Just in: Australians can’t pronounce “Australia!”

What are you looking at "American"?

The 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan are right around the corner and how excited are you for the jingoistic bacchanal? The correct answer is “very” and you are not alone. Professional surfer Kanoa Igarashi is so excited that he changed his nationality to Japanese from American and don’t you think it is funny that Americans call themselves “American?” I mean, there are 23 different countries in North, Central and South America with each having an equal claim to the “America” moniker.

I mean, not “equal” the America we call America has much more money and a much larger military than the other 22 combined but still. Funny. But not as funny as Australians not being able to pronounce the word “Australia.”

In a gorgeously written piece, author Tiger Webb walks though the historical and modern troubles Australians have with Australia. And let us read.

Towards the tail end of 1933, Londoners realised something strange: BBC announcers seemed to take multiple approaches to pronouncing the word Australia.

In one, the first syllable rhymed with the title of Patrick White’s then-unpublished Voss. In the other, the first syllable resembled the vowel sound in ore.

This state of chaos terrified the British public so much that newspapers lobbied the BBC to go with (their orthography) Osstralia.

Actual Australians, hearing of this debate, argued for a third way.

“I agree that Australia should not be pronounced Orestralia,” said the Reverend GE Hale, a lecturer in public speaking at the Workers’ Educational Association of Adelaide.

“But neither should it be pronounced Osstralia.”

For Hale, there was a third way — closer to Orestralia, but without stress on the first syllable. Orstralia.

That this great country had not settled on a single pronunciation of its own name, even 30 years after Federation, didn’t seem to faze its residents.

On the contrary: there is some evidence to suggest that speakers of Australian English used these variant pronunciations as a handy form of social marker.

In his autobiography, the writer Hal Porter observed that he was “an unmistakable Australian, albeit of the Awstralian rather than the Osstralian variety”.

Porter’s remarks on the Australian accent, written in 1963, neatly mirror today’s anxieties around pronunciation.

So? How do you pronounce? Having received my graduate degree in Applied Linguists I’ll tell you it doesn’t matter. Language is as language does but maybe you think one way is right and the others are silly. So are you an Osstralia gal, an Orestralia gal or an Orstralia gal?

Hmmm?

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"I thought it was a really low act on behalf of those guys," says Tim Winton.

Famous author: “Italo, Gabriel weak, conniving!”

Tim Winton says, "It's amazing how cowardly those guys were."

Two days ago, the celebrated Australian writer Tim Winton appeared on a youth network talk show for a few reasons: to pimp a new book and talk about “toxic masculinity” with a brief detour into the film adaption of his surf novel Breath.

Winton, who is fifty seven years old and lives in a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, regards the modern man as something a little diminished.

“As someone who’s surfed all over the world and with the machismo and bravado of Brazilians in particular, I thought it was amazing how cowardly those guys were,” he said

“I wonder what kind of sooks men are… (if they) can’t hear any form of criticism without needing cotton wool or wearing a special helmet,” he said.

Winton grew up surfing around the south-west and says he wasn’t impressed when the Brazilians Gabriel Medina and Italo Ferreira applied a little pressure to the WSL to cancel the Margaret River Pro.

“As someone who’s surfed all over the world and with the machismo and bravado of Brazilians in particular, I thought it was amazing how cowardly those guys were,” he said. “Look, not everybody wants to be in the water the day after two guys have failed the taste test around the corner, but I thought it was a really low act on behalf of those two guys. Because, also, there’s a professional aspect to that. They’ve just given themselves a professional advantage in the competition. At one level it was weak of them. At another level it was conniving.”

Winton suggested a chlorinated future would better suit the pair. 

“I just think  if you want to go swimming in a dead ocean, go to a pool, go to a wave pool. If you want to be part of something that’s alive, and that’s what surfing is to most of us, then you’ve gotta be prepared, you’re doing that in a living ecosystem. If you want to kill all the sharks you’re just going to kill the oceans. It’s one of the few places in the world where there are actually real waves.”

