06 | Shooting the Past | The Glide

An arresting photograph has Clare Wright duck-diving into the history of surfing in Australia.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:07Speaker 01

  A pig gets shot and this nearly starts a war. A pastry shop gets trashed, war. A football match turns ugly, also war? Hey there, I'm Mark Fennell. On the No One Saw It Coming podcast, we are taking on history's most absurd conflicts. Four episodes, four wars, and we called it This Stupid War. Search No One Saw It Coming podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  I'm Claire Wright and this is Shooting the Past, where every picture is worth at least a thousand words, if not a whole history.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  All my kids are surfers, my two sons and my daughter. Like most surfers, their lives are consumed by the waves. Chasing waves, predicting waves, dreaming of waves, pictures of waves. So I've seen plenty of photographs like the one I'm looking at now. In the picture, a tall, athletic surfer rides a wave to its frothy conclusion. The surfer's bronze skin is pulled taut across strong biceps and thighs. It glistens in the sun. The look on the surfer's face is one of pure pleasure. But there, the familiarity ends. Take the board itself. It seems uncommonly wide and looks stupidly heavy.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  This peculiarity could be explained by the fact that the photograph was taken in 1915. Yet the most radical departure from everything I think I know about surfing is the identity of the surfer herself. Yes, herself. For this pleasure seeker with the shimmering skin and muscular physique is a woman. This photo has me well confused. It's an intellectual wipeout. All I know is the surfer's name, Isabel Letham. But who is this joyful woman? And what's a nice Federation-era girl like her doing on a wave like this? There's only one way to find out. I'm off to the beach.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  To meet someone who knew Isabel and who's a dead-set surfing legend in her own right.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  So I'm Pam Burridge. We're at North Molymoke Beach in the beautiful south coast of New South Wales. I'm a former professional surfer, world champion in 1990 and a long-time tour participant.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Pam, it's an incredible scene that we're looking out on today. It's early morning, the mist has just started to rise. And can you describe the surf conditions for us this morning? How do you see these?

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've got a waning south swell of about a metre. There's a few hours left of the swell, I think, and then there's just a new east swell going to fill in. Still pretty small, light nor'east wind coming up once this planet warms up a bit where we're sitting. Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  So where did you grow up, Pam?

• 3:07Speaker 03

  Grew up in Clontoff, so across from Balmoral in Sydney. So my beaches were Manly and Freshwater.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Were you a surfing family?

• 3:17Speaker 03

  No, no, it's the weird, you know, I have to believe in a bit of destiny because I'm the youngest of three girls. My father doesn't even swim, let alone surf. But yeah, just exposures to the beach through swimming club, which was at Freshwater Beach. And going to the beach after that, I think, was where I got the taste for the waves and things like that.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  So when did you first grab a board?

• 3:40Speaker 03

  I got a board for my 10th birthday, like a fiberglass board. So yeah, I think I was standing up on everything that floated on a wave prior to that.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  So you were in your first competition in 1977? How old were you then?

• 3:54Speaker 03

  So I was 12, yeah.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  So you must have just progressed amazingly because you were national champion by the time you were 15.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I took to it straight away and that was my main goal in life was to improve my surfing at the expense of everything else. I loved all sport, all stuff. I loved footy, I loved... But you couldn't play soccer, you couldn't play footy. You played netball, didn't like netball. And this individual thing of surfing is like, well, no one's going to stop me, even though the culture was completely against it. And my parents just held their breath and went, okay, we'll drive you and watch you and pick you up and take you home and take you out of that drug den of the surfing of that time, you know? But yeah, it just spoke to me. I was a pretty anxious little kid and just, yeah, it salvaged me straight away and it was something I needed to do.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  And can you describe the pleasure for me then, as a girl, of being a surfer?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  The funny story that I tell about my first couple of years of surfing, I was a raging tomboy, so I didn't... And I looked like a boy and I never spoke because it was the 70s. So I was pretty harsh and so I just kept my head down. I was a little, you know, 10, 11-year-old kid, looked like a boy. And one day, one of the other boys, just a bit... Other boys, one of the boys, just a bit older than me, said, "Hey mate, why don't you get a haircut? Because it's pretty long." And I was like, "Oh, I'm a girl." Paddled away, you know? So yeah, I was completely undercover for quite a few years.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  And so was it the freedom?

