Surf writer drops in on arts festival Phil Jarratt has been called ‘‘Australia’s best gonzo sportswriter’’. He recalls wild rides, wilder times and the endless summer of the 60s, writes
Grant Smithies.
The voice has a broad Aussie twang and is surprisingly calm, given that he’s in a hotel room in Bali and a massive volcano is threatening to blow its lid just up the road.
His body, I imagine, is tanned, leathery, as wrinkly and tough as a rhino’s hide, and lightly crusted with salt.
Phil Jarratt likes waves. I mean… really likes them.
Now 66, the Australian sportswriter has made a career pondering that alternately dangerous and benign watery mass that sloshes off every coastline, full of symbolism and strange critters, its edge rearing up as it hits the shallows in such a way that an adventurous soul can stand on a shapely lump of fibreglass and ride it to shore.
Jarratt is obsessed. He has ridden waves, written about them, edited magazines about them, made documentaries, set up surf championships.
He has blathered away on camera as a TV surfing commentator, and been the European marketing chief of an international surf-wear brand.
He has interviewed famous surfers while bobbing in the briny, and roared around surf resorts on drug-addled benders with the likes of actor Bill Murray.
Between long periods riding killer reef breaks in Hawaii, Indonesia, Australia, the south of France, he bashes out columns, features and ‘‘around 36 or 37 books so far, I think’’.
And he’s heading to Tauranga Arts Festival, to talk about his excellently named new book, Life of Brine: A Surfer’s Journey.
‘‘You know, I thought only old buggers would get that title,’’ he says, his vowels squashed as flat as a careless roo on the Great Northern Highway. ‘‘But it turns out a lot of young people know about Monty Python, too.’’
Will it be young people who queue up to hear him speak in Tauranga? A few, perhaps, but I imagine a crowd more densely packed with older surfers and writers, for Jarratt is bloody good at both.
While on dry land, he has written for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Bulletin, and worked as editor for Australian Playboy and Penthouse, Aussie surfing bible Tracks and Insight Travel Guides.
His books are masterful, funny, clear-eyed and compassionate, with surfing often merely the on-ramp to surprising back-stories where surfers have contemplated the Bali bombings, or fought for social justice in Rwanda or East Timor.
Along the way, Jarratt has won numerous writing awards and was declared by one reviewer ‘‘Australia’s best gonzo sportswriter’’.
Jarratt has, he says, spent most of his working life trying to work out whether to be a surfer or a writer, and then thought – bugger it, I’ll do both.
‘‘About half of my books have been concerned with some aspect of the surfing experience, but I’m probably better at writing about all the stuff around surf culture than I am writing about the actual riding of a wave. Other blokes do that better than me. But I’m good at applying my sense of humour to the kinds of things that happen to surfers, and they’re a pretty wild bunch. You sound like you’re a surfer yourself, right?’’
Wrong. I’m too much of a wimp. Who wants to risk drowning while getting pounded into sharp rocks by huge breakers? And you wouldn’t catch me out the back of the waves astride a strip of fibreglass, dangling my tasty calves into the drink. I have no ambition to become a passing snack for a Great White.
‘‘You know, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of encounters I’ve had with sharks in nearly 60 years of surfing. I’ve met sharks out there three or four times, and it wasn’t life-threatening. I just paddled to the beach and got out.’’ Yes, well – you would, wouldn’t you? ‘‘Yeah, but my point is surfing is nowhere near as dangerous as nonsurfers think it is. There’s a lot of things I worry about far more than a shark attack. It’s definitely something you think about occasionally when your legs are dangling in the sea on an overcast sort of day, but I think something else will get me way before a shark does.’’
He could be right. By his own admission, Jarratt has had a pretty wild time over the years. Some of his more printable escapades appear in Life of Brine.
In an effort to sell books, he admits there’s some ‘‘shameless namedropping’’ in its pages. He details various beach-side adventures alongside both global surf stars (ahoy there, Kelly Slater, Shane Dorian, Gerry Lopez, Rory Russell…) and assorted celebs, among them Playboy model/ Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson, musicians Jack Johnson, Dan Hicks and Grace Slick, and heroically deadpan comedian Bill Murray.
‘‘I started out being a little bit coy about the name-dropping, but another writer told me: ‘Hey, you only get one shot at a memoir, so put ‘em all in!’. Bill Murray wasn’t quite famous yet when I met him in Sydney in the 80s. He was on Saturday Night Live but not yet a Ghostbuster, and he’d just finished making a movie called Where the Buffalo Roam in which he played the guru of gonzo, Dr Hunter S Thompson. Thompson had got my phone number through a mutual friend and told Murray to look me up to, ah… ‘get connected’. Being a