(Here, the host jumped in. “And it was ripping!”)

“Yeah, so they can go back to surfing dirty onshore beach slop in water somewhere else and that’ll be surfing. Finally we get something to look at and they don’t want to go out.”

Listen here (back third of the show.) 

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Global warming: More, bigger waves coming!

We are unreflective scholars of the divine!

You well know that our earth’s atmosphere is toasting up due an over-abundance of carbon emissions etc. and do you feel bad, resolute or resigned? I’m somewhere between resigned and indifferent. It is a bummer that we humans are such… consumers but it bothers me at an aesthetic level more than a ecological one. Like people who buy delightfully small homes in moderate climates then tear them down and build monstrosities.

Very gauche.

But at least as far as our surfing is concerned global warming holds promise or so declares The New York Times. In a review of four “ocean lifestyle” books the promise is clear. Future storms will be more severe and create more waves. And let’s read one review together?

But “debate rages,” the oceanographer Eelco J. Rohling writes in THE OCEANS: A Deep History (Princeton University, $29.95), “over whether we will see a stormier atmosphere in general, or perhaps fewer but bigger storms.”

But “debate rages,” the oceanographer Eelco J. Rohling writes in THE OCEANS: A Deep History (Princeton University, $29.95), “over whether we will see a stormier atmosphere in general, or perhaps fewer but bigger storms.”Paleoceanography, Rohling’s area of expertise, is the study of ancient oceans and ancient climates as they changed and developed together over geologic time. It involves analyzing data like layers of sediment taken from the seabed. Much alarming information can be learned this way, as Rohling demonstrates, about how today’s oceans are likely to respond to climate change — with greater acidification, sea-level rise, mass extinction and so forth. But because storms leave no geological record, the precise effect of global warming on hurricanes is harder to gauge.

Still, Rohling is confident that the combination of rising sea levels and some form of increased storm intensity “spells doom” for the world’s coastal regions. For surfers, rooting for hurricane swell may be increasingly difficult to rationalize.

Not difficult for me to rationalize. I’m a surfer! And so are you.

The same piece poetically declares.

In September, Hurricanes Irma and Maria posed this question with some vividness, producing the best run of swell seen in years along the East Coast while unleashing chaos and devastation down in the Caribbean. Surfers, to judge from the throngs who gleefully paddled out from Florida to New England, make for unreflective scholars of the divine.

Amen.

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The bit about getting your first hit of surfing and then spending your life chasing that feeling, he's just done a switcheroo there, with "surfing" as a metaphor for drugs. That's how I hear it. So yeah, I got off to a bad start with Kissed by God.

Warshaw: “Kissed by God disturbed me!”

Surf historian Matt Warshaw lights up on the AI documentary…

Next Wednesday, the AI documentary Kissed by God makes its world premiere in Los Angeles. Honolulu gets a premiere on May 6. New York follows four days later. Tickets are being distributed through a sign-up process, some are giveaways. Click here to get in the mix. 

Now I ain’t one for exaggeration, I don’t think, and therefore tend to err on the sceptical side of the ledger. But Kissed by God? Anyone even vaguely related to the game of surfing won’t want to miss it and I urge you to find a screening at the first possible instance.

“I had a dying heroin addict husband,” says Lyndie Irons. You want to miss that sorta candour?

Much earlier today, the surf historian Matt Warshaw and I viewed our respective screeners and came at it, swords, opinions drawn.

BeachGrit: Kissed by God is a… masterly… wrenching back of the narrative of Andy Irons’ life (and death). All the pious finger-pointers are silenced by the diagnoses of bi-polar disease, a doc from Harvard adding credence even though he’d never met the star of the movie. And, of course, once a mental illness is identified no further criticism is allowed. But, tell me, do you think, egg before the chicken or the chicken before the egg? To wit, drugs before disease or disease before drugs? Or disease as a convenient spin? I know you’re not a doctor, neither am I, but as I said the other day, you can’t fly as high as Andy did and not land with a thud. 

