SURFING began in the Pacific Ocean with the Hawaiians and other Islanders.
Aussies came to dominate the sport in its early professional years.
The biggest rideable waves in the world pour out of the Atlantic Ocean toward the now famous headland of Portugal's Nazare.
But if there's one nation that is head and shoulders above any other in terms of surf, it's the Indonesian archipelago, with a virtually countless spread of perfectly formed reef breaks stretched along 5000 kilometres of coast from Timor Leste at the Australian end to Aceh at the western tip of Sumatra.
The waves continue beyond there, into the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, but they're ruled from India.
It's a part of the planet characterised by tropical heat, warm water and a weather system that sends offshore winds over ruler-edged lines of swell generated by storms thousands of kilometres south, in the Roaring Forties.
It's a true surfers paradise, and while surf travel is a central part of the global tourism industry nowadays, it's a relatively new development in the greater scheme of things.
The first generation of surfers who discovered Uluwatu and the other waves of Bali's Bukit peninsula, and then followed whispers of other, even better waves, farther afield, have reached that reflective time in life, when old photos, and retold stories, can carry mythical status.
The discovery of Grajagan or G-Land, tucked inside a fishhook shaped bay inside the Alas Purwo National Park on the very eastern tip of Java, has long been shrouded in mystery, not least because the expatriate American wanderer who set up the first surf camp there, Mike Boyum, was a controversial figure whose profile until now has been one of a mystical outlaw who lived a pure and macrobiotic lifestyle on the one hand, while financing his tropical exploits at least partly through drug smuggling.
Boyum died at another surf spot, Cloud 9 at Siargao in the Philippines, in 1989, aged just 43.
His story has been told often enough in surf magazines, and a now infamous 2008 movie, Sea of Darkness, which played up the drug smuggling and which put plenty of noses out of joint at the time.
One corrective to this image is a recently released film backed by the Patagonia adventure brand, a biopic of Hawaiian legend Gerry Lopez, who like many surfers after him says he felt like he'd "come home" the first time he stepped off a plane in Bali in the early 1970s.
In the G-Land section of The Yin and Yang of Gerry Lopez, an unnamed nugget of a surfer with a goatee and moustache is seen in various images with Lopez, but is curiously never named.
That surfer is, of course, Newcastle's Peter McCabe, whose stylish tube-riding helped inspire the modern flood of surfers to Indo.
I wrote about those times in a 2015 piece that was McCabe's response to Heart of Darkness, which had surfaced at the time on DVD.
Yin and Yang is directed by US skateboarding champion turned filmmaker Stacy Peralta, with Australian expatriate filmmaker Jack McCoy listed as a producer.
When I asked McCoy why why McCabe went uncaptioned, he said it was Peralta's call.
"The film was about Gerry, that was what he said," McCoy told me.
Speaking to McCabe for this article, the laid-back legend said it was no skin off his nose. Indeed, he and Lopez are in regular contact, but Lopez's reputation for jealously guarding his own image may have been behind the no-name decision.
SURFING IN THE TIGER'S LAIR
Not to worry, because McCoy has just finished work on another project, a book titled Grajagan: Surfing in the Tiger's Lair, G-Land 1972-84, a beautifully produced effort co-written with another early adventurer to Indonesia, Mike Ritter.
It's published by another old surfer, John Ogden, through his Cyclops Press. It's available as an e-book, but for my money, there's nothing like holding the real thing in your hands - especially when it's as artfully produced as this.
Across 300-plus pages, McCoy has mined his voluminous photographic archive - and solicited a host of otherwise rarely seen images from the private collections of others - to go with the detailed memories from dozens of those who were there at the time, and who spoke to McCoy and Ritter for the book.
But as I discovered midway through writing this piece, it's not the only big literary effort on Grajagan hitting bookstore shelves.
In 2020, Javanese writer and artist Dian Hadiani finished years of work on a book called The Chronicles of G-Land, Bobby's Surf Camp, Behind the Legendary Tales. Although the two books are similar in outer appearance, Hadiani's 350-page book is quite different to the McCoy/Ritter effort. It, too, interviews those who were there in the earliest days of G-Land surfing. As well, Hadiani had access to a trove of documents kept by expatriate Aussie surfer Kim "Fly" Bradley, an Avalon boy who first went to Bali in 1974, and who died there in 2009.
Tiger's Lair is not short on text but it's the photos that grab your attention immediately, not surprisingly given McCoy's (not always popular) role as a photographer/filmer who brought once secret Indonesian breaks to the wider world in the various films he made with his business partner Dick Hoole.
Chronicles, by contrast, is written to be the most accurate and detailed history that Hadiani could manage.
As she writes the preface: "Conducting the research and assembling the interlocking puzzles was a most difficult and time-consuming process. This is not a sugar-coated or trumped-up story. It is based on recorded interviews, diligently cross-checked and verified with physical evidence. Some parts might be rather offensive or embarrassing to certain people, institutions, and departments of the Indonesian government. I do not intend to cause offence but simply to tell the truth."
