Go Along If You Like

As daylight broke on an icy winter morning in August of 2017, Torren Martyn found himself on the beach at Jeffreys Bay, enjoying a rare moment of perfect alignment. In front of him was six to eight feet of groomed Indian Ocean swell, bending and bowling down the point. Behind him, his surrogate family—filmmaker and best mate Ishka Folkwell, and mentor and shaper Simon Jones—watched on. Under his arm was seven feet and nine inches of experimental, channel-bottomed twin-fin—a board he felt had the power to radically change the trajectory of his surfing.

After navigating the keyhole, he sat wider and farther out than the pack until a set wave approached. Crouched low on the descent with his feet close together, he squirted off the bottom like a banana out of a peel into a high-line trim. With a deft adjustment of his stance, he then buried a cutback—equal shades of Michael Peterson’s classic Kirra carve off the top and, as he cut down the face into another bottom turn, Tom Curren’s seminal second wave at that very spot. 

The sequence appears as the opening scene in Thank You Mother, Martyn and Folkwell’s feature film, which is comprised mostly of footage from their month-long stint at J-Bay. It’s an exhilarating and improbable piece of surfing—a single turn that spans generations, connects the gods, and blends beauty and performance. 

 “You see a lot of guys pulling in here on all sorts of boards and they don’t surf the wave to its, or to their, full potential,” says Deon Lategan, a photographer who has shot and surfed alongside pretty much every well-known surfer you can think of at J-Bay. “But Torren’s boards never hindered him. They only worked in his favor. We all enjoyed watching him surf. So much flow, yet there was also the critical aspect.” 

When I find Martyn at home almost two years later, he’s preparing to take the film on tour across Australia and America. Narrated by Alby Falzon, the mystic journeymen, journalist, and filmmaker behind the 1972 surf/art/lifestyle epic Morning of the Earth, Thank You Mother presents as a similar countercultural surfing opus. 

Like Morning of the Earth, it’s the kind of film that feels like everyone in the world would benefit from seeing. “It’s really simple, life,” Falzon says in one of a dozen or more sermons he delivers in the voice-over. “We complicate it and it’s an illusory thing. We’re programmed to think that if we’ve got a bigger car, or we’ve got more money, or if we achieve this or that we’re going to be successful. But what does that give you? All those things that are materialistic, they don’t make you happier. They can actually be a great hindrance for a lot of people.” 

As I exit my car, Martyn has his head beneath a pile of belongings, which he’s in the process of organizing and putting away. He lives in a caravan on his mate’s property, a fellow named Bourkey, just south of Byron Bay. The setup sits hidden behind a dense canopy of rainforest between two of the North Coast’s premier point breaks, and costs Martyn $50 a week. “I don’t need too much and I don’t want to take too much,” he says. “I feel like the more shit you have the more complicated everything is.” 

Unfortunately, it seems things are complicated at the moment. Before he can go on tour, Martyn must unpack his caravan so it can be moved a distance of 30 or so feet across the compound, from a spot in the shade to one in direct sunlight, allowing Bourkey, who is a horticulturist by trade, better access to an irrigation dam. Living in a caravan and spending your prime working years banking little more than tube time might be considered weird in most places, but not in Byron. Martyn’s friends assure me that he’s “killing it,” and he ventures to at least agree that he’s pretty content with his current status. 

“There’re certain things you have to do if you want to live a certain lifestyle,” he says. “Work a job you don’t want to work. Live somewhere you don’t want to live. Except you do have lots of choice in life, so you just have to make decisions. They’re not all easy. For me, I didn’t start surfing for the career side of things. I’ve only been able to support myself with it these last couple of years, and it’s not like I’ve been battling to be a free surfer all my life. It’s just kind of fallen into place. One thing led to another.” 

*

Born in 1990 in Bangalow, a small town about 20 minutes inland of Byron Bay, Martyn was raised by his mother, Cindy, and his grandma, Beverly, after his father abandoned them when he was six months old. “I met my dad when I was 16 with my grandma,” he says. “We were doing the shopping in Byron and ran into him in the street. She introduced us and we had a coffee. He lived in Federal my whole life, 30 minutes up the road. I don’t resent him, but he’s not my dad.” 

That honor fell to Max, his mother’s long-term boyfriend during his childhood. Together, the three of them drove around Australia in Max’s second-hand Land Cruiser. Martyn rode his first waves on Max’s 6’6″ Brothers Nielsen at Cable Beach along Australia’s remote northwest coast. Max and Martyn’s mother would eventually split up but he and Martyn have remained close, catching up most weeks on the phone or for a beer. “Max was my father figure,” he says. “He’s been there and given me a lot of direction.” 

