SEA SISTERS
Queenslander Lara Einzig took up surfing as a form of healing and was then inspired to write a book celebrating the world’s female surfers
The rituals of summer. The car pack. Esky in the boot, boards on the roof, and arguments in the back seat all the way up – or down – the coast. The beach house arrival, the bagsing of rooms and unpacking of togs, the race to the beach, and the first glimpse of the white frills breaking on sand. Mornings spent beneath the sun, afternoons in retreat from it; board games, books and lazy siestas. Night-time games of hide and seek in the dunes, and sky blue dreams on sandy sheets.
For many Australians, the annual beach holiday looks remarkably the same the nation over and, for Lara Einzig, the imprint of her family’s Queensland summers is etched deep.
For Einzig, 44, latterly of Venice, California, but originally from Mackay, Queensland, the beach is where her strongest childhood memories lie.
It is also (as it is for so many of us) a place of healing; the ocean where we head in times of grief, to walk beside the sea in search of solace.
So when Einzig, author of Women Making Waves, a celebration of women’s surfing, lost her younger sister Julia to mental illness, she headed to the place where all her best memories of her sister could be found.
“We grew up (Einzig, her sisters Anna, now 49, and Julia, who was 32, and parents Jeff and Judy Kuhnemann) in a small beach community about 20 minutes out of Mackay called Bucasia,” Einzig says from her Californian home.
“There was a short path from our house to the beach, it was pretty flat, no surf at all, and we had to wear bright stinger suits, but it still had that beach feel, that beach vibe, and it was there that our collective love of the ocean was fostered.”
When Einzig was 14, the family moved to Brisbane and spent their summers on the Sunshine Coast, “all the kids piled on to mattresses, all the cousins running amok in the dunes”.
“My grandparents had a beach house in Caloundra, and later my dad (then in real estate) built a house at Warana Beach. When we stayed with our grandparents, they’d take their cars out of the garage and we’d all sleep on its floor. There were kids everywhere,” Einzig chuckles, “it was wonderful.
“We’d wake up just frothing to get into the surf, and our parents’ rule was ‘between 12 and 3, under a tree’, but then we’d head straight out into the waves again.”
It was, she says, an idyllic Australian childhood, but while all the boys in the group surfed, it never really occurred to Einzig or her sisters, or any of her female cousins at the time, that they should, or even could.
It would be years later that Einzig would tuck her own surfboard under her arm and take her place in the line up. It would be later still that she would write a book in homage to all the women in all the line-ups globally.
Women Making Waves is also dedicated to Julia, the reason, Einzig says, she learnt to surf, and who is still by her side in the waves.
“When I was growing up, we just didn’t see women surfers, except for the professionals like Pam Burridge or Layne Beachley,” Einzig says.
“When I finished school (at Brisbane’s Stuartholme), I did a business and marketing degree at QUT (Queensland University of Technology), packed up my car and moved to Sydney, and then in my early 20s, like a lot of other young Aussies, I headed to London.”
Then working in fashion marketing, Einzig met her now husband Dan, and father to their three children Raphael, 12, and twins Flynn and Louis, 9. When the twins were just 18 months old, the family moved to Santa Monica in the US, and it was there that Einzig heard that her beloved youngest sister had taken her life at 32 years old.
“Julia was the most beautiful soul, the most beautiful person inside and out, but she suffered terribly from mental illness from about the age of 13,” Einzig says quietly. “She tried so hard and my parents never stopped trying, but her mental ill health was so severe, it was just terrible for her. She had multiple problems, and had multiple treatments, medication, but we lost her – I feel like we lost her from a very young age.”
With her husband regularly commuting to London, and her family in Australia, Einzig says she felt adrift in her grief, away from her people, “with no village to turn to”. And so, she went down to the sea.
“When Julia died, I just felt this very strong pull to the ocean, and I think part of that was because that’s where our strongest childhood connections were made, where Julia was part of the gang running around, and where I remember her being happy and free.”
At 37 years old, with three children under five, a grieving Einzig bought a wetsuit, found a surf coach and headed for the waves.
