Surfing Life

As I sit here and write this, nearly all of Australia’s populated east coast is ablaze. Nearly a million hectares, they’re saying. Already more than what went up in the Amazon fires of 2019, and it’s not even summer yet. My dad left a couple of days

FIGHT THE POWER—TRACING THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF “SURFBOARD DIPLOMACY”. The late ‘60s into the ‘70s was more than the shortboard revolution and hippies on acid. Surfing was politically active, towards the progressive and away from the status q

If you were the technical type and were good at maths, all that stuff that clever people do, you’d be well within your rights to support the case that five surfers remain in contention for the 2019 WSL Men’s World Title. However, if you were the bett

Love the idea or loath it, surfing will be in the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020. 20 men and 20 women draped in their national flags will march with pride representing their nations, as the opening ceremony gets under way in less than seven months from

When competition increases, consumers benefit. That’s the general train of thought anyway. Quality and choice inevitably go up, and we even see prices sometimes come down. So it’s with a unified shout of approval that surfers all across the world com

At 12 years old, I came home from a day of autograph hunting with friends Mitch Parkinson and Jack Freestone, from the 2004 Quiksilver Pro at Snapper Rocks and announced over dinner, my mates wanted to be pro-surfers, but I thought I’d prefer to shap

If I were to say to you: Gold Coast pro surfer/model with 100,000 plus Instagram followers, what image springs to mind? I’m prepared to bet it’s nothing like the reality of Pacha Light, passionate environmental activist, born in an Ecuadorian rainfor

I was on the back of a scooter, leaving one of my mate’s gigs. Going home early because I knew the surf was going to be massive in the morning. I wanted to get up super early and ride back to Uluwatu and beat all the traffic. So, I jumped on the back

Jodie Cooper is lying face down on the ground with her hands tied behind her back and her mouth taped shut, as several masked gunmen stand around her screaming instructions. “Get down, I’m gonna put a bullet in your head! We want all the money and dr

Ash Grunwald has been in and around the surf scene for decades. Not as a comp or freesurfing shredder, but as a lover and participant of the craft we all know and love. Although he’s not a “pro” surfer, as a professional musician—playing predominantl

As the shutters came down on Luke Munro’s world tour career, the reality of what lay ahead of him immediately set in. He’d performed well at the season ending Pipe Masters, claiming an upset victory over Hawaiian tube specialist Shane Dorian in the o

Tahlija: We’d surfed that swell in the Mentawais in 2017, at Kanduis, and we’d come back pumped. We heard there were good banks at Iluka so we went there to camp. We paddled out the first morning, it was a solid six foot with bigger ones, really heav

So my dad’s house survived, for the moment. The potentially deadly wind change arrived, but it wasn’t strong enough to send the fire front down on him. Well over a million hectares were burned. Who knows how much wildlife was killed? Around 150 house