Waves of Nostalgia: South Australia’s surfing history
SA’s surfing history is rich and colourful but it’s often overshadowed by stories from the East Coast. Surfer, author and designer Christo Reid wants to right that, and he needs your help.
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It’s the story of the stomp, of surfies and rockers, of lifesavers turning their backs on the rules and committing their lives to an exciting new sport.
It’s the sixties counterculture and the Vietnam War, and it’s the Country Soul movement that saw waveriders abandon life in the city and head for the bush – or, in our case, the desert.
And it’s the story of epic road trips as young people, not blessed to have good waves in their backyards, jumped in their cars to conquer a new watery frontier on the dusty peninsulas or chilly southern climes.
Christo Reid, creator of the best-selling book Cactus: Surfing Journals from Solitude which concentrated on the famous-but-secretive West Coast surf break, is casting the net wider for his new book. Tentatively titled Surf City, Reid wants to document the history of surfing across South Australia, starting in the 1950s and ending at the start of the 1980s.
“Surf culture can be very East Coast-centric,” Reid says.
“The idea for the Cactus book came after I visited an exhibition of photographs at the Australian Centre Photography in Sydney – I’d seen every photograph before in magazines, as we all had. I thought, ‘Our experience was so different – we didn’t have the surf on our doorstep’. So I started looking at my own photos, and my friends’ photos, and that’s where the idea came from.”
Reid, a lifelong surfer who’s still riding waves at 68, says the sport had a profound impact on his life, and the lives of many of his friends. He spent years living at the dusty West Coast surf break of Cactus, chasing perfect waves, at a time when many other surfers were heading to spots like Byron Bay and Yamba in what came to be known as the Country Soul movement.
“I guess we could have moved to those places – the water was warmer and the living was easier,” Reid says.
“But we were drawn to something different. And I thought I should try to tell the story of just how different things were here – cars and driving, for example, were such a big part of the South Australian story. Often you’d drive for miles and get no waves.”
While Reid is well into the research stage of Surf City, and says he’s managed to unearth some historic gems, he’s still very interested in hearing from anyone who might have some untold pieces of the surfing story.
“What do people have?,” he asks. “What’s in that shoebox? People say I haven’t got anything, but every time I look through that box I’ll find something. I’m not looking for waves, generally, I’m looking for what was going on when people weren’t in the surf.
“It’s a work in progress that’s in pre-production. If I can pull it together by then end of next year that would be great.”
Reid says as well as documenting local history, the book will also follow local surfers’ adventures to places like Hawaii, South Africa and the South Coast of France.
What it won’t feature, however, is the more competitive, high performance and crowded era of surfing that took shape from the 1980s onwards.
“I know nothing of contemporary surfing,” he says.
“That’s a job for someone else. I’ve always liked to see someone flowing with the wave, not ripping it to shreds. I’ll finish at the end of the seventies.”
The second edition of Cactus: Surfing Journals from Solitude is available now at cactussurfingjournals.com and selected bookstores for $79.95. Anyone with photographs or footage of the early days of SA surfing can contact Christo at info@cactussurfingjournals.com