“The obsession was immediate, it just got into my bones. After my first surf lesson, I fell hard. I went out after preschool drop off, on weekends, whenever I could, no matter the conditions, it was so hard, but so exhilarating – and with three boys, it was also the only place I got to be alone,” she laughs.
At Santa Monica’s famous Bay Street break, Einzig, who “mostly was just trying to survive out there and not hurt anybody else”, was welcomed by a community of older surfers in their 60s and 70s who gave her surfing tips and schooled her in salty banter. As Einzig improved, she began to travel further in her search for waves, and while the Bay Street line up was mostly men, her travels took her to breaks where women were carving it up.
“I started seeing women on longboards, so elegant and graceful; I started seeing communities of women in their 30s and 40s, and this wasn’t something I was seeing at all in all the books I had on surfing, or in any of the movies I watched. That was all men ripping up these massive waves, but I saw these women out there being fierce and feminine, and it was astounding to me. But this experience of surfing I was seeing was not being represented. I thought “why isn’t there a beautiful coffee-table book on these lovely elegant women?” So Einzig did what women have always done when something is required – she did it herself.
We’d wake up just frothing to get into the surf, and our parents’ rule was ‘between 12 and 3, under a tree’, but then we’d head straight out into the waves again
Australia. Japan. The United States. The United Kingdom. France. The Philippines. Portugal. From New York to Cornwall, from Biarritz to Byron Bay, Einzig’s book is filled with women surfers who she groups in chapters called The Groundbreakers, The Radical Environmentalists, The Champions, The Culture Shapers and The Devoted. The youngest is 13 (Coolangatta’s Sierra Kerr), the oldest is in her 70s (Joyce Hoffman, San Juan Capistrano, US), and all of them have a story to tell.
“When I began, I was diving deep into the culture of female surfers, this global network of them, this amazing worldwide community. I found them through following them on Instagram, or making connections through people who knew them,” Einzig says.
“There were so many wonderful women, it was really hard to narrow them down, so I was looking for women with fascinating life stories, women who were driven by social impact, women who wanted to lift up others. Then I had to track them down by asking 500 favours, sliding into people’s DMs (direct messages). It
was just hours and hours of research, but I had a strong desire to do it. I found all these wonderful women and was offered a book deal in 2020, and then the world blew up with Covid.”
The pandemic meant some hasty changes to Einzig’s ambitious, global interviewing and shooting schedule as borders closed and quarantine rules set in. “In the end, I had nine female photographers all over the world – I was determined they had to be female – but I did manage to get to Australia and tell the story of five wonderful surfers there.”
Australia’s Gilmore sisters – world champion Stephanie and her older sister Whitney – are featured in the book, along with the remarkable story of their 2019 campaign for equal pay for men and women competing in the World Surfing League (WSL).
“I found one of the best things about Stephanie’s story was actually her older sister Whitney’s story, because Whitney has been Steph’s manager since Whitney was 22, and she is just fierce and instinctive about promoting and protecting Stephanie’s brand. She had to negotiate fairer and better contracts for her sister in what was then a very male-dominated culture. She was in there saying to these men who were offering less ‘no, absolutely not, you pay her what she’s worth, this is a four-time world titleholder’. I just loved their relationship.”
Then there’s Rockaway Beach’s Natalie J. Greenhill, a trauma surgeon and woman of colour, who paddles out to the man-made Rockaway break in Queens after pulling allnighters at a New York hospital.
“She is such a remarkable woman,” Einzig says. “She considers the ocean her church, the place she goes to find peace after the very real traumas of her job. She is part of a collective that raises funds and mentors local kids to get into surfing, to buy them wetsuits and boards. She has a real understanding of how surfing can help, and heal.”
So, too, does Einzig, who began surfing as part of a quest to connect with her sister, who she says she speaks to every time she hits the waves. “I talk to Julia each time I’m in the ocean, and I do feel her with me. When I’m on the board, we have a little chat and I ask her to help me out on the wave front,” Einzig says.
In a book filled with remarkable women, its opening dedication is to another one.
“For Julia”, it reads, “send one for me, Jules. Just for me.”