Afternoon Of The Earth

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 become compartmentalised, chopped up into marketable bite-sizes and sold wholesale down river. The world of surfing has become geared towards competitions, trophies, prize money and sponsorship, and has taken its place among the long list of mainstream sports that are now widely available to everyone, and can and do provide a lavish living and lifestyle to a select group of a chosen few.

To a large degree the pioneering spirit that set surfing aside as a wild, unknown, reckless and adventurous thing to do has leaked out of the passtime. A lot of breaks are easily accessible, surrounded by towns or suburbs, and high on the list of desirable places to spend an annual holiday. It is a matter of routine to walk out of an expensive and overpriced holiday house, get out into the surf, catch a few waves, and stroll back to the resort pool, pub or restaurant, and proceed to piss it up the wall. And it’s not hard to see the attraction of that, for sure.

By that measurement it could be said that we are now living in the afternoon of the earth, no longer the morning: the sun has gone through a fair bit of the day, and evening is approaching, and maybe sometime soon the light will finally vanish from the world of surfing, and the cold dark night will set in, as the sun sets over what once used to be a mind-blowing and mind-altering expression of the free human spirit. That setting evening sun may well be represented by the advent of surf parks, where concrete-bottomed wave pools create perfect identical waves all day every day, and where people can come and learn to surf and carve and shred like a pro in safe, controlled conditions. And it may well be a great thing to do, and it will have the potential of turning millions more people onto something that habitually fills the perpetrator with elation, ecstacy and euphoria: riding up and down a perfect curling green wave is like flying, like being weightless and unfettered, free. It’s an awesome feeling, pure bliss, a little bit akin to scuba-diving, floating weightlessly in the water, except that scuba-diving is very much a slow-motion thing. Surfing is more like scuba-diving at 30 kms per hour.

But there is a whole host of other things that come along with that feeling of being on top of the world, a swag of skills that need to be learned, a whole range of different aspects that come into play in the majestically simple and fiendishly complicated act of catching a wave. No two waves will ever be the same, from one minute, hour, day or week to the next. They are the result of a never-ending interplay between the way the water moves, the current and the height, stage and direction of the tide, the wind, the sand, the rocks. These things change and shift continuously, they never stop. As a surfer you have to learn how to read them, and make sense of them, in order to be able to work out where to be at what point in time and in what position, to be able to get on a wave. Distance between the person and the oncoming wave needs to be gauged, height, strength and speed of the water need to be estimated, and somewhere in the unconscious mind complex mathematical equations are drawn and calculations are made, hopefully resulting in a successful ride.

All these skills take a very long time to learn, and they all amount to an understanding of natural processes, of a developing of an affinity with the way the natural world works, of a tuning into the dynamics and life of the ocean. Stick a plunger in a concrete wave pool, and all of these things disappear, and it will drive another wedge between humanity and the world it lives in, alienating us one more step from our natural habitat, hammering one more nail into the coffin of either the human species or the planet, depending on which will give out first. My money’s on the planet surviving us. The cockroaches are waiting behind the scenes, rubbing their hairy legs in glee, ready to pounce and take over. Humanity Nil – Cockroaches One.

In these afternoon days of the earth, anticipating the beckoning twilight, it becomes harder and harder to find places not overrun with people looking for a quick fix. Just like Bali has been transmogrified from a quiet, peaceful tropical paradise into a congested polluted suburban tourist trap, so a lot of Australia has fallen under the advent of concrete, glass and bleached arseholes, and where once pandanuses and banksias rustled above sleeping kangaroos and scavenging bush turkeys, now real estate agencies, banks and luxury resorts weigh down heavily on the earth. It’s progress, apparently.

But if, when the night is dark and the land is quiet, you lay your ear down on the wet sand in the intertidal zone between the salt water and the dry land, close your eyes and breathe really slowly, you can just, barely, at the edge of hearing, hear the beating of the Dead Heart of the Country. It’s still there. Murmuring away, susurrating at the limit of consciousness, deep down under the ground, under the water.

And it can be found.

And followed.

