George Greenough’s “home movie,” 1968’s The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun. The film permanently entwined the North Coast points, including Angourie, with the vanguard of the shortboard revolution and the new discipline of tube riding. 

Baddy Treloar had a strong cameo in Innermost Limits, but it was his role—shaping his own board, running around the Point in cut-off denims, and surfing sans leg rope with schools of racing mullet—in Alby Falzon’s Morning of the Earth that cemented his place in the Australian surfing consciousness. “That stuff with Alby was never planned,” he says. “He just happened to film it and it all came together.” 

Baddy earned the princely sum of $200 dollars for his star turn in Morning of the Earth. With the rent on his farmhouse at Palmers Channel (complete with goats) going for $4 a week, he says he paid a year’s worth in advance and never went back to the city.

Greenough’s influence had harnessed the tremendous, pent-up virility of Australian post-war working-class culture. And the advancements and experiments were not just in surfboard design, but also in ways of life. A movement in which, for the last time, surfers were at the vanguard of social change had found a home in Angourie and, for an all too brief period, it looked like the question of whether surfing was a sport or an art had been definitively and permanently settled in favor of the latter.

It didn’t last. Before the decade was through, a fully realized version of professional surfing, complete with an international tour and mainstream sponsors, was alive and kicking. The fiercely anti-contest Greenough—as well as the original North Coast crew, which consisted of Nat, Baddy, Brocky, Ted Spencer, Bob McTavish, Gary Keyes, and Wayne Lynch—were mostly sidelined, apart from a few cameo roles, in surfing’s new era of professionalism. 

Thus, Angourie and the North Coast points slipped off the radar. Apart from the odd star turn in films such as Paul Witzig’s 1990 effort, All Down the Line, they mostly stayed there. Life rolled on. Baddy moved into Chris Brock’s tree house on the next point south of Angourie. When he built another one on South Beach in the early 70s, the police burned it down. Once massive tracts of the coast were declared national park land, the whole area returned to a sleepy backwater nestled by the biggest river in Australia, the Clarence. A single road ran in from the Pacific highway, leaving the metropolises of Sydney and the Gold Coast a long way away. 

*

Today, the road runs arrow-straight through the same Gondwanan Rainforest, flanked by cabbage-tree palms and swamp oaks. When I arrive, it’s May and the tea trees are full of showy yellow blossoms, which fill the air with a strong scent of honey. The pavement comes to a low rise and a bend, and abruptly the landscape changes. Rainforest gives way to low heath, which stretches away into the distance. This is Australia’s big sky country. It’s easy to see why Bob Evans once famously counseled that one should “never leave the North Coast in May.”

These days, you can drive right up to Angourie Point. To the south, there is heathland and the area feels like a sentinel island, a last outpost of human settlement. Bryce Young, free-surfing impresario and the youngest son of Nat, is trotting to the Point with a baby blue fish under his arm. He takes a look then abruptly turns back to go jump in a tin boat with Laurie Towner, who is on his way to go surf a break on the other side of the river. In a wave blessed region, an offer to go surfing somewhere with a mate is never far away. Inside the Young family home, Nat is still equal parts gregarious and imperious at 71. 

“Still getting out there, Nat?” I ask. 

“I’m pretty low down on the pecking order these days,” he says, “but I’m happy with where I sit on it. The fact that I’m still out there and getting ’em, at my age, is fantastic.”

Nat’s daughter Nava enters the sunlit room. She’s keen to express her reservations about the article. “Do we really need this?” she asks. “We don’t want any more exposure. We’ve never even had a contest here. This place is special.”

I tell her I understand—and I really do. In 2008, Rip Curl scouted Angourie for a Search event and, after local opposition, moved on to consider other locales, one of which was my home break, Lennox Head. The desire to avoid corporate exposure and exploitation runs deep in this area, a hold-over from the attitudes of the original pioneers and settlers. 

“My point of view is you have to live with the reality that it’s 2018,” Nat chimes in. “It’s not 1972. It’s not the Morning of the Earth. It’s the bloody night of the Earth.”

I ask if the special essence here can last. “The essence can stay as long as people realize there are many more people now, and you have to give more to receive less,” Nat says. A new, six-lane highway is being built, with a massive bridge across the Clarence, which will bring the urbanity of southeast Queensland closer to Angourie. “It’s gunna get intense,” Nat predicts. “It’s all gunna change and there’s gunna be heavy pressure on surf breaks by people who don’t have the same understandings as the people that live here.” 

The younger generation seems to have different, if not equal, concerns. Dan Ross, former World Tour surfer, grew up being mentored by Baddy, who is his stepdad. “When I was 5, my mum met Dave and we moved to Angourie, and that was where I learned to surf and fish and be a waterman. He was a stepdad, but he was also a best mate. Every day after school he’d wait for me to get off the bus and we’d go surf, whether it was 2 feet or 10 feet at the Point. He’d be standing there at the rocks at ‘Life or Death,’ where we jump off, and I’d be waiting for him to give the go ahead. You know the consequences if you time that wrong. I had a lot of trust in what he knew about the ocean and surfing the Point.”

Dan now lives adjacent to Angourie in the village of Wooleweyah, where homes are nestled in tree-lined streets on the shores of a tidal saltwater lake that drains into the Clarence River. For his part, as a product tester for Patagonia, he’s keyed into the environmental challenges facing the region. He sees the biggest threat not as crowds from Queensland, but the development of a mega-port and cruise ship terminal proposed for the Port of Yamba in the Clarence River. “The issue,” he says, “is with the dredging to get the ships in and out of the river. The sediment has heavy metals from the cane farms, and we know that can wipe out marine life. The tidal plumes from the river go all the way down to Angourie and then even further south, and that puts all the fishing and diving—the reasons everyone comes to the place—at risk. It could be a disaster for the local economy as well as the ecology.”

