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Book Review: Capital Surfers

Ian Ingram’s evocative photo-memoir of surfing Australia’s east coast in the sixties.

Nostalgia is a valuable commodity in surfing these days. With such rapid changes happening in board and wave technology, in the number of people taking to the water, in the way we ride and relive waves, the portrayal of a simpler time can capture our imaginations and provide a visceral form of escape for those of us dissatisfied with the current overloaded state of things.

Capital-Surfers-Cover

Ian Ingram’s recently released memoir Capital Surfers fits this category with its simple and surprisingly innocent depiction of a group of Canberra-based surfers coming of age in the sixties as they surf up and down Australia’s east coast. Filled with a multitude of colour and black & white photos and accompanied throughout by Ian’s fond anecdotes of his crew’s adventures, the book portrays the casual, carefree experiences of a group of affable punters who were lucky enough to come to surfing at a time that is increasingly being viewed as a golden era in our sport.

Capital-Surfers1

Charlie Bettini surfs Kianga Point on one of the largest swells we experienced along the coast.

Starting in the small south coast fishing village of Narooma in the fifties, it tracks Ian, his brother and their friends’ burgeoning relationship with the ocean as they spend long holidays on the coast with their families. From here the group is drawn to surfing and thus take to the waves, first at the beaches around Narooma and then, as the bug bites harder, their group expands and cars provide them with a new level of freedom, up to famous breaks such as Crescent Head, The Pass, Greenmount and Noosa, where they camp for weeks at a time and immerse themselves in the joys of riding waves. Throughout it all Ian’s photographs provide a constant stream of images depicting their comings and goings, their youthful revelry, and the beautifully uncrowded coastline that existed before surfing became such a widely appreciated phenomenon.

Capital-Surfers2

Warming up in the shelter of the Dalmeny cliff – Easter 1963

While in terms of language the book never reaches for the deep soul-searching high literature of William Finnegan’s Pulitzer-winning Barbarian Days, there is a charm in Ian’s simple, joyful accounts as he hops from one memory to another in a casual nostalgic wander. Somewhat surprising is the lack of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll present in a book based in an era so synonymous with such things, but whether through a decision on the author’s behalf to withhold these aspects or simply because the participants weren’t really that way inclined, it does help to lend an aura of innocence that compliments the book’s main objective of following a group of surfers so taken with the simple act of riding waves. Included as well are several of Ian’s articles originally published in Surfing World and Surf International in the late sixties, which offer a more immediate glimpse back into the wormhole of those frontier years.

With its easy layout and its cohesive form of written and visual storytelling, Capital Surfers provides an enjoyable, unpretentious read that concerns itself with a simple yet eternally satisfying subject among all surfers—the joy of chasing and riding waves. You can find it in bookstores or order it direct from Ian at [email protected]

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