Peter Drouyn reflects on a life of challenges and controversies
From his sex change (and its eventual reversal) to failed business ideas and clashes with high-profile rivals, former surfing sensation Peter Drouyn reflects on a life surrounded by controversy
In a humble Housing Commission duplex in the suburban backblocks of the northern Gold Coast – a few kilometres inland from where he once carved up the waves – sits surfing’s tortured genius Peter Drouyn. The last time Drouyn was interviewed, he was a she: Westerly Windina, his transgender alter-ego. Named after the offshore wind prized by east coast surfers for its wave-grooming qualities, Westerly was the woman Drouyn was convinced he was always meant to be; so much so he underwent a surgical sex change in Thailand nearly five years ago.
But Westerly is gone now, “annihilated” (in spirit, though not in body). Drouyn – the former Australian champion, one-time Cleo centrefold, actor, engineer, lawyer, pioneer of “man-on-man” professional surfing, the innovator who says he dreamt up manmade waves and introduced surfing to China – is back. And he’s just picked a fight with surfing superstar Kelly Slater.
Drouyn was born in Brisbane in June 1949. His parents, Gwendolyn and Victor, ran His & Hers, the first clothing store in Surfers Paradise. In 1957, Drouyn and his older brother Tony attended the local St Vincent’s Catholic primary school.
“The place [Surfers Paradise] was just a tiny little village,” he says. “The Coast back then was really a special place. We only got a handful of tourists up from Sydney or Melbourne and they couldn’t believe it. It was like another world, because in those days no one travelled north to Queensland. You might as well have been going to Timbuktu. Then, gradually, people heard about our winters, the beautiful offshore westerly winds, glittering waves and blue skies.”
Into this nirvana came a southern holiday-maker who would introduce Drouyn to the wonder of surfing. It was about 1958. Two years earlier, a group of Californian lifeguards had blown minds when they brought the first newfangled malibu surfboards to Australia on a tour to coincide with the Melbourne Olympics. As soon as the Americans showed what could be done on a wave with the lightweight, highly manoeuvrable balsa boards – the tricks, the way you could trim them across the peeling face instead of riding the whitewater straight towards the shore – a revolution was born.
“So, it was the summer of ’58 and this guy from Sydney shows up on the beach one day with one of these new malibus,” Drouyn says. “He went out and he rode across the wave. Across the wave? I couldn’t believe it. [I thought to myself] ‘I’ve got to do this’. So I asked him for a lend of the board and didn’t bring it in for four hours. Man, I couldn’t believe the rush. The flow, the velocity the wave sent you on with this thing under your feet. It was just so natural. It really got me in. Within a few days, I was just twisting it around [on the waves], doing things.”
Drouyn began entering contests and won the 1965 Queensland junior title. The victory qualified him for the Australian championships at Manly, where the boy to beat was 15-year-old Sydney rising star Kevin “The Head” Brennan. Drouyn was very much the underdog, and he styled himself as a surfing Muhammad Ali, the boxer, then known as Cassius Clay. The night before the competition, Drouyn, then 15, was beaten up by a gang of local thugs. “They threw me on a bunch of bricks, cut my head, split it open,” he says. “I felt the blood running down my face. I was totally in fear of losing my life.” He ended up at Manly Hospital, where doctors stitched him up but told him there was no way he was going to be surfing. His father flew down from Queensland the next morning to visit him in hospital.
“Oh man, I was just sobbing convulsively,” Drouyn says. “I said, ‘Dad, I want to go in the contest, they’re saying I can’t – this means too much to me, Dad, this means everything’.” His father took him on the rounds of doctors, until they found one who patched him up with a new spray-on plastic bandage so he could compete.
“Luckily, the surf was small and I kept my head above water,” Drouyn says. “I beat Brennan in the semi and then the final. When the results came, I had vertigo – I just saw purple haze. I was just about to faint. I was very shy. It was always eyes down. The more people looked at me, the more my eyes went down. It was a bit of James Dean coming out there, I guess.”
It was soon after this Drouyn’s enmity with Nat Young began. It was, as he sees it, the beginning of an anti-Drouyn establishment – the start of a 50-year conspiracy by surfing’s powerbrokers to cut him down, to deny him his rightful place in the sport’s history.
“There I was, the Australian junior champion with a new power style of surfing,” he says. “I was sort of walking on water. Then I was at Byron Bay about two months later and Nat was there. He was riding a big 11-footer [3.35m] and I was on my little 8’11” [2.72m] and was throwing it around. Nat asked if he could have a go on it and didn’t come in for hours. He came up to my place [on the Gold Coast] and stayed. We went surfing every day at Burleigh and Currumbin and played ping-pong and cards.”
Four or five months later, Young and fellow luminaries Bob McTavish, George Greenough and Wayne Lynch were featured in a Surfing World magazine spread, shot at then-virgin Noosa, documenting the “new era” of power surfing. “I was shattered,” Drouyn says, bitterly. “[I thought] ‘you absolute traitors, you horrible people’. I’d been power-surfing since I was 11 or 12. It’s like a band influencing another band. Nat and the rest of them just took it up and claimed it and they made money, money, money.”
After winning the Australian junior championship again in 1966, Drouyn finished second to Young in the ’67 and ’69 national open titles, before becoming the first Queenslander to claim the trophy in 1970. The same year, he placed third in the world championships and achieved major placings in events in Hawaii, including victory in the prestigious Makaha International. He was second in the famous annual Bells Beach contest in 1971, 1974 and 1977, finishing that year ranked sixth in the world.