Warshaw: Kissed by God is much much better than I thought it would be. On the other hand, it’s an Irons-family-approved project, so my expectations were low. In fact I turned it off after the opening bit, with all the stock slow-mo underwater shots, and Andy’s “kissed by god” monolouge in the voice over. I remember the Billabong promo when Andy’s “kissed by god” speech came out, I think it was right before it died  . . .  it was strange when I first saw it, and watching it again today, for me anyway, was just really disturbing. He’s got the drug sweats, he’s slurring, and you can tell he’s trying hard to, I don’t know, be better, to be well. But he’s kidding himself in that speech. Partly, anyway. And he’s kidding the rest of us too. The bit about getting your first hit of surfing and then spending your life chasing that feeling, he’s just done a switcheroo there, with “surfing” as a metaphor for drugs. That’s how I hear it. So yeah, I got off to a bad start with Kissed by God.

The bit about getting your first hit of surfing and then spending your life chasing that feeling, he’s just done a switcheroo there, with “surfing” as a metaphor for drugs. That’s how I hear it. So yeah, I got off to a bad start with Kissed by God.

BeachGrit: What compelled you to keep watching? 

Warshaw: Bruce comes onscreen, and thirty seconds later I’m all in. Bruce hedged a bet or two as well, but mostly he was incredibly honest and of course incredibly charismatic. He’s the heart and soul of the movie. And I’ll bet anything it was Bruce who pushed to make the movie as honest as it is. It’s not Brad Melelkain-level honest, and everybody involved with Kissed By God still owes Brad an apology. But my sense is that Bruce himself very much needed to unburdon himself, to get some more truth out there, and that he set the tone for all the other people talking onscreen.

BeachGrit; The static interview style of these sorts of documentaries usually bores me to tears. But, here, because it’s not a sing-song Andy-was-the-greatest-surfer-ever-hagiography, there’s an honesty I’ve never heard from the usual roll call of stars. Kelly saying Andy called him an old bald kook, adding, “Well, if this old bald kook beats you you’re going to be crushed.” Bruce is Bruce, not a damn word censored (“We were drug addicted monsters!”), Joel, Sunny, Lyndie, Mick. It’s almost as if they’re channelling AI. ‘Cause, not sure if you ever interviewed him, but if you asked a question he wasn’t going to festoon it with meaningless bunting. What are your favourite moments in the film? 

Warshaw: Probably, as you say, the moments where Andy himself is onscreen talking without a filter. The bit where they show the blank rehab intake form, with the all the drug history questions, and Andy’s hand-written answers show up onscreen one by one. 

“Do you consider yourself an addict?” 

Long pause. 

“Yes.” 

That was so powerful. What else? Fifteen years later, or whatever it is, Andy’s surfing holds up amazingly well. That was great to see. I’m not sure if “favorite” is the right word, but I was suprised to find out how fucked-up Andy was that first year on tour. The bipolar diagnosis and the heavy drug use. On the other hand, knowing that the Irons family knew that Andy was bipolar from that far back is…sad. More than sad. Bipolar people don’t get better without meds. Go off the meds and you’re a timebomb. Research bipolar disorder and that’s right there at the top of the page. When the movie rolls into 2010 I was just mad at everybody, anybody, who thought Andy should be back on tour. Friends, family, sponsors. The guy is bipolar AND an addict. You can argue that in the end it’s Andy’s decision, but I wanted to at least see somebody from his inner circle say “We blew it, he never should have been out there.” In other words, the movie goes further than I expected, but maybe it’s still too soon to for the full accounting.

What surprised you about Kissing God? I’ll tell you what surprised me, how losing at J-Bay in 2005 on what he thought was a bum call put him on the road to ruin. Which means the ASP judges killed AI. Am I drawing too long a bow here? 

