With a shoulder span that rivals his height, it’s clear Nick Carroll has spent a fair whack of time paddling around the world’s lineups over the last half century. He’s lived a rich surfing life and has witnessed decades of iconic surfing moments and cultural shifts. I couldn’t think of a keener mind to pick and ever generous with his time Nick obliged by answering the following questions about his early memories of surfing and women surfers of the 70’s and 80’s.
How did you find your way to surfing as a Newport youngster? Did surfing having you in thrall from day dot?
When I was a kid, everyone went to the beach. We lived across the road from Bungan but most of our family beach trips were to Newport. They were very classic beach occasions, zinc cream, sun, bluebottles, crowds of swimmers, lemonade etc. When my brother and sister and I wandered across the road and down the hill to Bungan by ourselves, as kids could do at the time, that felt a lot more like what I would later identify as the surfing experience: hardly anyone around, bushland giving way to big sand dunes, the roar of the surf, the windy Australian silence under the blue sky. We bodysurfed and rode Surf-O-Planes but surfing only really got me when I had my own fibreglass board, I caught a single wave and was hooked from then on.
Can you describe the surfing culture at Newport and the surrounding Northern beaches of Sydney at the time. Do you recall many women in the water?
Well I’ve written a bit about this in TC and in other places at different times. The surfing culture at Newport seemed to me to barely exist as a culture. There were surfers a year or so older than us and they seemed quite removed from us, we weren’t allowed even to surf with them for a while. It was raw and quite dangerous, no adults, we sorta made our own rules and some of those felt like “Lord Of The Flies” and some of those felt completely natural and fair, even drawn directly from Nature in a way, especially the ones to do with behaviour in the surf — a lot of that seemed to me like the waves were laying down the law, not us. Later as we got into our late teens it became more violent and kinda human-centric, like “who are you, you don’t belong here” sorta thing. Way more violent — or maybe “less civilised” is a better way to put it — than today.
There were two local girls surfers at Newport and they totally won us over, they were part of our tribe, they actually became human to us boys because they decided to surf. Anyone who’d tried to mess with them we’d have kicked the person’s teeth in, like literally. One of them has sadly died (Kay Jarman), the other is still a great surfer and board/SUP racer (Julia Farmer, now Magliano.) Other women in the water, Jenny Steen at Avalon, later Pam of course, then Toni Sawyer, Wendy Botha came and lived at Whaley from the mid 1980s, not many though.
As you began to travel beyond the peninsula to surf which surfers stood out to you and why, both male and female?
Umm shit well in Australia all the Narrabeen male surfers were heavy influences on us Newport boys, Terry Fitzgerald, Col Smith, Simon Anderson, Ron Ford and a bunch of others, we’d go surf Narra with them and they would make us boards and tell us stories about Hawaii and other places. Beyond that we then began to encounter a heap of other junior surfers, especially from around here and from Qld, but also from Bondi (Cheyne) and Maroubra (Steve Wilson and Marty Lee and others) and Cronulla (Jim Banks).
Those relationships were really formative, we would see each other at contests and really look forward to looking at each other’s boards and styles, and just having crazy adventures. Plus competing to the absolute DEATH. Then some of the young Hawaiians like Mark Liddell and Louis Ferreira would come over and stay with various of us. We also got close to people like Colin Smith from Redhead and Terry Richardson of Wollongong, surfers of incredible style and class. Hawaii was a huge eye opener — when I started travelling there each winter I realised just how many fantastic unknown surfers there were in the world, people you’d never hear of who just ripped Sunset and Pipe, and how that whole scene wasn’t a glamour thing, but core, like the scene I’d grown up in.
There were very few girls or women surfing around the places I spent my late teens and early 20s, I recall being astonished by the Hawaiian women (Margo Oberg, Lynne Boyer, Rell etc etc) when they came out for pro events, just thinking what powerful people they appeared, they would laugh and flirt with all the top men pros and looked like they couldn’t give a shit. I was also blown away by Phyllis Dameron, a bodyboarding woman who rode massive Sunset and Waimea and would catch anything, Phyllis was unbelievable, kind of mad like a lot of great surfers. Linda Davoli from New Jersey was a brilliant surfer who we all would surf next to like she was one of us.