THE CHRONICLES OF G-LAND
The great strength of Hadiani's book is the way it fleshes out the roles played by the Indonesians themselves in the development both of surfing, and of the broader tourism that existed before surfing took hold, but which has been driven by the magnificence of its surf from the time of the first hippie trail explorers in the 1960s.
In most accounts of G-Land, the way that Mike Boyum was able to gain the trust of the Indonesian officials in Bali and Java have been glossed over. In Chronicles, Hadiani finds the men who as boys carried the surfboards, lugged the water and crewed the traditional timber turtle boats that got the first surfers where they needed to be.
And through the Indonesians, she tells of another side of Boyum. He conned plenty of people out of money. There are no doubts about that. But his role in nurturing surfing in Bali, especially, is recorded dispassionately and in great detail. As Bobby Radiasha - the Bobby of "Bobby's Camp" - says in the foreward, Boyum was "not only my dear friend, but a hero for the Balinese surfers of the early '70s".
Now 66, Radiasha says Boyum "contributed to the growth of surfing in Bali before anyone did".
"I am an eye witness to his good deeds," Radiasha says. "Ironically, what most of the surfing community heard around the globe was only his dark side."
Thanks to the generosity of Burton Family Toyota general manager Kim Burton - a continual and generous sponsor of Hunter surfing - Hadiani will be in Australia for Surfest, with a book launch and signing at the Prince of Wales Hotel at Merewether on Tuesday evening from 5pm.
Surfest director Warren Smith - a former business partner of McCabe's at their legendary 70s-80s surf shop Trade Winds in Newcastle East - says people the world over have benefited from the generosity and beauty of the Indonesian people.
Smith and McCabe are still in regular touch with both the older and first generation of Indonesian surfers, but also their sons and daughters, now lured out of their warm-water paradise to take their place on the competitive stage. Surfest will feature possibly six Indonesian surfers including Ryuki Waida, whose brother Rio became the first Indonesian surfer, this year, to make the World Surf League's top-flight World Championship Tour.
ON THE EDGE OF SOCIETY
Surfing is a (more or less!) socially acceptable pursuit nowadays, but many of those early adventurers were very much on the edge of society, hardy travellers who risked everything they had in some cases, to pursue perfect surf deep in the isolated tropics.
There were no hospitals nearby if you got cut on the razor sharp reefs, legropes were only just coming into use, and the old single fin surfboards were nowhere as manoeuvrable as the modern multi-finned shortboads.
Malaria was rampant and the Indonesian authorities very much associated surfing with hippies and drugs. Not always inaccurately, as Tiger's Lair confesses, with its tales of hollow surfboards filled with hashish.
But drugs or not, the surfing always came first.
The various surf camps that now dot the planet are successors of the tree-house minimalism that Boyum carved into the edge of the Javanese jungle, although his original vision for Grajagan was to keep it as a quiet retreat for the world's best surfers and those who could pay the steep fees he charged from the beginning.
But G-Land - dubbed "Place of Dreams" in one of the first magazine stories of its endless left-hand tubes - could never remain a secret.
As Mike Ritter says: "During its heyday, Grajagan was a living metaphor for the surfer's dream of uncrowded perfection in a remote location. For a fortunate few, the experience left an indelible memory, as powerful as if they had been tested and purified in surfing's Holy Land."
News moved a lot more slowly in those pre-internet days, but an Australian surf film, Morning of the Earth, helped kickstart the Bali exodus with footage of Uluwatu.
Both books place the modern Indonesian story within its historical context, from the "golden era" of the Majapahit empire in the 1200s to through to the colonial era and modern times. Unlike the Pacific, where surfing developed naturally, the Indonesian people had traditionally viewed the ocean as a source of evil spirits, so westerners "walking on water" were a truly strange experience.
Today, Indonesia, and its 17,000 islands, attracts surfers from everywhere.
But in the Tiger's Lair era, there were more waves unridden than ridden.
PETER McCABE
Jack McCoy describes meeting Peter McCabe at Uluwatu in 1975, when McCoy - who grew up in Hawaii before moving to Australia - was with Gerry Lopez.
"When Peter came in, Gerry invited him to join us. Their teamwork to master the wave at G-Land is the most amazing collaboration I've ever witnessed in surfing."
McCabe describes one of his early waves at Grajagan: "We were still learning how everything changes. We didn't know about the different swells, about the tides, how long that point is ... I can remember this one wave I got out there, I'll never forget. I was way outside. I pulled in thinking, There is just no way I'm going to make this wave. I just kept going and going, fighting it. It wasn't really a super-perfect wave. It was just this biggest wave, roaring noise, everything. I'm on this unwieldy old single fin ... The wave was solid 8-10 foot. I've never forgotten. I was in for so long. The spray was coming up from the inside. I get the old basketball dribble going on the foam ball ... up and down, up and down. I keep going. And then another section would come over. I'd pull in. I really had no choice until I got to the end. The water was getting that brown look. I guess I was too scared to fall off.
I had my whole wits about me. I didn't want to think about the consequences if I didn't pull it off."
Nowadays, McCabe is still happily shaping surfboards, working out of a shipping container at Redhead he calls his "losmen" - Indonesian for "hostel".
And Grajagan? