In his latest book, Great Sporting Sites, GLEN HUMPHRIES showcases a collection of Australia’s most iconic venues. In this edited extract we take a deep dive into two of the nation’s best surfing locations…
Bells Beach
Address: Great Ocean Road, Bells Beach, Victoria
Date opened: 1962 (first rally)
No one but a rabid local would ever accuse Bells Beach of having the best waves in Australia, yet it has been the Holy Grail of modern era surfboard riding for almost 70 years. Its magical, mystical and somewhat spiritual aura stems not just from the rugged beauty of its cliffs, which give way to a cove brimming with powerful, challenging waves with their own unique qualities, but from its identification with the traditional owners the Wadawurrung People, who have been acknowledged and celebrated by the surfing community for decades. The role that the reality and idea of Bells has played in the shaping of Australian surfing history cannot be underestimated.
The neighbouring beach resort town of Torquay hosted the 1956 Melbourne Olympic surf carnival, an event that brought Californian and Hawaiian lifeguard teams to our shores and introduced the Malibu Chip, a finned balsa surfboard that quite literally changed the direction of Australian surfboard riding, from straight in to the shore to performing on the green face of the wave running parallel with the beach. As soon as the surf carnival ended a bidding war broke out to secure the lifeguard boards that would become the construction prototypes that ignited the Australian surfboard industry.
Sydney became the first hub of the surfboard industry, with surf cultures also developing around the wave-rich industrial cities of Newcastle and Wollongong. However, it was a group of scallywags in the tiny southern outpost of Torquay known as the Boot Hill Gang that made the first moves outside Sydney towards the development of competitive surfing. Cray fisherman and jazz musician Owen ‘Yatey’ Yateman is generally credited as being the first to surf the powerful waves of Bells Beach on a long, heavy and finless toothpick in 1948 or 1949, but by the time Malibu boards became available there was a dedicated crew of Bells big-wave riders who either paddled along the coast to the break or risked getting bogged on the rough clifftop goat tracks.
In 1958 pioneer Torquay surfer Peter Troy established the Bells Board Riders, which initially existed not as a club in its own right but as a division of the Torquay Surf Life Saving Club, an arrangement that could only have worked in a town where the Boot Hill Gang had broken through all social barriers. After surfer Joe Sweeney organised the grading of a proper road into Bells, Troy and his partner at T-Boards, Vic Tantau, started planning a surfboard rally at Bells along the lines of the successful South Pacific Club rallies in Sydney. The T-Board partners were first and foremost stoked surfers but they also planned the rally as an exhibition of their surfboards, figuring that the exposure would do them no harm and they might even take a few orders over the weekend. A simple enough equation, but this resulted in the first surfboard competition in Australia with a commercial imperative.
The Bells Beach Surf Board Rally, entry fee two shillings, was to be held on New Year’s Eve 1961, but due to a lack of surf it was postponed until Australia Day on 26 January 1962, with the quirky result that the inaugural winner, Sydney surfer Glynn Ritchie – who happened to be holidaying in the area with an aunt – received a pennant declaring him champion of the Victoria Surf Board Rally 1961. Local surfer ‘Ming’ Smith received a cash award of 10 shillings for riding the wave of the day, even though he was not actually competing. Half a century later Smith told author Michael Gordon that the award was supposed to be £1 but Peter Troy had pocketed 10 bob to help cover costs.
Meanwhile, Ritchie, one of the best junior surfers at Manly and also one of the most popular, went home and told all his mates how good Bells was. Plans were made for a huge surfari south for the next rally. Such was the creation story of the world’s longest-running continuous surfing competition. It was an event that, particularly after its shift in the early 1960s from summer to Easter’s solid swells, became as much an international celebration of surf culture as a contest while still providing some of the most memorable days of competitive surfing seen anywhere and some of the most unforgettable clashes between the world’s best surfers. Like Pipeline in Hawaii or Malibu in California, the Bells breaks Winki-Pop, The Bowl and Rincon became known to surfers everywhere.
In 1970 Bells Beach hosted the fifth world surfing championships, marked by an opening march of reluctant long-haired surfers down the main street of Lorne, further along the Great Ocean Road, and the disqualification of a prominent member of the US team for allegedly abusing the publican’s wife. While the waves didn’t live up to their reputation and the final rounds had to be held at faraway Johanna, the world titles exposed the fledgling Torquay surf industry to the best surfboards, wetsuits and surf wear available anywhere, igniting the growth of two local brands that would come to dominate the world market: first Rip Curl, followed soon after by Quiksilver.
By 1973 the era of professional surfing had arrived and Rip Curl sponsored Australia’s first truly professional event, the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach, which superseded the amateur Bells Beach Classic. Within a decade surfing had a well-managed world tour, of which the Bells Beach pro was a vital element, promoting the growth of the local surf industry to such a degree that the local government area surrounding it was soon renamed the ‘Surf Coast Shire’.