At the end of the dirt track, deep inside of the national park lost somewhere in the middle of the deserted windblown Western Australian coast, we paddled back in to the beach after our morning surf, bounced off a couple of rocks like pinball balls, and pulled our boards up onto the sand. We looked north. There, stretching away into the wild blue yonder, inaccessible by any other means than on foot, lay, so rumour had it, a series of headlands, framing small sheltered bays and coves, not seen by any white fella since old Billy McMahon, who maintained a marginal desert run around here, got swept away in the flood of 1956. They found what was left of him two weeks later, up high in the fork of a tree, three metres above bone-dry sand. Since then people have kept away, and some say that sometimes at night he can be heard singing under the stars. Apparently he was a shithouse singer while he was alive, and dying hasn’t improved his voice.

We were not deterred. We grabbed packs with all the necessary equipment and set off to explore. If there was a wave there somewhere we’d find it. So we turned our backs on the trees we’d slept beneath, walked off into the wild blue yonder, and melted away into the distance. Bare feet on the sand, hats on heads. Sun high above, seabirds wheeling and dealing all around us. To the side, a long stretch of low to medium dunes, covered in hairy spinifex, goat’s hoof vine, pigface, blady grass. Set further back, more away from the salt water and the spray that burns and kills their leaves, horse-tail she-oaks and banksias. Behind us The Great South Wind pushing us in the back, and ravaging the swell, cross-shore and blowing it to pieces.

We walked on companionably, a small group of us crew committed to finding waves unspoiled by too many people with not enough sense of sharing. Up in front there was my partner, The Evil Woman, so named for her razor sharp canines and her willingness to sink them into anyone’s throat to rip it out at the slightest hint of a whiff of disagreement, offense, or, more usually, paranoia. Deep in conversation with her was my mate The Snake Catcher, known for his violently allergic reactions to any would-be snakes, drop-ins and dickheads with shit attitude in the line up. He’s the only person we’ve ever heard of who never enters the water without an epi-pen, containing an especially concocted mixture of valium, vitamin D and garlic, not available over the counter and only prescribed by doctors with a prediliction for savouring their own medicine cabinet. Whenever he gets a turn and smoke starts to come out of his ears at the sight of a snaking or dropping-in event we rip the epi-pen out of the back pocket of his boardshorts, plunge it into his leg and administer oxygen for half an hour. He’s usually mostly all right after that. Strolling on leisurely at the back were my mate’s son The Pocket Rocket Grommet, a walking ball of sunshine with a smile from east to west, and myself, The Baboon, diligently dragging my knuckles through the sand to cover up our tracks so no interlopers would be able to see where we were going.

Every now and then we stopped, to listen for the pulse of the Dead Heart. It urged us onwards and forwards, guided by the sound of the waves, the wind and the oyster catchers, scurrying hurriedly away over the sand, looking over their shoulders with accusing eyes. Dunes gave way to towering chalk cliffs, eroded and washed away, with low undercut caves at sea level, and rock pools up on top. We clambered up and over, waded around. Assessed the quality of the wave that rolled up towards the rocks, and found it stood up and broke and rolled itself out in a very satisfying fashion. We noted its location and pushed on, further down the windy beach.

And saw a shape looming up, way out in front of us. Something long and pointy, sticking out at a strange angle from the sand. Casting a shadow, away from the sun, and there, just out in front of it, a clump of irregularly shaped lumps. We closed in without getting any the wiser as to what it was. We speculated. A shipwreck? A beach hut? A stranded UFO, crashed and burned after having been exposed to commercial radio on the earthly airwaves, causing alien brain burn-out and instant death? It’s a well-known fact of life that it takes many years of merciless conditioning and exposure to be able to survive that shit. Those poor aliens didn’t stand a chance.

We pulled up and looked down upon a giant skeleton.

Not, in all probability, alien in nature. Not either, as we first thought, a dinosaur from 65 million years ago, unearthed and brought to light by any recent violent storms. In dazzled and dazed enthusiasm we named this stretch of the beach Jurassic Point after our sensational discovery before we realised that, instead of a hitherto unknown species of dinosaur, there before us lay what was left of a whale. Presumably a humpback, as that is the most common kind to come through around here.

We walked around it a bit, inspecting its various bits and pieces. There was something that looked like a tailbone, two to three metres long, sticking out high above the sand, wedged solidly inside of a joint that could have contained shoulder blades or might have been made of a pelvis. We couldn’t make heads or tails of it, so to speak. A bit further along, half buried in the loose sand, a set of vertebrae, a section of spine. Here and there long dried up and faded strips of skin still hanging on. Definitely not a dinosaur then. We didn’t like the chances of skin surviving for 65 million years.

