But there's a caveat, "You gotta have balls, you
can't be fragile… every trip I see sharks at least once."
There is an island in the Pacific that shivers in the
shadow of black cliffs three thousand feet high, the sun
only fringing the two moss and fern covered mountains a little
before midday, a dim violet haze turning gold.
The ear tunes to the the whining and chattering of the sea
birds, the boobies, the petrels, the littles shearwaters, the grey
ternlets, to the hissing of ocean swells flowing onto thickets of
undisturbed reef.
The is air cool and sweet here on this white man’s island,
unknown to the Polynesian mariners subsequently sighted and claimed
by a British naval vessel en route to its country’s greatest
experiment, to land the detritus of its kingdom, the overflow of
its prisons, on a southern continent nine thousand nautical miles
distant.
But, here, four hundred miles north-east of Sydney, four hundred
souls live in deliberate and splendid isolation, untouched by white
guilt for there is no ruined indigenous population, many from the
same families that were first to build their little farms there.
The people live among three thousand acres of subtropical forests,
valleys and ridges and plains and mountains with neither snakes nor
stinging insects nor land animals that rear on hind legs, bare
teeth and threaten.
If you were to visit this island, you’d find your mobile
telephone to be a glass and aluminium paper weight. No towers. No
reception.
With only a few exceptions, there are no cars.
Too hot? Open a louvred window. Air conditioners are forbidden,
along with rubbish dumps and the disposal of household goods.
When a local tires of, say, a couch, by law he’s gotta ship it
to the mainland for a thousand bucks.
Recycling is everything and if it don’t turn into mulch in the
island’s vertical composting unit it’ll be sent back to
Australia.
In little wooden shacks across the island, an honesty system
works for fruit and for the hire of snorkelling equipment. Pay your
two dollars for an avocado, for a bunch of organic parsley, slice
off a ten for your mask, tuba and flippers.
At Government House, a flag, either pink or blue, appears
whenever a local has a kid, gender issues yet to wash ashore. All
profit from the liquor store is channelled back into community
works.
The ocean barely swings from sixty-eight in the winter months to
seventy-eight in early spring.
When the naturist prophet Davey Attenborough landed and sniffed
around the island’s Providence Petrel sea birds, he called the
place “so extraordinary it is almost unbelievable… few islands,
surely, can be so accessible, so remarkable, yet so unspoilt.”
Yeah, in some ways, it’s a paradise, in others a brooding isle
of nostalgia and bitterness haunted by the ghosts of vagrant
spirits.
The surfer, riding a bicycle, surveys his options in one
day.
The outer reefs hugging black-water drop-offs; the electric blue
beachbreaks that remind the well-travelled of King Island; the
deep-water reef pass shadowed by Gower and Lidgbird.
These aren’t world-class reefs, even if you squint hard into a
January sun and try and imagine you’re in French Polynesia. Nice
for pictures and, like most places, when the pressure of a specific
swell direction cuts through the maze of grottoes and fissures it
can lead to something the surfer can exaggerate later.
He looks around. A fin cuts the surface amid a school of fish at
a four-foot left-hander three hundred yards offshore. It’s too big
to be one of the curious reef sharks that’ll shoulder-hop your
tubes. Either a mako, a tiger, a whaler. The fin disappears. The
school shifts south.
His decision is fairly plain and straight.
He’ll be surfing alone.
***********
In the Australian spring of 1974, a thirteen-year-old
surfer from Bondi Beach, Greg Webber, already three years into the
shaping game, walked along the little wooden jetty at Rose Bay on
Sydney Harbour to board one of the two Sandringham flying
boats, Beachcomber and Islander, that serviced the
island.
Thirty years in the sky these birds, converted to civilian by
the Royal Air Force use after the war. Basic as hell. The cockpit
looked like something out of Dambusters, all levers and wheels and
a vast domed windshield.
The two Sandringhams flew, in convoy, to the island, landing in
the lagoon, take-off and landing times tidal dependant.
Greg climbed through the starboard door and strapped himself
into one of the forty-one vinyl covered seats in the lower cabin,
alongside his brother John, fifteen, and his parents, John and Di.
(His mom would design the Webber Rorschach logo Greg still uses the
following year.) Both brothers had self-made surfboards, single
screws, stored in the hold.
The Webbers took the trip on a whim, since it was the last time
the birds would fly the island route from the terminal a ten-minute
walk from the family house. An airstrip being built on a slab of
flat ground near the south end of the island meant regular
passengers planes would soon take over.
Greg, now sixty and whose concave heavy designs are still adored
by Kelly Slater, remembers the chattering of the finned hull and
the side pontoon and flames coming out of the back of one of the
motors, the unburnt fuel igniting.
Taking off and landing in water, he says, “was a bizarre and
beautiful experience.
The family stayed for one month, the boys doing volunteer work
pumping aviation fuel out of 44-gallon drums into storage tanks to
prove to the locals they weren’t just “tokenistically pretending to
respect them.”
The boys surfed the beachbreaks, Neds and Blinkeys on its
eastern shore, ignoring the reefs on the other side of the
island.