However, the Bells and Torquay surfing communities were committed to preserving the quality of their first-class surf breaks and the environment behind them despite the necessity to create parking lots and spectator stands as the events grew in size each year. To this end the Bells Beach Surfing Recreation Reserve was created, now managed for the state of Victoria by the Surf Coast Shire. It is focused on maintaining its environmental values and the cultural values of its traditional owners, the Wadawurrung People, along with its rich surfing history.
Snapper Rocks
Address: Snapper Rocks Road, Coolangatta, Queensland
Date opened: 1940s (first surfed)
The five point breaks of the southern Gold Coast of Queensland boast the highest concentration of top-quality surfing waves in Australia, ranging from cruisy longboard peelers to critical barrels for experts only.
Unsurprisingly the area, all of it since 2015 coming under the protective banner of the Gold Coast World Surfing Reserve, also has the highest number of surfers competing for its waves every time a Coral Sea or east coast low-pressure system sends powerful swell lines towards the coast. On such occasions, usually falling between January and May but sometimes through winter, the points are no place for the faint-hearted, but they are ideal for watching many of the world’s best surfers – top-line professionals and local heroes alike – work their magic on fast-peeling waves that seem to go on forever.
The staging point for rides along what has become known as the ‘Superbank’ is behind the jump-off rock at Snapper Rocks, and what makes Snapper unique is that while in many parts of the surfing world human intervention has destroyed surf breaks, for the past 30 years the dredging of sand from the Tweed River has not only made a good wave perfect but it has helped create one of the world’s longest and best wave rides. The Superbank rolls through Snapper and on to Greenmount and Coolangatta and in extreme conditions can offer rides through to Kirra Point, a distance of almost two kilometres. However, it all starts at Snapper Rocks, which is appropriate given its landmark role in surfing history.
Dredging of the Tweed River, which forms the coastal border between Queensland and New South Wales, to improve navigability had actually been happening since the late 1800s. Training walls at the river entrance were extended in the 1960s but the sand bar began to reform in the 1990s, and by 1994 it was a serious navigation hazard at low tide.
In response to the issue the New South Wales and Queensland governments jointly funded a bypass project, between 1995 and 1998 dredging more than 3,000,000 cubic metres of sand from the Tweed Bar and entrance to create a navigable channel. While this replenished all of the beaches of Rainbow Bay, to the delight of tourism authorities a side effect was the creation of a massive sandbank running adjacent to the points and beaches that produced a new type of wave that would draw surfers from around the world.
First surfed by toothpick riders from Coolangatta in the 1940s, Snapper’s attractions were usually overshadowed by the rolling waves of Greenmount Point until the establishment of the Snapper Rocks Surfriders Club in 1964. Under founding president Graham Merrin, later an important figure in the Queensland surfboard industry, it became a hub for Coolangatta’s best emerging surfers. In 1967 the Snapper club had five of the six finalists in the junior division of the Queensland titles, including brothers Robye and Wayne Deane, whose powerful and energetic attack on right-hand point waves led the club into the 1970s and the emergence of the first generation of Coolie Kids.
The Coolie Kids were grommets who had spent their formative years on the rowdy streets of the tourist town, playing pinball and begging, borrowing or stealing surfboards to hone their skills at Snapper, but they soon became household names in the surfing culture. The most senior of them was Michael Peterson, who dominated professional surfing through the decade. Behind MP were Peter Townend and Wayne ‘Rabbit’ Bartholomew, who both became pioneering world pro champions, and the smooth-styling young goofy-footer Andrew McKinnon, who became the driving force behind the Gold Coast World Surfing Reserve.
The next generation of Coolie Kids emerged just as the Superbank formed and became one of the most talked-about breaks in the world. It was also home to the Quiksilver Pro world tour surfing event, which from the early 2000s created many of the most exciting visuals from the tour, and was a launchpad for future world champions Mick Fanning and Joel Parkinson and their mate Dean Morrison. On the women’s tour Tweed Heads local Stephanie Gilmore, Snapper Rocks a standout surfer on the Superbank, became the most successful female pro surfer in history, with eight world titles.
However, the Snapper story isn’t just about contest victories. In fact, many of its glory days have been outside competitive windows, when powerful swells created conditions that are still talked about a generation later. There was the day in 2002 when local Damon Harvey rode a well-overhead wave for longer than four minutes, from behind the rock at Snapper to the Pizza Hut at Kirra, a distance of almost two kilometres.
The downside is that the possibility of riding the wave of your life has resulted in unbelievable crowds in the line-up – as many as 500 surfers jostling for position during swell events – with the inevitable friction, but on such a long wave there is always a pocket for the patient.
This is an edited extract from GREAT SPORTING SITES by Glen Humphries (Gelding Street Press, $39.99) now available at Dymocks, QBD and all good bookstores
By PHIL JARRATT
