The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

The track is moving along my feet. There’s sand, rock, gravel, stone, sticks, grass, clipping along at a steady rate. The track crosses a creek, goes through a bog, passes over marshland, winds its way up and over a long crumbly cliff and heads back down again into the shelter of the trees. The branches close overhead temporarily, then open up again. The windswept conditions here are not conducive to lush, tall and thick vegetation, and mostly the trees and bushes are sparse and spread out. I pick through the gravel, skip over the rock, enjoy the soft grass and the warm sand under the skin of my bare feet. I wriggle my shoulders to shift my backpack and relieve building up tension on one side, and push on. After a good few kilometres the warm sand disappears altogether, the soft grass becomes as rare as hens’ teeth, and all that’s left is a never-ending blanket of gravel, stones and rocks. They are rough and sharp and annoying, and it gets to the stage where it’s slowing me down too m...

There is an iconic surf movie called Morning Of The Earth. It is is made in the early seventies, and shows surfers travelling around the face of the earth, looking for the perfect wave, or, even, a half decent wave. The movie sees these intrepid trailblazers explore such exotic and far-flung places as Bali in Indonesia, undiscovered by the west in those early days, and now, almost fifty years later, flooded and swamped with mass tourism. From a purely antiquarian point of view the movie offers a snapshot of the Indonesian island as it once was, peaceful, quiet, traditional, and providing waves of solitary glory, not yet invaded by a million holiday makers. In some ways the movie is symbolic of the world of surfing in general: those days can be seen as the early morning of surfing, of a waking up to possibilities that seemed endless, and of a venturing out into a future that seemed exciting, boundless and promising. Like so many things since then, that future has shrunken and ...

The Great South Wind was blowing gently and listlessly, caressing the stiff leaves of the pandanuses and rubbing them melancholically against one another, making a soft, clunky, scraping rattling noise. In the days of old it was told to naughty little children who refused to eat their kangaroo curry for breakfast that it was the sound of the bunyip, waking up from his midnight slumber with rumbling stomach and insatiable appetite for human flesh. No kids ever believed the story, because they weren’t born yesterday and could see through a lie as easily as the next person, but it made the parents feel good about themselves while carefully and thoughtfully laying the foundations for deep and lasting trauma for their offspring.  The wind yawned, stretched out on his toes and, indolently and more for the look of the thing than out of any heartfelt conviction or intrinsic motivation, puffed up his cheeks and released a gentle stream of Antarctic air onto the land below it. He watch...

One day our mate Dave turned up at the surf with a camera. We gathered around and went ooh and aah and expressed great admiration for the contraption, and marveled at the wonders of modern technology. He informed us of his intention to take snapshots in the water, and assured us he was confident he would be able to pull it off. We frowned, scratched our noses and rubbed our chins thoughtfully. It seemed like an enterprise fraught with difficulty. We didn’t doubt his talent, skill and ability, but the challenges appeared considerable. With supreme indifference Dave shrugged off our reservations. ‘It’ll be right’, he said, ‘just wait and see.’ So we nodded our agreement, and proceeded to watch the spectacle unfold. Being, of course, more than willing to be of assistance we lent him a hand getting all the equipment out of his van, and helped him carry it all down to the beach. We left him there to sort things out, and paddled out onto the water into the surf, glancing back over our sh...

This is the third book I have just finished publishing, also available from Amazon Books: The Eye Of The Beholder. "The Eye Of The Beholder collects and celebrates the images of renowned Australian surfing photographer David Snapper. Resplendent in its display of shapes, colours and themes of a breath-taking magnificence, it takes the reader on a journey of a lifetime, in through the crest of a wave and out into the wide open ocean, as seen from a surfer's perspective. Sit back and enjoy the ride." Available on Amazon at:  https://www.amazon.com/Eye-Beholder-Photography-David-Snapper/dp/1726455602/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1538272069&sr=1-2&keywords=The+Eye+Of+The+Beholder+Steve+Hansen