“Oi, stop, STOP!,” yells Dan. “There’s waves. Down there. Pull up, bro.”
He’s hanging out the passenger window of my four-wheel-drive swerving around the sharp bends in the road. His lips are wrapped around a blueberry vape, WorkSafe sunnies shielding his scorched eyes. In his lap, a 2003 edition of the Travellers Guide to Surfing Australia is opened at the Shipwreck Coast chapter.
For the past few days that guide has been our manual. We’ve studied it, dog-eared the pages, and tried finding noted spots on the satellite maps in our phone. But along this stretch of The Road, we don’t need the guide.
“Reef breaks, everywhere,” says Dan.
I slam on the brakes, boat trailer clunking behind, and pull onto the cliff edge where Dan is pointing. Cars zoom past inches from my door. Below the guard rail the cliff drops 100 feet into the Southern Ocean and down there it’s all gun metal grey, raging white water, rock ledges. Dan hops over the railing to get a better look. The Razors Edge.
Like all young men, me and Dan are drawn to that edge. For the past two years I’ve found myself permanently out here, living from my four-wheel-drive about the back roads of Australia. Surfing, always driving the adventure. Grinding lefthanders belittled beneath the scorched, dusty peak of Red Bluff. Isolated desert slabs in the Great Australian Bight. Dreamy, sub-tropical point breaks on the east coast; even sludgy little novelty beachbreaks right up in Queensland’s croc country.
But this zone along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road is one place I haven’t been, until now. It’s an important place in Australian surfing history and we’re seeing it for the first time. I want to know: how does it stack up against other surfing locations around the country? And is surfing out here still the same as it’s been written in the history books?
Dan’s already into his wetsuit and waxing up before I’ve had time to check the surf. He’s frothing, this three-week break from his mining job as a geologist in WA’s Pilbara region the first proper holiday he’s had in months. He cracks open a cold tin of Furphys from the car fridge while he waits. I want to take my time, get a good read on the ocean, eat a banana and a few nuts, and maybe a few yoga poses after the drive. But after two swigs, Dan’s already finished his can. He’s sucking down on his vape, hopping from foot to foot.
While Dan and I have a very different approach to our surfing, our motivations are the same. Dan surfs, I surf, because it helps us to escape a war within ourselves.
For Dan, surfing is the one positive outlet he’s discovered and relied upon to help him through a marriage break-up and a difficult relationship with his mother.
For me, surfing helped me to feel at home when I first moved from England to Australia, aged eight. Later, it helped to remove me from years lost to juvenile detention and a teenaged ice addiction. It put the colour back in my skin, meat back on my bones, and gave me something to get up early in the morning for.
For both of us, surfing is freedom.
Surfing is life.
The waves aren’t as good as they first looked from the cliff top. Mushy little three-footers bobbling about a flat, featureless reef. Still, we’re alone, and even if the surf isn’t pumping it feels fitting that Dan and I are here, of all places.
For as long as The Great Ocean Road has existed it has offered an escape from war. The returned WWI servicemen who first built The Road worked on it all together as mates, as they had done during the War. It helped distract them from all the gunfire and bombs still ringing in their heads. Over the 13 years they spent building it, it helped them appreciate the beauty of the country they had fought for. When it was finished it stood as a proud memorial to their mates who didn’t make it.
Ironically, The Road was later used as a hideout by many draft dodging surfers in the 70s. They camped out in the back of HQ Holdens and Kombi vans, tucking into nooks in the eucalypt and she-oak forests. They lived off crayfish and blacklip abalone pulled from the reef, as the Gadubanud had done along this coast for thousands of generations before them. Just living, man. Fuck all that Vietnam War bullshit.
Dan and I follow a rough track into the forest. At a little gravel clearing we unhook the tinny and set up camp. Walking into the bush looking for firewood, Dan notices a little berm on the side of the path.
“Dude, I think this is a mountain bike trail,” he says. The drawbar of the boat trailer is hanging out over the berm, ready to poleaxe an unsuspecting biker.
“Just a little welcome to Camp Schmeg,” jokes Dan.
At nightfall we light the fire and stand swigging Fireball straight from the bottle, waiting for the lamb roast in the camp oven to cook. We talk about all the dark and personal things that have happened in our lives, the things which feed all our insecurities and flaws. About our struggle in recognising and responding to these things, and the impact they have in our lives. It isn’t often easy for us men to talk about this stuff in a completely honest and genuine way. I guess a lot of us never learned how. But right here, on this surf trip, it feels completely natural.
In the morning we’re woken by two cyclists riding through our camp. An alarm. Time to get up and go surfing. We load a selection of boards into the car and head for the Bells Beach car park.
I’d heard so much about Bells. With all that talk of it being iconic, I had expectations of the place. I had expectations for the car park more than anything. After all, the beach is a just a strip of sand and the waves know no history. The car park is far more revealing of a particular surfing location’s character, and I imagined Bells’s to live and breathe a pure and uncorrupted version of surfing. Sun-wizened men telling garrulous stories of lives dedicated to riding waves around the world. Radical and unique surfboards, each one an emblem of that individual’s relationship with riding waves. Beaten up old surf wagons. A richness of surfing experience prioritised over material wealth.
But rolling in, around us: flashy white Prados, late-model SUVs. Most crew in coloured wetsuits, pulling out sub-six-foot DHD and JS factory pop-outs, even though the waves are double overhead, stretched out and crisp. Dan shakes his head in disgust.
