Forty-eight years ago, I walked into Newport newsagency and picked up a copy of the first surfing magazine I’d ever seen, turned a page randomly, and saw something that changed the course of my life. Three months ago, flicking randomly through Facebook, I saw something that told me where my life had gone. The same person, Tony Edwards, was responsible for both these things. Captain Goodvibes and the painting of Newport you see here. Neither had anything to do with me.
This time, instead of a full-page comic featuring a dope-smoking pig, it was a sketch of a headland. I can close my eyes at any time, night or day, and see the shape of that headland. I know this to be a common experience for many surfers. We all see coastal landscapes, not in our dreams, but actually inside ourselves. The landscapes engrave themselves into us. This one is part of me, or rather, I feel a part of it.
I try to think about what I see in the sketch, what it tells me. The headland is sloped away, like the volcanic ridge of Diamond Head when seen from Waikiki in Hawaii, but like Diamond Head it shows this face from only one angle. From others, it takes on other shapes. If you’re directly offshore from it, you can suddenly see it as two headlands in one — the Newport one in Tony’s sketch, and the Bungan one, taller and rockier. In between is a little valley and sometimes, when sand is trying to migrate between Newport and Bungan and is caught halfway, a little semi-beach.
Up close, the headland loses its triangular aspect, and you see an older face, cracked and grizzled. Layers of rock bending around and into each other, story after story, written for all to see but none really to know; sediments from the depths of old oceans, volcanic debris from 30 million years ago, sandstone in blocks and crevices. The closer you peer at those rock layers, the more abstract they grow, patterns from a time before people. Here and there grow clumps of aloe bush, various shrubs and even small trees, holding on to the poor soil.
Up close to it, you quickly see also how the headland is changing its shape. There was a big rock fall in 2020 about halfway around, next to the swimming pool once made famous by the photographer Max Dupain. Maybe 30 tonnes of sandstone all came down at once, prompted by the building works of a property owner who’d wanted to fence off a swimming pool of his own on the cliff rim. The property owner lost a fair bit of backyard and all the will to build a pool. The rock is now part of the cliff-base jumble, being thrown around occasionally in big swells. Above it, the clifftop looks like a mouth missing a couple of teeth.
The reef, what they call Little Reef, extends directly out from that cliff base. Once, many thousands of years ago, when the sea level was 100 metres lower and the coast was 10 kilometres away, it must have been a coherent ridge-line, the sort you might find today up in Terrey Hills or above Avoca and Terrigal. When the sea rose and brought heavy surf energy to bear on that ridge-line, it must have exposed some weakness in the rock layers and broken the ridge apart, separating the reef away as a little island and eventually eroding it down to the old lava layers. The surface of that reef is one of the strangest places I’ve been. Flat exposed rock has been penetrated by shafts of harder basalt, sticking out everywhere like bolts. Its resistance to the ocean must be extraordinary, but one day it’ll be worn away like the whole coast is slowly being worn away, or just submerged when the sea levels rise again. Water always wins.
I look at the cliff again, every day, but it doesn’t see me. If it could, it’d have seen some of my best and worst moments as a surfer. Riding big surf off the northern edge of the reef, being challenged, stoked and humiliated in ways I’ve never experienced anywhere else, probably because this is home.
I nearly jumped off it once. Thought better of it. Too much greenery. You’d bounce around, break a few bones, have to go to hospital, spend the rest of your life thinking, “You fucking idiot!” I have enough reasons to do that already.
