Investing in Surfing Magazines

(This is one of my favourite things Stu has written lately. It’s the editorial in our second issue. Al)

by Stu Nettle, Kurungabaa, Volume 1, Issue 2, July 2008 > Download (PDF)

I was brought up in a house surrounded by bushland. The wild eucalypts and banksias grew up to, and over, our back fence and, as a kid, I could hop that fence and walk for many miles through untouched bushland before coming to another fence or road. Before surfing took over my life this stretch of bushland was the place where I spent most of my time – jumping bikes, throwing rocks and getting creative with gunpowder. A site of endless adventure for me, it was a source of eternal anxiety for Mum. There were the mandatory snakes and spiders, poisonous enough to drop a horse and always on the move come summer. Her other fear – another summer occurrence – was bushfire. The old chook’s mantra, drilled into my sister and me over 18 hot summers, was always the same: If a bushfire comes, grab the photo-albums. Everything else can be replaced.

I haven’t lived in that house, or heard those words, for nigh on 20 years, but I recall them now after an incident in which I almost gave away my lifelong collection of surfing magazines.

***

Six months back I was moving house and with 11 crates of magazines and a lack of new space it was time for a cull. I didn’t give it any thought at first; they were going to whoever wanted them. However, before I could give them away I received several messages – all from older blokes – advising against such rash action. Each message came with its own tale of woe and regret, but the advice was always the same: Hold on to them. And so I did.

The weekends leading up to the move were spent packing, wrapping and strapping a house full of goods. Beside furniture and personal belongings, they were mostly incidental items without much value, either sentimental or monetary. Old Christmas gifts and the like, you know how it is. When I came to the crates containing my old magazines I downed tools and stopped to take a peek. By coincidence the first crate I looked in contained the first surfing magazine I ever bought – Tracks May 1984 with Tom Carroll, in his first world title year, doing a frontside re-entry on the cover. I stared and was transported back 24 years. The effect was profound and beyond mere déjà vu. As I flicked through that magazine, light was cast onto forgotten memories and thoughts. Images and words that I’d read when I was a very different person to who I am now were flashed on and the result was to recall that person: myself 24 years ago.

Twenty-four years ago, when I’d stopped blowing things up in the bush behind our house and become a surf-obsessed grommet. When surfing meant everything because I was in the throes of teenage adolescence, and discovery and the need to belong were blending with passion typical of those formative years. And I began reading surfing magazines earnestly – every mag, every month, every year. The concrete had yet to set in my teenage brain and I was stirring into the mix all the values, beliefs and ideas that the editors and authors (and even the bloody letter writers!) ventured.

So there I sat on the carpet picking through the magazines at random. With each one I could remember the clothes I used to wear and the way I used to think when I first read it. It sounds silly to say I was coming face to face with the old me, but it was, at least figuratively, something similar. The stirring of old memories caused me to think about how I’d changed. The feeling was akin to looking at pictures in an old photo album, though it wasn’t more wrinkles and less hair that marked the differences. The process was internal. The memory of my thoughts was contained in these magazines. A timeline I hadn’t realised was being recorded. I understood completely why the wise old fellas told me to hang onto my magazines and I’m grateful they warned me.

A few weeks later a work colleague heard about my revelation and gave me a whole lot of magazines that she’d ended up with but, being a non-surfer, had no use for. They were Surfer and Surfing mags from the ’70s with shots of Lopez, Shaun, MR and Dane back when Hawaii was the epicentre of surfing and if it didn’t have a lightning bolt it just wasn’t cool. But as enjoyable as they were to read I didn’t have the same attachment to them as I did to my magazines. After all these weren’t my memories. They were more like portals to surfing’s past than touchstones to mine.

***

I just moved into a new apartment and the first pieces of furniture I bought were bookshelves. Five of them. Floor-to-ceiling numbers that can hold all my mags and I can be surrounded by all my memories. And if ever there is a need for sudden evacuation I know the drill by heart: Grab the photo-albums and the surfing magazines. Everything else can be replaced.

– Stu Nettle