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Yes, it's just a natural calling. And some people just get... It happens to them straight away. They catch away and they sense something about that thing of this gliding, this energy. This is the energy, I think, that all of us have those moments where we just... It's just about the glide.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  So did you have a sense that there were women in the past?

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, yeah, I sort of knew that it had been more popular in the 60s and more, maybe more accepted or just more popular, really. And then the numbers, we were like the placeholders. It was like everyone had gone, we were the last ones, just kind of just going through that decade where it was really quite aggressive, you know? And I mean, probably it wasn't everybody, but that was just the general thing. People were protecting their breaks. It was all about aggro and very macho, yeah, indeed. And puberty blues was not fantasy, it was fact, you know? That documented the time.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  The first real resurgence of women surfing in Australia was the formation of the AWSA, Australian Women's Surf Riders Association. So that grew a lot of young girls into good competitors.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  And has the regular presence of women on the pro tour or in the line-up generally changed the culture of male surfing, away from that really macho style of the 70s?

• 6:47Speaker 03

  I think it has. Like usually, once you get a couple of women out in the line-up, the mood will change. It's just like you might accidentally smile at someone, so it was a nice day.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So how do you reckon pro women surfers feel about that sexist depiction of women generally in surfing media, you know, all the tits and arse and...

• 7:08Speaker 03

  I think most of them have embraced a look, a sexy look, to help their cause. I mean, if you follow most of them on Instagram, they will have bikini photos and... But I just sort of think of the 12-year-old, you know, daughter of that age or something. Do I really want her wearing a Brazilian bikini and paddling out with some middle-aged man behind her going, "Whoa!", you know? No, I don't want that. But look, as long as you... They've agreed within themselves that that's all right, then I guess, then yeah, go for it. Because sex sells and... But don't forget they're surfing and how incredible they are at that, you know?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Pam, I might actually turn to the photo that we've got in front of us here. And I like actually kind of holding it up against the surf and imagining Isabel Letham out there at Molymoke.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  But what do you see when you look at this photograph?

• 8:04Speaker 03

  I see her riding a board like eight foot six long and really difficult to ride and she's on a wave. And I'm imagining it's exactly in the middle of Freshwater Beach where I caught my first wave. And I just see the pure joy of her just trying to keep with the flow, just riding that wave, loving it, just feeling it and the skill.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  And when did you first become aware of Isabel?

• 8:27Speaker 03

  The Australian Women's Surf Riders Association started up and they asked Isabel to be a patron. So she came to that initial meeting back in like 79 or how old was she then? So she was born on 1900, yeah?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so she'd been almost 80.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  So she was hailed as a bit of a hero for the younger female surfers?

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Did she come to see you surf?

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, she came to the Australian Estate Titles, yeah, yeah. It was to see everyone surf, yeah, not just me, but yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  And is it true that you named your daughter Isabel?

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, my daughter Isabel, who's nearly 19, yeah, we named her after Isabel.

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  What do you think Isabel would have made of surfing today, particularly for women?

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, she would have had an opinion and she would have been, yeah, telling them to go equal, go better, you know? Yeah, telling them to go and surf those big waves. As she... I visited in her home up there at South Curl Curl one time and she was sitting there and just saying, "Oh, those little waves don't interest me, you know? It's the big stuff that I'm interested in." You know, so she's still minesurfing out that window at Curl Curl, which I would be doing too, that was me.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Well, that's great, Pam. And I know that you are keen to get out in the water yourself.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can see, starting to get...

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  I can see...