I taught at the Warringah Surf School when Pam (Burridge) came along to learn to surf, she was super talented and pretty soon was teaching too. I liked Pam a lot and respected her but wasn’t too sure who she was, maybe because she wasn’t too sure herself.
Us boys were dumb about gender difference. We were different when we were by ourselves with women — shyer probably, or maybe in some cases more open and talkative — but we’d never have wondered why. We, or maybe just I, wondered why women seemed as if they were supposed to be different to men, my sis had always come swimming and Surf O Planing with Tom and I but had then switched off it, seemingly as part of growing up. She never put words to it and I didn’t have any context for it. Why didn’t they want to surf like we did? If they did want to, did that mean they were not “normal”? I didn’t want women to be a puzzle, but it seemed as if it was supposed to be that way.
Surfing history and folklore has largely been viewed and documented through the eyes of men would you agree? Through magazines, books and filmsI know so much about the male icons of the sport in the 70’s and 80’s: MP, MR, Rabbit etc. and so little about the female surfers of this era.
Can you share any stories or insights into the female characters of those times?
Wow this is a huge question, one requiring a lot more time and energy than I have available right now! There’s no doubt most of surf history and folklore has been viewed and documented through the eyes of men, I think that is self-evident, and it’s definitely meant many great women surfers and their stories remain little documented, if at all. (There’s a few stand-outs though, Gidget being one. You’d search far and wide to find a better known surfer than Gidget.)
It’s always seemed to me that the girls and women who got through the many barriers erected against them through the 70s and 80s and blossomed into super skilled surfers were very much like the boys in their attitude to surfing. They were (most still are) powerful, confident, free-spirited, liked to laugh and carry on and do what they wanted. Their sexuality was their own to choose and to use. Nobody had expected this life of them and thus they owed nothing to anybody.
They often got a raw deal from contest directors and boy pro surfers, there was a notorious call that occasionally rang out during pre contest free-surfs when a small non-set wave crept through the lineup: “That’s the chicks’ wave! Chicks’ wave!” The boys got the sets and they got the best surf for the contests. Once I’d got myself out of actually competing, which is a real closed mindset, I watched the girls a lot more closely and began to see them for the fabulous individuals they were.
Frieda Zamba (captured above falling into a Rocky Point bomb by Jeff Divine) won four world titles in that period. She was an unbelievable competitor. To me, top eight all time competitive surfers. Just a ruthless and unflinching sense of the rhythm of a heat. It must have been heavy having to compete against her. Outside a heat she was a restrained person with no affectations and little desire to play the star. She had a solid boyfriend, Flea Shaw, also a good surfer if not on her comparative level. Flea was a good tennis player and I think they honed a lot of her drive on the tennis court.
I guess Jodie Cooper was the opposite, someone who surfed purely for the stoke, Jodie was non stop and really attacked big Hawaiian surf in the manner of the earlier women of the 1970s (Margo etc). She had so much energy and it was all good energy, she was impossible not to like. Toni Sawyer of Manly was a lot like that too, she just moulded her life around surfing. Pam was fascinating to me. She had the most wonderful parents and a very sturdy older sister, but she was always in search of something she couldn’t quite find. She won a world title and it felt to me like that freed her up to begin to become her true self. There’s something special about Pam that places her in a very rarefied space in surf culture, she is a true keeper of the flame.
It would occasionally incense me that these women weren’t being paid attention to as much as they should have been. I recall as editor of Tracks, wanting to run Pam on the cover and requesting the then photo editor access a cover shot. He resisted and resisted, it was unbelievable. Just would not come through. Finally he agreed to take one but instead of a surfing shot, he took a kind of clumsy glamour shot of her, a portrait with makeup etc, which was so not Pam. This was typical of the times; surf media was full of men who would not open that door, they would find every excuse not to feature women surfers, “oh no, we can’t get good photos of them”, or “we can’t spend film on them because we can’t sell the pics for ads”. That all changed incredibly quickly in the mid to late 90s when companies like Roxy etc began to boom.
I don’t want to shade these women by all that shit though, they are fantastic humans, great surfers, and more fool the men who couldn’t see that at the time.