Australia’s premier shark hunter to test efficacy of Sharkbanz bracelets off Tweed Heads and Yamba beaches 

Once the complete lack of any shark deterrent properties have been proven, perhaps the company can pivot to a desperately needed Fuckwitbanz® product, a collar-like device that emits powerful electromagnetic radiation pulses that repel any and all fuckwits up to a distance of 50 meters.

I reckon he could sell heaps of them in Australia –

how can that company still be selling product with tidbits like;
‘… killed by a Great White, was identified by the Sharkbanz bracelet on her ankle.’
floating about the place?

I’m way too fucked from surfing drop-perfect waves all morning to respond to Brutus’ question regarding what I meant when I said that Modern Australian culture is a beautiful fusion of Indigenous and Old School Western European. So I’m posting this story I wrote for Australia Day a few years ago:

Celebrating the Great Southern Surfing Superpower

Australia; Anyone who dips their toes in the surfing culture rapidly discovers it’s nigh impossible to avoid the outsized influence of this island nation. Whether it’s as a dream surf destination, the breeding ground for generations of World beating talent or the hub of global surf industry and culture, Australia punches with more power than almost any other place.

Hawaii may be surfing’s birthplace and its spiritual home, Indonesia may take pride in possessing the planet’s best breaks but Australia is the beating heart of modern surfing.

It’s not just the waves. Many places have great waves. It’s the perfect meld of epic breaks and a First world society which places an ideological premium on the esoteric notion of surfing as valid life pursuit. No where else does surfing hold the same respectability amongst its population. In Australia you are held in high esteem if you make it a priority to keep your gills wet.

This globally unique culture has been gestating for tens of thousands of years, since the first people’s arrived to discover this crazy, beautiful land. The First Nations crew found such natural abundance that the hunter gathering style of existence left them without need for extensive agriculture. One of the primary benefits of a hunter gather lifestyle is the surplus of leisure time once food has been procured. Through both want and necessity, these semi nomadic legends also eschewed burdening themselves with excessive material possession or permanent structures, both of which also place demands on surplus time. Instead of the worship of material possessions, a cultural primacy was placed on spirituality, joy of existence and maintaining integration with the natural world.

This lifestyle remained relatively inert for millennia. Until one steamy late January day, some 240 odd years ago, that the catalyst for the creation of a World surfing juggernaut arrived in the shape of several shiploads of utterly discombobulated Old Worlde social outcasts and their equally forsaken overseers.

The British crown had plans to control Terra Australis using the acquisitional strategy previously imposed so successfully on their homelands: force their arbitrary social structures on a guileless population, dispossess them through law fare and the shifting goalposts of a rigged economic system. Overseen with a monopoly on legal violence.

In the initial journey of the first settlement, the ships of the crown, and their useful human cargo, somehow managed to avoid catastrophe for over 250 days travel across the wildest places ever known – the open oceans of the Southern hemisphere. To the modern sensibility, conditions aboard the ships were virtually unimaginable in their deprivation. Victims of the Crown’s class war locked in airless hulls as the wooden ships were at various times pummeled by huge bluewater swells in the freezing Southern Ocean and cast adrift in the stifling heat of the doldrums.

Still this impoverished and exiled convict class of working poor found the strength of body and spirit to relentlessly drink, fornicate and fight their way throughout the hellish passage to the impossibly strange foreign land awaiting. A harbinger of how the foundations of a new nation were to be established.

After a false start in Botany Bay and an improbable encounter with ships of the Crown’s French rival, the First Fleet made its way into the arms of Sydney harbour.

It’s astonishing to imagine how the convicts, administrators and soldiers onboard the ships felt as they experienced the same utopian late summer Australian days we take for granted. Isolated and alone. Distant from relatives and loved ones in a land of unknown dangers and threats.

Of course their first reaction was to get leglessly pissed and lose themselves in pure debauchery.

So it was that the first seed of “ If you can’t rock ‘n’ roll, don’t fucken come!” was sown amongst the soil of the Great South Land.

Here’s some homework for you. Close your eyes and see the British exiles as they went about their business, toiling endlessly towards recreating the Old World society from which they’d just been rejected. Them watching the local inhabitants spend a small portion of their time procuring the essentials for life and the rest engaged in enjoying their lives.

Now you can see the origins of Australian culture. The osmotic cultural fusion of a people with a striven, competitive and analytical bent, amongst a society that valued leisure and being wholly present in time and place.

A beautiful juxtaposition of laid back island life and first world industriousness. A complimentary pairing of holistic engagement with nature and a desire to create a orderly habitat from which a benevolent society can flourish.

This cultural fusion had a tumultuous development over generations. The resulting society is unlike any other in the world. We value hard work and industry whilst simultaneously ready to give ourselves over to hedonism and celebration of natural wonder at a moment’s notice.

Perhaps the ultimate marker of our cultural uniqueness is of The Sickday AKA The Sicky. Waking up, seeing a blue sky, blazing sun and lines of swell stacked to the horizon and deciding that work can go and get fucked then calling the boss/ client and telling them that you’re sick before running out the door to get stuck into the good times. That purely Australian notion of the gleeful shirking of duty in pursuit of leisure. It’s the recognition that we have work to do, but right now there’s a good life to be led outside the confines of productivity, and we are going to grab it with both hands.

The Sicky is emblematic of our twin dedications to work and play. The same philosophy made Australia the eminent surfing superpower of the modern age. Our competitive surfers dominated the contest scene for decades. Our shapers were the vanguard for board innovation. Our surf industry sold the idea of the enviable Australian surf culture and the rest of the world fell in line.

None of which would’ve ever occurred if Australians weren’t living the concept of “Take your fun seriously”. It’s the fruit from that same glorious juxtaposition of cultures. Only Australians could foster the unlikely evolution of a youth generation living on government benefits, in order to surf as hard as possible and inadvertently breed an unmatched wave of highly paid professional surfers. Avoiding work to immerse yourself in the moment and the joys of nature, only to strive harder than those around you and excel at…. leisure!?!?

Australians find no contradiction in this concept at all.

And the benefits flow to the world at large. Australia alone promoted the idea of a life spent chasing waves as a respectable decision. We universally adore our surfing greats who’ve abandoned all other endeavours in order to perfect their cutbacks. Surfers who would probably be considered wastrels in other society’s are feted by our leaders. Whilst the USA was sniggering at surfers as Jeff Spicollis tropes, Australian Prime Ministers were jostling for the reflected glory from our wave riding champions.

A German bank teller who has decided to abandon a demoralising career to pursue a life of fun in the waves has Australia to thank for the respect found in this decision. We made surfing serious fun and it spawned legions of surfers proud to follow their dreams.

May I suggest we all take a moment to appreciate this anniversary of the moment that birthed such an incredible blend of human perspectives. The world of surfing is the ultimate beneficiary of this cultural marriage. We got here thanks to unmatched spiritual dreaming of 50,000 years spliced with unrivalled innovation and initiative , thrown together in a land of unique beauty, opportunity and perfect, perfect waves.

Happy Australia Day.

Now get out there and shred. Those rails ain’t going to bog themselves.

Just needs a Power Balance band on the other wrist. Unstoppable!