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  I'm in the racing stance, on my toes.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  I know, I can feel that. And the mist has completely worn off now. It's now a beautiful sunny day. It looks like this swell's actually picked up a bit or maybe the tides come in. So I think that we better let you go and grab your board and get out in two waves.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  I'm Claire Wright and this is Shooting the Past, where every picture is worth at least a thousand words, if not a whole history.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Now I know something about the thrill of the glide for modern women like Pam Burridge. But I still need to understand what drew a woman into the ocean in 1915, when corsets and high-necked dresses were de rigueur. So I've come to speak to historian Dr Eve Rees at La Trobe University, who is the leading expert on all things Isabel.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  She was born in 1899. Her parents were Scottish, who had immigrated from Scotland before her birth, and she was their only child. And Latham, or Isabel, from a very early age, had a very independent, kind of athletic, quite feisty personality, which she probably inherited from her mother. Her mother was quite an active feminist in Sydney circles in those times, and was a good friend of Millicent Preston Stanley, who became the first woman elected to New South Wales Parliament. Isabel is growing up on Sydney's beaches, and she loves swimming.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  And she develops quite a reputation for what we would now call body surfing, but what was then called surf shooting, which is a great phrase for it.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Oh, so that's where shooting the waves comes from?

• 11:35Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. And then she suddenly was propelled into local celebrity in the summer of 1914, 15. So she's, you know, she's about 15 years old at this time, just a sort of local teenage girl enjoying the beaches, when her life intersects with that of Duke Kahana Moku, who was a champion swimmer and surfer from Hawaii, who'd become quite famous a few years earlier when he won medals and broke world records at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. And so, in the wake of that, he was brought out to Australia for a bit of a kind of demonstration, swimming tour.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  But he was also keen to promote surfing in Australia. So she kind of intersected with him on the beach in Freshwater, which is where she lived, just near Manly. And then in February 1915, the Duke was going to give a surfing demonstration on D Y Beach. And this was a really well-publicised event. There was lots of press there, huge crowds. And to kind of, you know, make the event a bit more sensational, he got Isabel to come along and join him on the surfboard. So they did some tandem surfing together. And then she developed a passion for surfing from this encounter.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  And so this photo would have been taken shortly after that encounter with the Duke.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  So what started as a gimmick turned into a lifelong pursuit?

• 13:10Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. She already, you know, loved swimming, and this was the kind of next logical step.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  So you've said that her mother was a real influence and role model in her life, and that her mother had been involved in the feminist movement at this time. Tell me about that milieu. What was it that women were actively working towards?

• 13:38Speaker 04

  Well, this was a really exciting time for the feminist movement in Australia, because a few years earlier, Australian women, shortly after Federation, had become among the first in the world to have the right to vote. And this was also a moment shortly after Federation, when the Australian nation was very new. Australia was hailed internationally as being a progressive nation. And there was a lot of enthusiasm about what could be done next. And Isabel and her mother were really in the thick of that.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  So was taking to the seas, as Isabel did, as you said, scantily clad, was that seen as being part of a broader movement of women breaking boundaries and seeking new horizons?

• 14:23Speaker 04

  Certainly, certainly. I mean, you know, now women had won the vote in Australia. They really wanted to break through into other terrains, which had been dominated by men, including the professions, but also, you know, sports and different forms of leisure activities. And, you know, this is a time when we start to see the emergence of the figure that's known as the modern woman or the modern girl. You know, later is known as the flapper in the 1920s. And a huge way in which those kind of women asserted their modernity, their independence, their freedom, was through new forms of kind of bodily movement and display. So women's fashion was changing.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Women are starting to smoke cigarettes at this time as an assertion of their modernity and independence. Women are starting to drive motor cars. Women are starting to play tennis. And so swimming and surfing is very bound up in this, you know, there's new horizons that are opening up for women in the early 20th century.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  So it sounds like mobility was intimately tied with modernity.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Certainly. Mobility was certainly very tied up with Isabel's modernity, because the next big step on her life, of course, after this, is that she goes overseas to the United States.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Does she come back to Australia?

• 15:47Speaker 04

  Yes. In rather unfortunate circumstances, she took out US citizenship in 1925, and so was planning to stay on and was working as a swimming teacher in San Francisco and was sort of putting down roots. But then, all of a sudden, she has this kind of calamitous accident in 1929. She's walking home from work one day. She slips on some grease and falls into a manhole in the street and has a really serious back injury. So she decides to return to Australia while she's recuperating from this injury and rest up with her mother. Her father had already passed away.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  But initially, she sort of plans to return to the United States when she gets better. But that just never ends up happening. There's economic hard times. It's hard for her to afford to go back to the States. Then her mother's unwell. So it just never quite eventuates. I mean, she lives a fine life in Sydney. She's quite a local, sort of swimming and surfing identity. But I think she always has a sense of what if? What if she'd stayed in America and continued her exciting life as a career woman over there? What could have happened?

