To mark the recent passing of Northern Beaches underground legend, Dale Egan, we’ve republished the opening passage from Derek Hynd’s 2010 profile. At one point Dale was one of Australia’s top junior talents, but would live one step to the left of the surfing limelight. It would be a colourful life, oscillating wildly between good and bad luck, as Hynd catalogues here.
On any day, in any place, from any angle, Dale Egan fears good fortune. A train wreck is on its way. Never used to be this way. Here was a surfing kid like the kid from The Jackson Five. Any sniff of a tube and magic would happen. At age 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 he had it all. Narra club mascot the land over; the next generation Wayne Lynch; the Guy Ormerod surf twin; the Tommy Carroll forerunner; witness to the best of MP and Bugs. The Australian surfing future was his on the plate.
Something went wrong though. He missed the green light back then that swept so many into careers in Junior Pros and IPS events. He’s missed every green light since. Traced back to a D’bah surf in 1976, the doom of Dale Egan knew no end.
A track leads off the only bush road left on the metropolitan coast from Cronulla to Palm Beach. It opens up a sight so removed from Gillard’s Australia that Dostoevsky’s Russia is the better call. Bending past the worn-out cottage. Stacked in front of a broken-down shanty. An older patchwork tin shed recently lost to forest and filth sits last in line.
Out of the shed, eventually, comes a slow Dale Egan. On a cold sunny August morning he shapes as a man of the past. Four-day growth, grey cardigan, unlit cigarette lolling in his fingers, head swaying side to side with a wry set grin. Stops next to the outhouse. He’s got the rogue’s look of a past winner, a punter maybe, and looks upwards as if to greet the sun. The burst of relative heat, however, leaves him bewildered. Given his somewhat fabled dud luck, it’s obvious that he’s had a brand-new shocker.
“I don’t know what it is, but last night was off the planet. You know the expression, ‘It never rains, it pours’? Well, last night it poured rain on me, in bed, and the room hasn’t got any windows. Second bloody time in two years I’ve almost died in bed from impossible shit like this.”
He lights his cigarette and politely distances himself. “The last morning of my last place in Mona Vale,” he says, taking a drag and pausing, “I woke up around 7am from dreaming about someone trying to bust in. It was snowing on my face, inside my room, like last night. There was a sudden smash and a worker came busting through the fibro with a sledgehammer. He’s face-to-face with me and I’m in bed half asleep caked in asbestos. My place is being demolished and the fuckwit landlord is burying me in it.
“So, I wake up last night around midnight and my face is wet. I switch on the light and it’s pissing a mist of rain all over me. I’m thinking about this absolute freak of physics when the ceiling explodes in flames from a short and the foam in the roof catches fire and then it’s pitch black with the smell of death black smoke and soot and I’m choking to death trying to find the door.
“Then I look up at the sky expecting a storm. The stars are out, hasn’t been raining for days. Meanwhile the rain inside has killed the fire. I tell you, it’s not just bad luck. I’m in a fucken movie.”
It’s been mostly this way since 1976 when, at the height of considerable powers, his luck started to swing. For every good day, a shocker would fly over the top like a haymaker. To illustrate the point in time he pulls an old envelope from a pocket. “Found this in an old pile. This was at the end of my run. I’ll be inside when you’re done reading it.”
He stamped out his cigarette and slowly collected the butt. Egan never littered. Postmarked February 12, 1976, it’s a feverish pitch from a Whale Beach teen to hook up in Coolangatta as soon she can bail the Northern Beaches. The attached photo of perfect crochet bikini clad body in sunbaking repose at North Whaley is the stark down payment.
Egan’s shed upon entry is a hovel, upon exit a palace. Despite a ramshackle corrugated iron exterior, the interior is one of the coolest spaces in Sydney, so industrially smart that it’s doubtful anyone else with zero budget and bum luck could transform such a wreck of a joint any better. Egan wholesales 1950s-1970s antiques/bric-a-brac and older surf memorabilia. He ran the first such retail space in the city through the mid-‘80s. He was featured on covers of interior design mags. His Lunar Tech operation was the template for dozens of such stores in the ‘90s. All was zinging until his landlord walked in one day with a smile and upped the rent 200 per cent.
Over the past three years he’s surfed barely once a month, beset by ankle problems but moreover by non-stop moving house. Ten tons of accumulated bric-a-brac every time. And this is where the luck is most tapped out. He gets set in the one spot, his back half-broken from toil, then shoved to another spot. Just like The Pistols roared, “No Fun”.
A massive concrete slab sets off an industrial interior that basically stinks with style. On a good day he can make ten grand on a handshake. On a bad day he can be shortchanged all but a fraction of the amount on the same type of deal – the case of the past compounding 24 hours. He sits on a transient designer chair – due to be collected from a buyer. The notion that someone upstairs has a relentless thumb on his life isn’t far away as he starts the interview. His hope is that, finally, he can sit and rest a while.
