When Kelly thinks about what is being done in his name and looks in the mirror, does he still see an environmentalist looking back at him?

(Editor’s note: Last month, the WSL announced a billion-dollar development on 510-hectares, or 1200 acres, of “highly constrained land” near the Queensland beach town of Coolum. The proposal includes a Surf Ranch wrapped in a 20,000-person stadium, a six-star eco-resort, restaurants, bars, a retail village and “an environmental education centre based on the site’s wetlands and nearby waterways.” The WSL’s Andrew Stark said the local surfing community was “ecstatic and excited.” Over the course of the next week, the writer Steve “Longtom” Shearer will investigate these claims as well as the mood on the ground.)

I got into Coolum, proposed site of a massive Surf Ranch development last night. It’s not foreign territory.

I lived up the road for a few years, hustling up grub stakes in between overseas trips. I drove around looking for the old bottle-shop I worked at. Gone. Under the bulldozer’s plough. The town of Coolum, compared to how I remember it from twenty years ago, has been gussied up, impeccably landscaped, with a Stepford Wives feel about it.

For those unfamiliar with the area it’s a sub-tropical surf town, nestled against a series of headlands that are mostly crap but have golden moments and miles and miles of serviceable beachbreak in either direction.

To the south, the coastline breaks at the Maroochy River. To the north, the beachbreaks end at the vast headland complex with world-class pointbreaks of Noosa Heads. It has flat spells but no-one is angsting about being a surfer. A couple of hundred days per year of easy, warm water go-outs are on offer.

It’s prosperous.

Like most of coastal Australia it’s upgraded to Surf Cafe living, which is an actual book you can buy. The carpark outside my budget accomodation, chosen for it’s proximity to the best beachbreak in town is full of new four-wheel-drives.

Tradies and contractors are killing it. You’ll get change from nine hundred grand for a house and land just off the beach, but not much. One-point-nine million will get you a ten-bed ranch on acreage with deep-water access to the river abutting the wavepool land.

I surf that beachie at dawn, trying to get a read on the temperature of the local surfing populace on the KSWC proposal. Then head for a second surf down the road to a beachie filled with punchy wedges. Enthusiasts were thin on the ground.

So, what do you think of the Kelly pool proposed for Coolum?

Salt and pepper beard, late-forties on Lost Rocket: Shrugs shoulders. “Not much, it’s already so crowded. That’ll just bring more people here. They won’t get their fill there.”

Early-thirties shredder on stubby four-fin: “It’s fucken BS, we won’t get to surf it. Taxpayers subsidising the privileged.”

Early twenties on a twinny: “Sick if we got to surf it. But how much is it going to cost and where do they get the water from? Already too much development around here.”

Mid-forties on a thruster: “I’m suss on it eh. Taxpayer funded and locals will have to pay big time to play.”

By mid-morning I’d racked up a small cricket score of super fun waves; probably the best I’d had for a month. It was crowded, few grumbles in the carpark but the vibe in the water was sound. Free people enjoying nature’s gifts and all that. I showered off next to a sign: Please help us conserve water. Every drop is precious.

I had to drive to Noosa, twenty kilometres away, to find a true believer. On the way I drove around looking for the beach shacks I used to live in. Gone. Like the bottle-shop, they’d been bulldozed.

My existence here had been erased from history. In their place were architect-designed homes, tacky mansions; the spoils of wealth. A secret little beach track down to a reliable rip bowl left was the only piece of archaeological evidence of previous habitation I could find.

The two kids in the Rip Curl shop were non-plussed on the pool. Bring crowds, too expensive etc.

The manager, former pro longboarder Dane Wilson, thought: awesome. His take was it was as an amazing opportunity for the local kids to step up to the elite level and an interesting posit that the price of Mentawai travel might come down because people might come to the pool instead and the decreased demand for Indo might put downward pressure on prices.

Also, of course, a golden opportunity for surf retail inside the complex.

Coolum surf shop owner Genevieve Kendall was more ambivalent.

Her first response to the pool was “where will the water come from?” She described the mood at the initial community “consultation” meeting* with Andrew Stark as “frothing” but that as time had passed the vibe had become more subdued.

How much will it cost and how often will I be able to access it were unanswered questions.

A little strange, when they propose turning soil next year.

“I want my kids to have jobs in the area and the Sunshine coast does need jobs,” she said. “I’m broadly for it, I think a wavepool is a good fit for the area but there’s still a lot of unanswered questions.”

