Transgender surf icon’s battles laid bare in brave new documentary, “The Life and Death of Westerly Windina!”

"Westerly has been living in public housing on Australia’s Gold Coast. She is alone, poor, and often taunted by her neighbours.”

Fifty-five years ago, Peter Drouyn was the best surfer in Australia, better even, than the icon Nat Young. But how do you want to say it? Drouyn was, by nearly all accounts, an asshole swollen by ego and torn apart inside an infinite sense of injustice.

But then,

“In 2002, Peter suffered a traumatic surfing accident that nearly drowned him. Not long after, Peter’s feminine side fully emerged. ‘It was a supernova,’  said Westerly. ‘It just kicked in one night, and suddenly Peter went, Westerly was there.’

Six years later,

“Peter Drouyn announced on Australian national television that he was living as a woman. His new name, she said, was Westerly Windina. Since then, Westerly has been living in public housing on Australia’s Gold Coast. Her life is not easy. She is alone, poor, and often taunted by her neighbours.”

Now that’s a story, right? Surf hunk to showgirl!

The wildly well regarded surf journalist Jamie Brisick thought so and Westerly became the subject of Briz’s masterwork, Becoming Westerly.

The book is better than good. The best of all the surf bios. Part thriller, part melodrama, all page-turner. To be and not to be, if you gets my drift.

Now, and after so much ado I’d forgotten about it, almost a dozen “epic” years, the documentary of Westerly’s journey, including her flight to south-east Asia for gender reassignment surgery, is just about to light up screens.

The Life and Death of Westerly Windina premieres on October 19 at the Palace Theatre in Byron Bay as part of the Byron Bay International Film Festival.

As an addendum to all this, I interviewed Drouyn a couple of times and found a delightful egoist preparing, it seemed at the time, for his greatest performance. At one point, he confided in me when I asked him about the time he posed nude for a women’s mag that his balls were so big, like basketballs he said, that he could sit on them.

Little did I know!