Shattered: Australia’s Most Enduring Surf Myth!

Hawaiian legend fails to turn closet lesbian; Australia's first-ever surfer ain't who it seems!

In a sizzling reveal, The Australian newspaper reported yesterday that Australia’s first-ever surfer wasn’t Isabel Letham nor the Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku but a Manly surfer, Tommy Walker, who exhibited the sport on a two-dollar surfboard three years earlier.

“Oral storytelling, particularly about new and radical experiences, forms a large part of surf culture,” writes Fred Pawle. “As a result, surfers, who are not the most literary bunch, are prone to exaggeration. But even by their hyperbolic standards, the Letham story is extraordinary. The truth, as usual, is even more fascinating .

“A reassessment of Letham is overdue, partly because her status in surfing has become ludicrously high, and partly because the centenary of her alleged achievement is approaching, and it would be a shame if the planned celebrations on Sydney’s Freshwater beach on January 8 commemorated a fallacy.”

Even better, writes Pawle, the now-legendary Ms Letham hid her sapphic tendencies behind a wall of supposed longing for the former Olympian.

“Letham herself repeatedly gave the impression that she, if not Kahanamoku, established a deep emotional bond on the day they supposedly rode together at Freshwater,” writes Fred Pawle. “But Sandra Kimberley Hall, Kahanamoku’s official biographer, is not convinced. ‘Any romantic interaction between a 15-year-old white girl and a 24-year-old dark-skinned Hawaiian in Australia in 1915 stretches the bounds of plausibility,’ she says. ‘Nowhere in Duke or Isabel’s archives is there anything that would lead researchers to believe there was a romance, a fling, or even a friendship between the two of them. It’s laughably ridiculous.’”

The story really is a remarkable piece, in its research and its shattering of an enduring myth.

Read the entire story here!