Husband Chris was concerned about the development outpacing infrastructure and the effect that would have on the lifestyle of the area.

Glancing left at the site which is bordered by the road the presence of water on the ground, despite the drought, is startling. Fifteen hundred residential lots, commercial, retail, hotels plus the wavepool on some of the lowest lying floodplain in south-east Queensland. What, as they say, could go wrong?

She mentioned the traffic and how gnarly it was around the site. I road-tested the gnarl and can confirm. Trying to enter the roundabout where Sunshine Motorway and Coolum-Yandina road converge was as fucking frightening as a three-am tweaker.

Drive-time from the airport is fourteen-minutes at a hundred k’s heading due north up the Sunshine Motorway. Glancing left at the site which is bordered by the road the presence of water on the ground, despite the drought, is startling. Fifteen hundred residential lots, commercial, retail, hotels plus the wavepool on some of the lowest lying floodplain in south-east Queensland.

What, as they say, could go wrong?

The developer’s eye eludes me. I see trees and bush. Birds, insects, frogs. I feel sad that surfers will be the ones behind the bull-dozers, erasing this wildlife, this bush from history. From what I can see though, although there is ambivalence, distrust and even hostility to the Coolum wave pool development, that is unlikely to stop the bulldozers.

I put boots on the ground at the site. I know this country very well. It’s in my blood. My people come from the Queensland cane swamps. They are Danes, Swedes, Sicilians.

Practical people.

They would understand the necessity of bulldozing the bush to make way for jobs. But I do not. The developer’s eye eludes me. I see trees and bush. Birds, insects, frogs. I feel sad that surfers will be the ones behind the bull-dozers, erasing this wildlife, this bush from history.

From what I can see though, although there is ambivalence, distrust and even hostility to the Coolum wave pool development, that is unlikely to stop the bulldozers.

The greenwashing on the project will be immense. Next level.

But I wonder, when Kelly thinks about what is being done in his name and looks in the mirror, does he still see an environmentalist looking back at him?

Next: Australia’s Chinatown?

*Described by upcoming state government election candidate Maria Suarez as “more of a sales pitch than true consultation”.

When surfing hits you in the guts it changes everything…

Dan Dob’s essay on the fundamental ordinariness of surfing was very good, much truth, but a little too neo-liberal in outlook, a little too every-man-is-a -rational-economic-actor-out-for-himself etc.

A little too dry, too grim. Mostly true.

(Read “I’m immune to the magic of dancing on water; the act of surfing holds no spiritual magic for me, no Shangri-La!” here)

But truth doesn’t sustain us, never has.

We need illusions.

Damn thing woke me up at two am, these words were there.

I offer them to you.

Modern middle-class humanity praises and holds dear the rational, the conscious decision, but far more than conscious thought it’s our animal mind that makes us what we are.

Derek Hynd’s missing fins made the ultimate statement about it: “Surfing is at the pinnacle of animal-based experiences and only a fool fully walks away”.

Defending surfing from the outside world is stupid – it needs more enemies, not less – it’s only here, among friends, that we feel we need to defend her honour.

Dandob is right to stick it to the carpet baggers and toothy flim-flammers whoring the dream, and right to insist most of the time it’s a splash and giggle and not much else.

I can’t stand by, though, and have my beloved desert traduced like some cheap Chinese piece of plastic. Can’t let the charge of nothing life-changing in it, no brotherhood and sisterhood, only rats chasing the same piece of cheese, stand unchallenged.

Surfing the desert changed my life. Before it, the half decadal knocks on the door of the middle-class had some hope of success.

When it was done, I was just too far out on a limb to get back.

One thing the town lacked, like much of Western Australia outside Perth, was women. A rumour circulated there was a foxy young doc in town and I cooked up a reason to visit her. To get hands on with a woman I suggested a small scar as being a possible skin cancer. She said, would you like me to cut it out and biopsy it. I said, yes. Foxy Doctor hacked a big gaping wound into my calf with a scalpel and then sewed me up. She was no plastic surgeon.

A year passed working the snapper boats, wet-lining out of Kalbarri. It was a good life for a surfer, unlike working crays we only fished when it was troughed out. Fish when it was flat, surf the rest of the time. There is a heavy left just south of town. I got into rotation for the sets.

