Blaspheming Dora

I grew up with stories about independent blokes like outlaws, larrikins, anti-heroes, as well as a full pantheon of inventors, travellers, rogues, competitors, and stylists. It’s how I learned to be enthusiastic for an “escape” from the “hum-drum” of everyday life – work, school, and family.

The stories told me to avoid the white picket fenced house, two cars, steady job and kids. Home life was negatively linked with being “tied down” and “pussy whipped”.

I drew pictures of my favourite versions of the “heroes” on my schoolbooks. Posters of them plastered my bedroom walls.

Mind you, these blokes weren’t actually heroes. It would have been more appropriate for me to restrict that title to people who spend their lives going out of their way to help others.

Over the top adjectives were used in the stories about these heroes – cultish, innovative, masterful, enigmatic, dependable, industrious, revered, imposing, determined, stylish, smooth, gritty, powerful, hard-charging, self-destructive, thrill-seeking – and that would be just one on them.

It’s a tall order to live up to such expectations and qualities. Some of us do not have the money or social opportunity to drop everything to do so.

Some families are poor, have different cultural situations, live in war torn areas, and the like. There are too many bills to pay to just get by. The steady job, safety, and home life the surfer in their family is meant to reject is a faraway dream. They don’t have such things to “escape from” in the first place. And why would they want to?

Independence is a privilege, and can sometimes come at the expense of thinking about and helping others.

I dreamed about the lives of the “heroes”. The act of being enthusiastic about them kept their stories, cultural capital, and version of being a “real” surfer going round, even though I would never be like like that.

Michael Peterson was the most charismatic bloke in Australian surfing stories. MP was the essence of the anti-hero in Australia.

Surf journalist Sean Doherty wrote a biography of MP. In it he explains that during the early 1970s and the birth of professional surfing Peterson won every major surf contest in Australia. He’d paddle out late for a heat, arriving from around the headland riding a wave to psyche out his competitor. Peterson was an imposing figure with long limbs, muscled physique, and focused stare. He shaped his own boards. During award ceremonies he sometimes wouldn’t turn up to accept prizes, and when he did he was drunk, or drugged up to the eyeballs. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia after a police chase.

But while MP became idolised it was stories about the Californian surfer Mickey ‘Da Cat’ Dora that most influenced me. Crew called Dora the surf mongrel because he was one of the very first to just surf, party hard, do his own thing, avoid work, and travel to far-flung surf spots. When asked about his lifestyle Dora said

My whole life is this escape, my whole life is this wave. I drop into em, set the whole thing up, pull out the bottom turn, pull up into it and shoot for my life, going for broke man, behind me, all the shit goes over my back. The screaming parents, teachers, police, priests, politicians, kneeboarders, wind-surfers, they’re all going over the falls into the reef – head first into the fucking reef – and I’m shooting for my life, and when it starts to close out, I pull out the bottom, out to the back, and I pick up another one, and do the same goddamn thing.

Dora began surfing in the 1950s. He hated the rise of the commercial industry that pushes the products, marketing and consumption of surfing.

Sometimes Dora wrote angry letters having a go at the specialist surfing press. His position was that the whole “surf culture” thing is a sell-out, and that commercialisation corrupts the uncomplicated life of surfing.

A popular historical claim is that it was the Gidget movies, books and magazines that did as much as anything to bring surfing to the masses, and inspire a legion of “dilettantes”.

As they say in the movie: “For Chrissake … it’s a midget, a girl midget, a goddamn gidget!”

Frederick Kohner wrote Gidget about his daughter Kathryn’s coming-of-age adventures while surfing at Malibu in the United States. The novel was turned into a big budget Hollywood production in 1957.

After Gidget Dora stopped competing and claimed to be disillusioned with the marketing of surfing as a commodity to the masses.

In surfing history Gidget has come to represent a negative “feminisation” of surfing – domestication and consumption.

There’s no shortage of claims that “real” surfers don’t buy into experiences and stories. If they do it is said to be simply a sham, shallow, lazy, faddish, mindless, fraudulent, fake, and a sell out.

The tradition is that women and girls are the only ones who should want to be associated with shopping and wanting to be looked at.

In contrast, stories about Dora are all about a “manly” take on surfing.

When you boil it all down the story about Dora is all about making a go for it by yourself. There’s an emphasis on freedom and choice.

The logic extends to the belief that “real” surfers and blokes don’t get “trapped” into a world of houses, family, and white picket fence.

Women and girls get stuck with that expectation.

Blokes like Dora were lucky and privileged. They had enough social kudos and resources so they could have the freedom and choice.

In Dora’s time, post World War Two, poorer unskilled newcomers from Europe and South America were having to do all the shitty work with long hours. Women were still expected to be at home, and to play the supporting role to their man’s choices.

Not much has changed.

It’s way harder for some people to “follow” the Dora narrative to become a “real” surfer than others.

Such independence and choice is a privilege.

It’s continues to be popular to preach the Dora narrative like a biblical gospel, and how it demands a long-term “grassroots” commitment to surfing.

But the ironic thing is it is this narrative that popularises surfing, and keeps the surf industry engine room running on all cylinders.

Do you want to be, or want to dream about being, a rebel, individual, rogue, outlaw, etc? Take up surfing. Be like Dora. Buy this.

There is a habit of pointing the finger at spring time kooks and dilettantes for all of surfing’s woes – overcrowding, exploitation, colonisation, loss of history, commodification, etc. It is a way to turn our backs on our own contribution to these woes.

The industry relies on the preachers of the Dora story to disseminate it so that the marketing and packaging of surfing can go on. It gives the industry that “counter culture” selling point they so love, even though they are mega-corporations listed on stock exchanges around the world.

Dora took part in the selling of surfing an awful lot, despite his protests. He wrote stories for the media about his pranks and travels. He seemed to recognise the appeal of celebrity. As my mate Stu said: “Dora took the anti-establishment stance, but then drank from the establishment teat when it suited him”.

Dora had worked in Hollywood. Perhaps he knew how to exploit the surfing scene for coin and kudos, and then selling, the heroic, flawed genius/artist, rebellious, and romantic narrative of surfing people wanted to attach themselves to.

Dare we say that it is the anti-hero or outlaw narrative of Dora that inspired the commodification, consumption and uptake of surfing as much as Gidget.

Also, while some crew reckon the Dora story is about being an individual it could also be about being self-indulgent, selfish, and privileged.

Am I being blasphemous? Yeah, but that’s a good thing I reckon.

It has to be healthy to always question role models, heroes, legends, and idols, and to blaspheme them and never blindly follow their lead. Then again, that might be the very point of Dora.