We admired the thickness and strength of the bones of the poor old whale, and wondered at his fate. How did he come to a sticky end here on this remote beach? Had he given up on life in a fit of cetacean depression and thrown himself high upon the sand, perhaps in an involuntary genetic throwback convulsion driving him to attempt to go back in time 50 million years ago, and try to walk on dry land? Had he, finally and terminally, gotten well and truly jacked off at the notion of, after having spent 50 million years in the ocean, still not having been able to evolve gills and still being forced to come up for air every 45 minutes? We can only guess at the frustration. Or, potentially more feasibly, had he given in to repeated shark attacks and ended up as breakfast inside of a shark gut? When the humpback whales migrate back south along this stretch of the coastline around this time of year they’ve returned from the tropics further north, where they’ve given birth to their calves, and for a period of six months they will have fed their baby up to 500 liters of blubbery milk per day, while not having had a bite to eat since they left Antarctica six month previously. They can lose up to 50 percent of their body weight in that period. It’s understandable how that could make you weak, hungry, vulnerable to predators and well and truly pissed off.

Either way, his or her race was run, and this was the final resting place.

I examined the bones more closely, and thought of how some people in days gone by eked out a living along deserted beaches, scavenging and gathering anything they thought they could use for their survival. Beach combers, they were called. When William Buckley jumped overboard from the convict ship that was transporting him towards seven years of backbreaking hard labour on a ball and chain he disappeared into the bush around Port Philip Bay, down south in Victoria. The ship, which had come to try and set up a settlement there, changed its mind a few days later, pulled up its anchor and disappeared to Tasmania instead. As a result William Buckley spent 32 years living as the only whitefella among the blackfellas of the area. While it could be argued that he had Buckley’s or none of surviving, a phrase coined after him, he did in actual fact cope remarkably well. He learned from the Aboriginal people, married a few of them at various times and places, and generally made do.

Most of his time he spent on, near and around beaches, mostly near the mouth of the Barwon River, not far from present day Geelong. There he fished and gathered molluscs, and caught eels and yabbies and crabs, and generally lived off the land on a diet of seafood and kangaroo. As far as healthy diets go you can’t ask for better than that. He built huts of driftwood and generic flotsam and jetsam, and, over time, forgot how to speak English, and lived as a white Aboriginal.

And this is what people have always done. They use what they can, when and how they can, to survive, to live and to thrive. No person can live without making an impact on the world around them. No animal or organism can do so either. Everything needs to eat something, even if it is grass or gumleaves, a particularly stupid evolutionary dead-end adapted by koalas, who, as a result of the low nutrient and energy content available in gumleaves, their only food source, spend 23 hours a day sleeping, lacking the energy to do anything else than eat, sleep, shit and, presumably, have a root once a year to ensure the continuation of the species.

As an outdoor educator I conduct outdoor adventure activities with people, doing such things as rockclimbing, canoeing, abseiling etc. At some stage I used to run outdoor survival camps, where people came bush with me equiped with a knife and a blanket, and I would teach them how to find water, sleep under trees and eat grass. While they inevitably and without exception never failed to be traumatised for life by the experience, they often came to the same conclusion. When looking around our campsite on the last morning, before crawling back to civilisation, junkfood, diabetes and coronary disease, they would look over the shelters we’d built of bush materials, the wood we’d used for cooking and warmth, the various things we’d used for our purposes, such as flat stones for cooking and holes we’d dug to collect water and cook food, and they would all say the same thing: we have trashed this place.

And that’s how it is. It’s impossible to live without having an impact on our environment. We can and should be careful and considerate with how we live and how much of a destructive effect we have on our world, but it’s impossible not to have any at all. And we need to use what we can, when and how we can. It’s all we can do.

So I looked at the remains of the whale splayed out on the ground in front of us. I noticed the width and girth of the joint that held the long upright whalebone, and the two wide bones that stuck out on either side. I nodded thoughtfully. Then I reached out my hand, patted the bone on the side companionably and appreciatively, said “thanks mate”, and sat down in the curve of the bones.

It fitted my back and bum perfectly.

The Snake Catcher and The Pocket Rocket Grommet came and sat on either side of me, and we leaned back, supported by the kind, caring and willing whalebones, and rested our bare feet on the warm sand. A perfect whalebone seat, providing rest and support to the weary intrepid explorer.

We looked out over the ocean, where seagulls were swooping in and out of a perfect left handed point break we were never going to tell anyone about, and reclined on our whalebone couch.

Life was beautiful.