“Ride this board, it’ll make you surf like a sponsored pro. Pfft. No, it won’t. It’ll leave you struggling and looking like an idiot.”
I’m surprised too, to discover that a lot of the people walking the footpath don’t actually surf. They gawk and point at the waves, like tourists tapping on the glass enclosure at a zoo, trying to stir the beast within.
Back at the car, in the bays beside us. A green van with a note written on foolscap paper sellotaped to the rear windscreen: “Honk three times if you wanna jam, do yoga together, or have a mid-length or log you want to sell me.” On the other side, a black van, panels all patched with bog. The occupant, Dave, rides a mini-mal and has a handshake like a wet fish. He’s been living out of his van since evacuating Melbourne post-COVID lockdowns.
“I like it here, man. It has a nice feel,” he says. “The land is healthy and the people aren’t so wounded.”
Dan tries to hide his contempt with a deep puff on his blueberry vape.
Walking down the stairs, wetsuit on, I see a bloke I recognise. I don’t know him, but I recognise him. Damo is nuggety, in his mid 40s. His lips are cracked and chapped, and he wears a logoless beanie and flanelette shirt. He’s taken the day off from his job as a carpenter to be here.
“Life is not all about work, mate,” he says. “You gotta make time to enjoy yourself too. And when the surf is good, you gotta surf, otherwise you miss out.”
You’ll find men like Damo in surf car parks all around Australia. Strong-hearted family men , capitalising on a rare spare moment and getting that little selfish fix that helps them to be more selfless men.
Out in the surf, and the waves sort the pretenders from the purists, the Damos from the Daves. At eight feet the Bells bowl is a colossal velodrome, lending itself to swooping bottom turns and sharp rail work, every combination stretched out over 50, 100 metres. Three old boys sit out the back on nine-foot boards. Each of them rides a wave in a bomb set that washes the crew inside on their short boards and mid-lengths right back to the beach.
Back out on The Road. Scrubby Eucalypt forests and tight, winding headlands disappearing in the rear view. Up into the temperate rainforest, where it rains nine months of the year and drips off the trees the other three; all that wild hilly country standing in defiance to farmland and westward expansion. A natural boundary in this tale of two halves. On the other side; flat grassland, incessant wind. Cliffs guarding waves hidden below, turning furious beach breaks into cute little ripples. Boggy, pot-holed tracks, this one now threatening to put the car and tinny trailer on its side.
We catch a glimpse of the coast and pull off to the side of the track. We batter down a trail barely big enough to have been pushed in by a kangaroo, overhanging ti-tree and wattle branches grabbing at our wetsuits. Dan curses not bringing thongs. Where the scrub ends and cliff starts, a length of one-inch marine rope is tied off and wrapped around a star picket. It snakes down a narrow ravine, the only place in the 100-foot cliffs that is not a vertical drop.
“Someone has been down here before. I guess this must be the wave” says Dan.
He abseils down the crumbly sandstone, holding tight to the rope in the washed out sections. Down the bottom, a wedgey little left-hander stands up on a kelp covered bommie, and runs 150 metres into a rocky cove. Sandstone cliffs tower on all three sides. Dan hesitates a little as he wades across the kelp-forested rocks, trying not to think about that seal colony just around the corner.
Out in the line-up, we take a moment to look away from the ocean. We’re in disbelief of how we actually got down here, and in complete awe of the natural amphitheatre around us.
“Wow, this is pretty loose,” says Dan. “Surfing in its purest and most raw form. It’s kinda scary, but fucking transcendent too.”
The waves are fun, if a little shifty and tricky to read. It’s a common theme on this coast. The Southern Ocean is the most unpredictable in the world; the only one not intersected by any land mass. Storms track unimpeded around the entire globe and the swells they produce arrive here angry, capricious. Still, Dan manages finds a rhythm among the lump and bobble, and on his last wave threads a beautiful little runner all the way into cove.
Back on The Road, consulting the manual. Dan trying to pull up directions to places in that have caught our attention. Watching, arms crossed, huddling from the wind on cliff tops and headlands, trying to find a bloody way down. Surface conditions that never feel completely clean, even in a stiff offshore. Swells that jump from rippable head high peaks to horizon-blackening walls in an hour, and disappear again just as fast.
At one particular break, we’re surprised to find two other surfers in the water. While many isolated surfing areas are renowned for fanatical localism, out in the line-up the men are friendly and generous with their knowledge. Both are middle-aged, one in his mid-40s, the other in his late-50s. The waves are solid, eight-feet on the sets, and the take-off is almost vertical on some waves.
On his first wave, the older man matches the speed of the wave with just a few strokes on his eight-foot board. He struggles to his feet, slowed by time, kids, and the house up the road he built and now rents as an AirBNB for a bit of cash. Up and riding, he rockets down the face, drawing graceful lines and carving with speed and power.
The other man rides a board hand-shaped by a mate down in South Australia and wears an all-black wetsuit and hood. He surfs alone for a time after we paddle in. He sits patiently just outside the boils on the reef, using half a lifetime surfing here to position himself and pick the best waves in the set. Back in the gravel car park, empty but for us, he jams his board into the back of a work ute, and drives away.
On the last few days of our trip strong winds destroy the surf. We head for the city, camping in she-oak forest, beside waterfalls, vacant beachside car parks along the way. Monday. Dan’s flying out in a few hours. Rushing around the switchbacks and sharp bends, we pull up on the cliff tops for a quick piss. Dan sends a stream down, cackling as the wind carries it into the ocean. We both take one last look, trying to make sense of what’s down below.