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Were there any specific structural obstacles to Isabel participating in surfing? Or were there purely ideological ones around social and sexual norms?

• 17:13Speaker 04

  There were some structural obstacles, obstacles to her full acceptance in the surf culture. So a good example of this is when she's in the United States, she notes the lack of surf lifesaving on Californian beaches, the kind of surf lifesaving that was well-established in Australia by that time. So she develops a scheme to export Australian-style surf lifesaving to California. And some of her colleagues in California are really enthusiastic about this idea. But the problem comes when she reaches out to the Australian surf lifesaving community.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  And because she's a woman, they won't allow her to be formally affiliated with the movement. You know, as the president of the Australian Surf Lifesaving Association said, "We don't teach women the work." So because she had no formal affiliation with the movement, even though she was obviously a very competent swimmer and surfer and international celebrity, she, you know, couldn't realise her plan to export Australian surf lifesaving, and it all came to naught.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  So I'm assuming then that she couldn't, say, have membership of something like the Manly Surf Lifesaving Club?

• 18:34Speaker 04

  No, she certainly could not.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  So Isabel Latham was an entrepreneur as well as an athlete. I'm starting to grasp the kind of drive that propelled her to take all sorts of risks. But what still intrigues me about the photo is that it was taken in the same year as the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli. Yet this image is the antithesis of the blood, sacrifice and loss that we associate with the wartime era.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  You know, so often, when we think of the iconic Australian of the early 20th century, we think of the Anzac soldier. And that was certainly important at the time, even for Australia's self-image. But it was only one idea, and it's a very male image. So I think having an image like Isabel as a, you know, bold, young woman, who was a huge celebrity in her own right, is really important, because it gives us a female icon of that era. I think another way we can read this photo and her story in relation to the Anzac legend and the experience of World War One is to see Isabel's, you know, feminist strides,

• 19:48Speaker 04

  her bold taking up of space, and the kind of broader moment that represents as a kind of last hurrah for a progressive Australia that existed in that kind of, you know, 15 years or so between Federation, beginning of World War One, before the militarism and the death and the grief of World War One takes hold.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  I'm Claire Wright and you're with Shooting the Past, where today I'm exploring a surfing photograph that, as it turns out, has so much to tell us about female mobility. But now I want to find out more about surfing culture in Australia and the unwritten rules that both Isabel Latham and Pam Burridge had to negotiate at either end of the 20th century.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  My name's Jock Sarong. I'm a fiction writer mostly. I also write feature articles in the surfing media. And I suppose, being a lifelong surfer, I have a lot of interest in surfing history in Australia.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  So tell me about surfing as a culture then. And can you delineate the shifts in surfing culture over the generations, say, pre-1970s, 1970s and now?

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, there was a period in which surfers were complete outliers in the early days. Pre-1970s, you had these pioneers going out from the suburbs in Australia. And that applied on Phillip Island. It applied on various parts of the New South Wales coast. By the 1970s, surfing in Australia was becoming an expression of the counterculture, which is kind of a stereotypical view that people have, I think, of surfing, that these were bearded hippies hiding in combi vans in the scrub. But what was different probably for Australians is that we were great technical innovators in surfing. We brought the size of surfboards down significantly from those giant planks of the old days down to very small performance boards. It was an Australian, Simon Anderson,

• 21:43Speaker 05

  who came up with the idea of a three-finned surfboard, which is now the accepted design. So there was both an element of counterculture and an element of really interesting innovation going on in the 70s. By the 80s and 90s, Australians were really caught up in surfing as performance and as an athletic endeavour. There was a lot of colour going on, there was a lot of dyed hair. It became a scene. And now, I think, we've reached a point where surfing has reached its tentacles into so many different parts of Australian society that surfing is almost an aspect of people's ordinary health or fitness. It's become ubiquitous.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  If it's not an outlier's pursuit, explain some of those ideas of tribalism within surfing.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  For a surfer of my generation, we were brought up with the idea that secrecy was a legitimate thing, that if you knew about a particular wave, you had a responsibility to stay quiet about it and that people who were violently inclined would feel perfectly entitled to mete out violence in order to protect that place. The generations that are coming up through surfing now, I think, two significant influences have been at play. One is that surfing is much more accepted as a female pursuit and women won't engage in that way with their surfing. And the other is that the internet has revered to anybody with a computer exactly where that wave is. So the tribalism is dying away. And there's no doubt at all in my mind