One thing the town lacked, like much of Western Australia outside Perth, was women. The town pub was a sausage sizzle. A rumour circulated there was a foxy young doc in town and I cooked up a reason to visit her. To get hands on with a woman I suggested a small scar as being a possible skin cancer.

She said, would you like me to cut it out and biopsy it. I said, yes. Foxy Doctor hacked a big gaping wound into my calf with a scalpel and then sewed me up. She was no plastic surgeon.

Well, of course, the next trip out in the generalised hurley burley of life at sea the wound busted open and I now had something that looked like it could give birth to a small mammal on the side of my leg. And, my pal had arrived from the east coast and said, let’s go to Gnaraloo. Which we did. I quit my job with the best snapper fisherman in town, stocked up on wound dressings, bandages, plastic bags and electrical tape and we hit the road. Bush chooks, food, water.

We made pals in the desert, anyone who’s been there will.

The Australian male is not a well-loved figure in literature. Our finest writer, Tim Winton, loves to portray us as a particularly toxic masculine brew : sour, demented, petty, vindictive, provincial ; the worst kind of colonial scum. Of course, he excepts himself from such portrayal.

Hooked up with old buddies from previous trips.

Hard to see us all as desert rats chasing the same piece of cheese, but I guess we were.

The truth is a bit more complex. The Australian male is not a well-loved figure in literature. Our finest writer, Tim Winton, loves to portray us as a particularly toxic masculine brew : sour, demented, petty, vindictive, provincial ; the worst kind of colonial scum.

Of course, he excepts himself from such portrayal.

They ain’t the people I know.

The people I met are more like the ones Dostoevsky met in Siberian prison camps; about the finest,toughest timber grown in that land. I could not have a higher opinion of the non-sponsored Australian surfer.

We got what we came for. The night before the day of days me and Corey ate the cheek meat of a reef fish that bio-accumulated a neuro-toxin from a dinoflagellate that gave the ingestor intense hallucinations.

It seemed like a fun thing to do.

I crawled out of the tent at midnight sure the sun was midday-bright in the night sky. I passed out on the sand dunes and woke up to a ghost crab nibbling my eyelids. It was just on the wrong side of intense to be fun. In the morning the coast-line was under heavy bombardment.

Seven hours passed. Seven hours of eight-to-ten-foot Tombstones. Every desert rat was under the influence of the mull cookies my Byron pal produced.

Things were surreal.

Anyone who could spin and go and make the drop got the tube of a lifetime.

Corza was looking in, I was looking out, looking at him looking in. The bottom dropped out, then dropped again, an angry knuckle appeared in the tube. The board was skittering left and right on the foam ball and shockwave. A backdoor section protruded ahead and threw out a big crystalline chamber made of shattered glass fragments that refracted the sunlight. The wave developed an intense pressure chamber of air and water .

It spat, but not out but back at me. The spit hit my front hand so hard it made me strike myself in the face and the whole bottom of the wave opened up and sucked me down a trapdoor.

Was that 5,6 seconds? Half an hour? I came up and Corza was screaming.

I said, “Fuck!”

We all rode waves like that. Intense beyond imagination.

One of the benefits of camaraderie, according to Owl Chapman, is the increased chance of sexual congress.

“Give a wave. Share a smile. Make a friend,” he said. “You never know, he might have a good looking sister.”

I drove back to Perth with Corey. He had a good looking sister. Who thought it was a good idea to drop a tab and hit the city.

So we did, and hit it off.

I swear as God be my witness, all true.

And you could see how, it might change your life, this extended stay in Shangri-La. See how, at some point, the thought might cross your mind, “Maybe middle-class life ain’t my bag.”

How a preference for the tube over keeping up with the Joneses, the friends, the wild life and wild living might constrain once choices, for good or ill. How coming back into the world of home renovation and cooking shows may not be possible.

The working title for David Rensin’s Dora Biography was “The Point of No Return”, I think a much better descriptor of the life aquatic than the chosen title, “All for a Few Perfect Waves.”ˆ

Being shunted from the middle classes due to surfing.

Depressive, or anti-depressive? I say, anti-D.

Of course, it’s pathetic as well as appealing when people go too hard for too long and can’t wind their necks in for the sake of the kiddies.

End up living in vans, kids won’t talk to them etc etc.

But you?

I can’t be the only one here, surely, who’s been unwound by the magic of mighty desert toobs.