What about the new highway, I ask him. “For sure, the new highway is going to bring more crowds, and part of that is just the evolution of it. It’s getting busier on the coast and these quieter areas are becoming more of a hot spot. We’ve got so much national park land on the southern side and northern side of us, so it can’t expand up and down the beaches. It can only go inland. Still, amongst the local surf community, I believe there is a key crew that keeps a respectful mentality in place. I won’t hesitate to inform someone, politely, that this isn’t Snapper, that there are people on the inside here waiting for waves. I think there’s enough energy in the community to keep it that way. Not in a ‘locals only’ way, but in a come and share waves way. Understand the vibe and the energy of the place, and connect with that.”

Laurie Towner is another member of the new generation—and another great Angourie export. Like Dan, he was also raised to full potential under the tutelage of local surfers like Baddy. About ten years ago, according to Baddy, “his star exploded,” after he scored the heaviest wave of the winter at Pipe, and then paddled into a Shipstern’s bomb during a session with Andy Irons.

Unfortunately, Laurie was a victim of surf industry downsizing that followed his main sponsor’s over-extensions in a shaky economy. A minor renaissance has occurred, however, and he’s received some new backing by Ryan Scanlon, the founder of wetsuit and clothing company Need Essentials. Scanlon moved into the area from Torquay to “get back into the country, and because of the values of the surf community here.”

“I spent a lot of time surfing with Laurie,” he tells me, “and was blown away at how good he is and how much he still has to offer, especially in the big-wave arena. At the time, he was doing a tiling apprenticeship, but as our company started to expand I was in a position to help him chase some swells.”

Apparently, tensions between the anti-corporate vibe of the area and the dictates of pro surfing have remained mostly in check, a result that Dan Ross attributes to the egalitarianism of the tight-knit surf community. “I definitely had moments, when I was coming into my career as a pro, when I thought I was killing it,” he says, “and I’d soon get pulled up by my mates or by Baddy. ‘What, you think you’re the man?’ He was really good at putting it in perspective. He still is. Having such good mates, like Navrin Fox and my brother and all that crew, that I’m close to—they pull you back into line if you are exploiting it. Sometimes there’s a scenario where you get pictures from a good swell here and you want to make your sponsors happy, but it’s a double-edged sword because you also wanna keep it quiet.”

*

On a glorious, blue-bird day in autumn, the sunlit stretches of the Clarence River wend their way through to the Pacific. Waiting for Dan, I meet an old friend by the fishing harbor. We’ll call him Mick. The place is changing, Mick tells me. Speculators moving in, houses being renovated and flipped. The lure of easy money has brought greed and a shattered community. The pastoral vibe is being gentrified, he says. 

“People are getting forced out of their houses because they can’t pay the rent. No way did I ever think that would happen. No one did. There’s nothing for sale here. It’s all been bought up. The real estate agents in the last few years have made a squillion. A squillion!”

It’s a long way from tree houses in the heath. 

Still, it seems as if the kids are all right. Laurie is in Fiji, with the possibility of a second act in front of him. Bryce is enjoying the avant-garde life as an international free surfer, teaming up with Ryan Burch to build boards out on the family farm, whilst staying mostly underground in a small country town. The rest of the younger crew has moved on from the lure of the bowling waves at Angourie Point, pushed by crowds into their own age of discovery. The surrounding national park gives room to move—wildness, solitude, points, slabs, inspiration. Despite 50 years of being intensely surfed, the area still yields undiscovered or lightly-surfed gems. Development could also bring economic opportunities to local businesses, surf or otherwise.

An uneasy equilibrium will be put under immense pressure once the new highway opens, and then again if the cruise ships arrive in the Port of Yamba. A second wave of infiltration looms, not just from Sydney but also from the barbarians of the north, where the most crowded surf spots on Earth along the Gold Coast have bred a Hobbesian mentality—a war of all against all. The fragile, multi-generational respect cultivated here over a long period is in jeopardy.

I walk out along the headland at Angourie in the early afternoon, following the same track Baddy did in Morning of the Earth. Like then, the headland is deserted, devoid of human occupation. The strains of “Simple Ben” run through my mind.

In my mind’s eye, I can see the heavy machinery driving concrete pilings deep into the Clarence River, building the six-lane bridge that will deliver the masses with their cars. Seaward, the lazy ocean winks in the sunlight. A small wave looms across the Point and peels perfectly to the beach, unridden. How can you keep a place like this under the radar?

Past, present, and future roil in front of me in a kaleidoscopic display. A whisper from the time behind us continues to reach into the future—an ethos about how life could be, and how it could be lived. Preserving this beauty and the beauty of this surfing life won’t be easy, but if it can’t done here, it can’t be done anywhere. “It would be good if the people who come,” says Nat when we talk later, “could have that Morning of the Earth mentality.”

Dawn haze at Baddy’s local.

Nat and Bryce with a brace of 12’2″ gliders shaped on the Young family farm—the patches glassed in the decks are made from wooden-block stencils Nat found during a 1973 trip to Nepal with Miki Dora.

Baddy and Dan confab.

Kookaburra, the soundtrack to the Australian bush.

Breakfast with Dan.

Fishing and surfing in harmony where the Clarence River meets the Pacific, a junction that has shaped the town and the community.

[Feature image: Turned iconic through John Witzig’s photographic compositions, the Angourie coastline remains a breathtaking version of surfing Valhalla.]