In 1975, they got the dad of a local kid to take ‘em out to a
wave they’d seen flying in, a classic righthand reef pass set
up.
“A really sucky, radical sort of wave,” says Greg.
The man’s son was too young to surf so Greg and John broke the
cherry on the wave’s four-to-six-foot tubes.
“Surfing those reefs in the seventies was some of the best
things we ever did. No one was surfing then.”
Two decades later, big brother John would join Lance Knight, who
discovered and named Lance’s Right in the Mentawais, on of his
regular supply trips from Yamba to the island on the barge MV
Island Trader.
Thirty hours straight listening to the drone of its diesel
engines. On a flat-bottomed barge. Open ocean. Hell of a ride.
No glory days of aviation flying boat vibe here.
The island got into Greg’s head, into his brothers’, and it
would get into the head of at least one of his sons, who would
spend three years of his twenties there.
He likes that it ain’t easy to be a surfer there.
“You gotta have balls, you can’t be fragile,” he says. “You
can’t be worried about massive drop-offs, fathoms and fathoms deep,
totally black. The guys that fish there know how sharky it is. They
pull up their kingfish in a rush. It’s a shit-fight to get ‘em
before they’re bitten in half. They get the shortest window before
the sharks move in. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s raw.”
Once, some years ago now, Greg decided he wanted to experiment
with awareness inside the tube. His gut feeling was, the only thing
you can think about inside the tube is the tube itself.
To prove this theory, at least to himself, he would surf nude,
and if he was aware of his own nudity inside the tube, well, he was
wrong. He paddled out at Middle Beach, did his tube experiment on a
little shore break, couldn’t remember being aware of his nudity
inside the tube, thus proving his theory.
What he could remember from the tube, however, was some sorta
panicked noise. A frenetic splashing.
He looked over and an eight-foot shark is in water so shallow
its tail fin was entirely exposed as well as most of his dorsal
fin. Maybe two feet of water.
“Every trip there I used to see sharks at least once,” he
says.
Ten trips all up, and he lived there for two years in the early
two thousands with his wife Christina and boys, Hayden and Joe.
While a resident, a newly retired couple from Brisbane in
Queensland arrived on this beautiful and peaceful little isle to
celebrate a life without work. The man, Arthur Apelt, seventy years
old. One warm autumn night he tells his wife he’s going for a walk.
He never comes back.
A few weeks later, a twelve-foot tiger shark is caught, the guts
are cut open and out spills Arthur’s head, still with hair.
If you want to get real tough, if your fear glands have been
sufficiently cauterised and if you’ll do anything for waves, pay a
skipper to take you to Middleton and Elizabeth Reefs, sandy cays
sixty or so nautical miles to the north.
“The most horrifying surf trip ever,” says Greg. “Absolutely
frothing with sharks. Only two or three people have ever surfed it.
A ten-hour boat ride. Reefs in the middle of nowhere.”
The 2016 sleeper hit, The Shallows – surfer hit by Great
White, has to get back to shore without being snatched by the jaws
of death – was filmed on Lord Howe.
It ain’t all sharks, however, well, not entirely.
The best wave is a joint called Little Island, a wavepool-esque
righthander with a tapering shoulder that gets snapped off by the
cliffs and edge of Mount Gower. Six-foot on the takeoff that swings
into a bowl that you’ll still be telling reporters about
thirty-five years after a session you had with your shaper buddies
Rodney Dahlberg and Murray Bourton, and nineteen-eighties surfing
doc, Narrabeen’s Rod Kirsop.
A lefthander is named after the nineteenth century French
warship that lays beneath, La Meurthe, abandoned and sunk in
1907.
But then there’s the stillness of life on the island. The same
looks from the same faces. The same inflections at the same point
in the same stories told over the same schooners of beer at the
same bowling club.
It ain’t for everyone.
“You’ve gotta be able to handle certain levels of quiet,” says
Greg. “I could live there for ten years but city people, they could
handle one month at the most.”
The secret is to step back, he says, and feel where you are.
“The biggest thing is the fact of the two mountains at the end,
Gower and Lidgbird. There’s a certain energy that even really
straight, unspiritually minded people will pick up on. First,
there’s the three-dimensional aspect, the mountains exist in the
background of everything. People visit and are dumbfounded by those
mountains, one square and blocky, very male, the other with
convolutions and curves to it, female, like a mother and father
protecting the islands.”
Greg says he’s going back to the island soon.
He wants to buy there, if he ever gets the chance, houses, which
cost in the millions, are offered to residents first, then to
approved applicants on a waiting list, wants to live there.
He was told by a local, once, that the Webbers were some of the
very few non-islanders who would be welcomed to buy.
“I can’t wait to go back there, I adore the place,” he says.
“Old people are very respected there and because there’s no
original inhabitants that changes the feeling of being local, which
we’re meant to feel guilty about in Australia. But they
are… it. That’s why they’ve got this sense of connection to
the island that no one can get in Australia. It’s a great place to
have a base forever and ever.”
(This story first in The Surfer’s Journal, issue 31.2, with the
title, Lonely in the Pacific. Subscribe to that wonderful bulwark
against all the bad in the world here.)