I think you are, Derek. That section of the film was overcooked. They all get fucked by the judges. Kelly, Mick, Curren, Bugs, everybody. If J-Bay broke Andy, it’s cause he was ready to be broken. 

When the movie rolls into 2010 I was just mad at everybody, anybody, who thought Andy should be back on tour. Friends, family, sponsors. The guy is bipolar AND an addict. You can argue that in the end it’s Andy’s decision, but I wanted to at least see somebody from his inner circle say “We blew it, he never should have been out there.”

Oh, another surprise. I’d forgotten that in 2004 they won every contest between ‘em. That’s a rivalry. Compare AI and Kelly to Gabriel and John John. 

There’s no surfing rivalry to touch what Andy and Kelly had. Not before, not since. Whoever the contenders are, Gabe and Julian, Dora and Fain, take your pick, they’re all clustered together 25 miles behind Andy and Kelly.

Can you imagine if Andy had died in Padang in 1999? Or if he didn’t get picked up by Billabong, found a way to channel his genius, and become the juggernaut he was? Kelly may not have come back on the tour, there would’ve been no pool, probably no WSL, maybe no John John. His effect on professional surfing is profound. Yes? Or you want to argue agains that posit? 

No. I don’t have the imagination for the what-ifs. Can you imagine if the sperm to the left had busted Danielle’s egg instead of Andy? Etc etc. 

I’m going to say that Kissed by God is the among the top three surfing documentaries ever made, alongside Bustin’ Down the Door and Sea of Darkness, in no order etc. Where are you going to put it? 

Surfwise is the Andy-Kelly of surf documentaries. Nothing else is close. Surfwise is the only doc from our side of town that can step in the ring with Man on Wire or Hoop Dreams or The Thin Blue Line. Of course, I’m partial to old guys. Andy Irons is compelling, but Dorian Paskowitz in Surfwise took me for a real ride.

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Scottish locals are thrilled to surf!

Arms race: Scotland to get Wavegarden!

Another territory ceded to Spanish innovation!

There was a time, not too long ago, when the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a race in building their nuclear arsenals. It was an amusing game with fun results though eventually the Soviets couldn’t afford to keep up and the whole country collapsed. We are now seeing a similar drama play out but this time between surf tank giants Kelly Slater Wave Company and Europe’s Wavegarden.

Which will win and which will collapse? Very difficult to say at this point. The KS Wave Co. seems to have a much better PR machine for it is Surf Ranch that gets millions of views online. But while people are watching Surf Ranch they are going to Wavegardens from Wales to Austin and now Scotland too.

For it was revealed today that Wavegarden Scotland is being developed in an old rock quarry near Edinburgh. Let’s learn!

Wavegarden Scotland View 03

The £10m project has been designed by landscape architects HarrisonStevens, with engineering and technical consultation provided by WSP, and planning and development advice by Colliers International.

Alongside a world-class surfing facility, Wavegarden Scotland also includes a surf school, self-catering luxury guest lodges, a waterfront café and restaurant, retail spaces and a snow-sports training jump.

Andy Hadden, the co-founder of Tartan Leisure, which is developing Wavegarden Scotland, said: “We believe that this facility will deliver many benefits for the local community and for Scotland by offering world-class adventure leisure amenities alongside a wonderful country park, for walkers, runners and cyclists to enjoy.

“Another very exciting aspect of Wavegarden Scotland is the opportunity to nurture surfing and sporting talent. With Scotland’s own surfing team starting to make a mark on the global surf scene, we hope to inspire the next generation of surfers, life guards, and active outdoor enthusiasts.”

So I am very excited about the snow-sports training jump, for one, and love the name Tartan Leisure, for two, and am very curious about Scotland’s surfing team which is starting to make a mark on the global surf scene.

We have a famous Scottish surfer here at BeachGrit, Mr. Chazz Michael Michaels, and do you think he is on Scotland’s surf team?

Very curious.

By the way, I went to Edinburgh once and liked the whisky and the creepy castle in the middle of town and… liked… the overall aesthetic.

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