Initially, Martyn wanted to be a cricket player. But soon he was running amok in the predawn streets of Byron, with a crew of mischievous groms on their way to scoring perfect waves in the dark. “The fondest memories I’ve got are of the days riding down with our boards at four in the morning, having a little fire on the beach, phosphorescence in the water, surfing Suffolk Park all morning with no one out. Then you go to school and go out and surf in the arvo, and you ride your pushbike everywhere. It was epic. Half the time you’d come in and your bike was up a pole or up a tree because your mates had stitched you up.”

Martyn might have grown up in a town surrounded by living surf legends (George Greenough, Chris Brock, Dick Hoole, Rusty Miller, to name a few) and only a few miles from the farmstead where Nat Young lived during the making of Morning of the Earth, but as he puts it, “I never had much surfing history growing up. I just went surfing.”

By the time he was on the scene, Byron had partially shed its skin as the country-soul, dropout mecca of the 1960s and 70s and had instead forged a reputation as a mainstream competitive powerhouse. The enigmatic Jeremy Byles first blazed a trail through the ASP Tour ranks on his way to taking out the 1991 Rookie of the Year Award. Danny Wills followed, falling just short of a world title against Kelly Slater and Mick Campbell in 1998. Kieren Perrow’s surgical approach and masterful heat strategy on tour made him a household name (though he’s also remembered for his heroics at giant Shipsterns and Backdoor). Underground aerial innovator Craig Warton was another major influence on Martyn, as was his teenage sparring partner and mate, Garrett Parkes, who went on to join Slater, Dane Reynolds, and Julian Wilson, among others, in the Quiksilver Young Guns film series and later won the Australian Junior Series. 

Martyn also competed on the Junior Series, but it wasn’t for him. “My friends were doing the competitions,” he says, “and it was a good way to surf and hang with your mates but I never really pursued it seriously. It was more of a social thing. Then it started getting expensive and I’d rather save my money and travel.” 

Raised on the income his mother and grandma earned in the rag trade selling secondhand clothes and fabrics often sourced from Bali, Martyn was taught the value of money at a young age. From 12 until just a few years ago he always held down a “real” job, first at Crazy Clarks, the zany two-dollar shop in Byron (run by a flamboyant local character who didn’t seem to mind Martyn and his mates pegging products down the aisles between customers), then at the Ocean & Earth store where he worked alongside underground charger and semi-pro Shane Wehner, followed by stints at the Electric and Afends warehouses. 

During his early twenties he also moved to Sydney and became a swim instructor at a public pool, before launching his own business teaching kids to swim at luxury villas around Bali (in part as a springboard for surf trips). He only quit after the chlorine started to make his hair fall out. 

“Life goes in different chapters,” he says. “You grow up with your mates and you’re surfing certain boards and doing the boardriders club events and you gravitate toward that. And you go through another chapter of working and you get stuck into that and go down that path. And then you have surfing and different music and all these different interests.”

His mother and grandma, in addition to passing on a strong work ethic, always encouraged his other interests. “I never had pressure to go to university. At school I never really applied myself that much. In a sense there was a lot of freedom there and it could have gone either way, but I was fortunate enough to be in an environment that worked for me. Mum had a lot to deal with being a single mother. Granny helped out so much. She taught me to drive. She brought me up almost as much as Mum. We’re really close. She’s my best friend as much my gran.”  

Two more events helped to consolidate Martyn’s outlook during his upbringing. The first was watching his friend, mentor, and president of Byron Boardriders, Ben King, drop dead of a heart attack on the beach at a regional surfing contest in Yamba in 2006. “That was rattling,” Martyn says. “It was a shock. He was a staple of the community, the president of the boardriders. That was the first loss I’d ever experienced.” 

The second was the death of his best mate, Ben Donohoe, also a talented surfer, in a car accident near Byron in 2010. Martyn was on a road trip through Mexico at the time and flew back immediately to be with his friends and family. “When something is taken like that you reconsider everything,” he says. “I definitely looked at life with a different set of eyes. I feel like those issues, and the memories of those losses, can shape someone in a way.”

*

Byron Bay and the Northern Rivers region have a knack for incubating unconventional ideas, identities, designs, and movements. A large thrust of what became the Shortboard Revolution emerged from these pointbreaks, the fruits of which were unveiled in Morning of the Earth. 

The film would change the lives of thousands, if not millions, of surfers, including Simon Jones—Martyn’s shaper and the softly-spoken, artisanal craftsman behind the Byron-based label Morning of the Earth Surfboards. “It spoke to the beauty of what surfing can be,” he says. “Everyone [in the film] was clearly an individual and everyone had their way and their style. It wasn’t homogenized. They were living a life that I could identify with and really wanted to live myself.”  