Before long, he was using his vast ocean knowledge and civil engineering studies to design a wave machine dubbed “The Drouyn Wave Generator”, which he patented in 1979. He envisioned surfing events being held in “wave stadiums”, complete with laser-beam light shows and performing dolphins. “Penniless”, Drouyn’s patent eventually lapsed without his dream becoming reality. In 2006, at a Stubbies Classic reunion, he claims he dusted off his wave stadium idea and presented it to an audience that included 11-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater.
In 2015, on an inland California property, Slater and business partner Adam Fincham, an aerospace engineer, unveiled the most perfect artificial wave the world has seen. With an eye on the future, the World Surf League recently bought a majority stake in the Kelly Slater Wave Pool Co.
For Drouyn, it was deja vu. Another shattering wipe-out. In a lengthy diatribe in iconic surf magazine Tracks in March, he accused Slater of stealing his Wave Generator concept. Drouyn has since apologised to Slater, conceding that their concepts, while similar, are not the same – but have still caused him “enormous sadness”.
Drouyn has tried his hand at many vocations throughout his colourful life. He’s made surfboards, owned surf shops, driven cabs, sold life insurance door-to-door and sanded furniture. He was a ruggedly handsome model who appeared as a nude centrefold in women’s magazine Cleo in November 1974, and alongside Elle Macpherson in one of her first commercials for diet drink TAB. He studied acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, where his classmates included John Jarratt, of Wolf Creek fame.
Despite dropping out of school at 14 to chase his surfing dream, he earned degrees in engineering, Asian studies and law. After
completing his Modern Asian Studies degree at Griffith University in Brisbane in the mid ’80s, he was invited by the Chinese Government to bring surfing to China in 1985. But all that time, beneath the surface, the super-fit surfer was struggling.
Westerly Windina sashayed on to the scene in all her Marilyn Monroe-esque glory several years ago, to the shock of the surfing community. But she’d been decades in the making, Drouyn says, from age 12, when he suffered panic attacks and crippling shyness.
He started dressing as a woman and wearing make-up in the early 2000s, before taking female hormones. Windina came out on national television on Today Tonight in 2008 and eventually underwent gender transformation surgery in December 2012.
“I went through stages where I just had to do that, my happiness depended on it,” Drouyn says. “[Becoming] Westerly just made me the happiest person and got rid of all my phobias, all my shyness, all of those horrible early things. [As Westerly] I could focus better, concentrate better, use all that education and bring it all to the surface. She gave that to me.”
Drouyn was accompanied to Thailand by a US film crew, headed by former pro surfer Jamie Brisick, which was making a documentary called Westerly: A Man, A Woman, An Enigma. “It was just bang, it was a supernova – it just kicked in one night and suddenly, Peter went [and] Westerly was there,” Drouyn says in a trailer for the yet-to-be-released documentary.
Drouyn had seen Monroe in The River of No Return on a family movie night at Southport’s Pier Theatre in 1956, and it planted something in his subconscious. “Peter’s existence became Marilyn’s resurrected in Westerly, inclusive of [Monroe’s] personality, voice, demeanour, body motion and the performing artist Peter so wanted to be,” he says. “The torture was wiped out of me in an instant after decades of struggle.”
At the Thai hospital, Drouyn reneged on the surgery five times before finally going through with it. He reveals he even asked a young female nurse on a date to ensure he was making the right decision. She told him she had a boyfriend and Drouyn’s mind was made up. The next day, he put on a red dress and high heels in his hotel room, ordered a cab and headed to the hospital. “I can’t go home without having the operation,” Drouyn told himself. “I wanted to be a fully fledged woman; it’s the only way I can continue this freedom of mine.”
A sad, disillusioned Windina left and Drouyn returned about six months ago. Asked why he let her go, Drouyn laments her unfulfilled artistic ambitions. She’d written and presented a musical to the Gold Coast Arts Centre but it was rejected. So, too, her pitch for a stand-up comedy set. “The Arts Centre people said, ‘Nah, we don’t like you – you make too many waves’,” he says. “Westerly and her artistic ambitions were gradually annihilated in this dry, creative desert called the Gold Coast. It became depressing and she couldn’t afford the [female] maintenance.”
Drouyn says the money he received from the Westerly documentary went to throat surgery to repair his vocal chords, which were severely damaged during the sex change operation. “Then there was my poor son [Zac, 27, from a brief marriage to a South African woman in 1989], who could see I was having troubles,” he says. “He knew somewhere in Westerly was his dad. To help him, I thought, ‘We’ll go back to Peter and see if the Westerly inspiration is still in me’. And yes, it is. I’ve still got the upfront [personality], I don’t have the whole torturous shyness thing. It’s OK to go back to Peter. Right, I don’t have the genitals. Maybe I’ll get them back one day, if miracles happen and I have enough money. Then again, relationships. I’m over them. I want my son to have a relationship, to have a family.”
In his sparsely furnished lounge room, a misty-eyed Drouyn pores over old newspaper clippings of his exploits, black-andwhite surfing photos and drawings of his ill-fated Wave Generator. “Bastards!” He slams shut an old coastal engineering textbook, cursing Slater and Fincham. “It’s a complete rip-off, it’s bulls---.”
But at 67, Drouyn’s dreams aren’t yet dashed. He talks of setting up a company called Wave Stadiums Australia and floating it on the stock exchange, “so Australians can get a piece of the action”. He has written an adventure/thriller screenplay that he is pitching to international film producers. Later, he texts me a decades-old photo of himself performing a spectacular 360-degree upsidedown loop turn.
“The surfing by The Kid was ridiculous,” he says, referring to himself in the third person. “No wonder he was misunderstood … he was light years ahead of his time.”