• 23:17Speaker 05

  that when you paddle out the most accommodating and polite and friendly people in the line-up are the women and the young kids. And that's got to be a good thing for all of us.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  And so has women on the pro scene, as well as in recreational surfing, changed surfing culture?

• 23:35Speaker 05

  Yes, surfing culture took a long time to accommodate the rise of women, I think, because the way that it was initially processed, and Pauline Menzer is the great example of this, was that women with Hollywood looks were commercially viable and therefore had the sponsorship to travel to enough events to rack up the points to become the champions. There was this kind of momentum that had a false premise at its very base. Pauline Menzer really upended that by doing everything off her own bat. And she fought arthritis, she fought a complete lack of sponsorship, and she got her way all the way to a world title in 93. And from then on, I think, the surfing industry started

• 24:20Speaker 05

  to very, very slowly take itself more seriously along the lines of, these women are athletes and need to be respected that way and they need to be supported in getting to events in other countries. But that has been a long time coming.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Jock, is Isabel Latham considered a trailblazer or a legend in surfing culture generally? Would most surfers know of her? Or is she really more of a role model to female surfers?

• 24:46Speaker 05

  Most Australian surfers would know of her, but what they might know is more the mythology than the facts. There was a widespread view for many years that she was the first Australian surfer. There's some evidence that's emerged now, I think, that there was Isma Amor before her, also female, and there was a bloke called Tommy Walker. So she may not have been the first surfer, but I think most Australian surfers would have an understanding that she is this formative figure in our history. And it's interesting that other surfing nations don't have a significant early female pioneer of the sport.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  So does that say something about Australian surfing or Australian women?

• 25:29Speaker 05

  It's a good question. I think it says something about Australian women. There's such a deep gulf between the disappearance of Isabel from the public eye somewhere around 1918 and the emergence of someone like Pam Burridge in the mid 70s, that the only real signpost about women in surfing that you have between those two points is probably Cathy Lett writing Puberty Blues, which is a dreadful depiction of gender relations in surfing. So her influence somehow withstood that enormous gulf across the decades. But we didn't start from a very good point in modern history.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Jock, as a surfer and as a surfing journalist and maybe even as a novelist, what do you see when you look at this photograph?

• 26:15Speaker 05

  The thing that I see immediately is Isabel's face, that she's got her eyes down on the nose of the board, but she looks completely happy. It's such an unguarded expression. Second thing is, I can see that the board is extremely wide and thick. That would be an enormously heavy board. So Isabel, at this stage, might have been 15 and to have got that thing down to the beach and to have paddled it out would have been quite a feat in its own right, before you even talk about the surfing.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  She's at freshwater, she's a natural footer.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  As you can see, she's powerfully built. She was a very, very accomplished swimmer. And she's riding right up on the nose, which would suggest that's probably the end of the wave and Isabel's right up at the end of her ride. Yeah, I just, I love the simple joy in that image, that exactly what's going through her mind at that point is exactly what could go through a kid's mind at Wollamai or Bondi or anywhere you like in the country. And that's the timelessness of it.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  As I've been brought up to stand on my own two feet at a very early age and take responsibility. I've been brought up in a good scotch and discipline, but I was quite determined I was going to ride a surfboard and how I was going to do it. My father told me not to. I'll be the change if I'm in mainly a beautiful board. I had a rental, so it was all right after that.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Isabel Latham herself, recorded in 1986. Isabel died in 1995, at the age of 95. Her ashes were scattered by surfers off Freshwater Beach, where this spectacular photograph was taken. My thanks to guests Pam Burridge, Dr Eve Rees and Jock Sarong.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  And don't forget that to view the photograph from today's episode, you can head over to ABC Listen. Shooting the Past is an ABC Radio National production. Until next time, go on, make history.

• 28:54Speaker 00

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