Tired of a backbreaking gig moving furniture in Sydney, Jones relocated to Byron in the early 1990s with the dream of starting his own shaping label. He’d already made hundreds of boards in the city for a variety of other shapers. Once up north, he continued shaping and glassing, among other odd jobs, to pay the bills, before eventually coming up with the idea of making boards in honor of his favorite surf film. 

One of his mates, Paul Hutchinson, had appeared in and shaped boards for Morning of the Earth and knew Falzon well. He told Jones to call Falzon and ask how he felt about the idea. “I looked him up in the phone book and went, ‘No way—A. Falzon! Bullshit!’ I rang him up, cold call, and started having this rave with him,” recalls Jones. Using advice he’d received from George Greenough, Jones pitched Falzon the concept. “I said to him up front: ‘It’s never gonna be big. It’s always gonna be small.’ George had said to me, ‘Grow small, Simon.’ That was sound advice. I’ve never forgotten that.” 

“How could I say no?” Falzon says.

When Martyn met Jones a few years ago, he was similarly at a crossroads. On his way back from a serious knee injury (suffered while trying an aerial in the shorebreak), he’d burned out on the shortboards and thrashy, high-performance obsessions of his youth. “That stage of meeting Simon,” he says, “I was a lot more conscious of myself. It had an affect on me—I was at the right place at the right time to be open to his designs. I look back at it now and I see where my life forked.” 

“The way Torren surfs is in tune with Simon’s philosophy and the way he thinks,” says Falzon. “It’s a great combination, a perfect marriage, and they will get surfboards out of it that will go to another level. It’s great that Torren’s fallen in with Simon. Simon has got years of shaping experience and years of surfing, and Torren is a really high-level surfer and sensitive and creative.”

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been misfires and refinements in the collaboration. In fact their very first board together, a single-fin that Martyn took to Desert Point, was a failure. “It was aesthetically beautiful,” says Martyn, “like every board of Simon’s, but I’ve never been drawn to single-fins. I’ve never gelled with them. Something about them doesn’t sit right.”

After the trip, Martyn asked if Jones could rip the middle fin out and instead drop in a twin setup. Still primarily coming from a thruster mindset, he had always wondered why “there was a stigma around twinnies not working.” 

Jones, it turned out, knew a thing or two about twin-fins. The design emerged during his era, after all. Having grown up around Manly, some of the best surfing he’d ever seen was by 1989 world champion Barton Lynch on a yellow, channel-bottom, round-pin twin-fin shaped by Greg Clough. “The surfing he was doing on it was just so fast and radical and smooth,” says Jones. “It was insane to watch. BL rode the board into the ground, until the deck cracked and filled with a liter of water every session.”

What Jones knows—that many younger shapers don’t—is that some of the best twin-fins are essentially single-fins in certain aspects of their design. “There’s a couple of key reasons for why they’re like that, and why they have to be like that,” he says. “Because when a twin-fin is on its rail [and only one fin is in the water], it basically is a single fin.”

When Martyn received his remodeled twin back from Jones, the board was a revelation. “It just felt so solid and perfect,” he says. “I ended up glued to it. I couldn’t get off it. It changed my world. I was refreshed and drawn to this new, foreign feeling.”

The relationship has since produced a highly eclectic and functional palette of twin-fins. True to form, it has also moved along guided by gut feeling more than anything, says Martyn. “It doesn’t feel like we’ve been working on anything,” he explains. “It’s more like, ‘Let’s try these things.’ And one thing has led to another.” 

Having ridden similar designs everywhere from big Cloudbreak to J-Bay, Nias to Kirra, and at several ice-cold Aussie slabs in between, Martyn has helped take Jones’ designs, plus his individualized strain of surfing, to a place the original cast of Morning of the Earth could have only dreamed of. “He epitomizes the current version of what they were doing then,” says Falzon. “He’s almost a modern disciple of them.”

As for the attention his surfing has recently generated, Martyn is quick to
hose it down. “It’s nothing groundbreaking,” he says. “It’s more so a visitation than a progression in terms of performance, which goes back to a less is more sort of thing.”

For Jones, however, watching Martyn’s surfing develop over the past few years has served as an important reminder. “I remember growing up and everyone had a different style,” he says. “Everyone rode different boards. Torren’s surfing has kind of come back to that. It’s stopped people and made them go, ‘Fuck, I didn’t realize it could be this way.’ He’s an example of how people should just be allowed to surf like themselves. You don’t have to try and surf like anyone else. Just go out there and stand there and feel it. Put your own personality into it. It doesn’t matter how. You can just stand there and go along if you like.”

[Feature image by SA Rips]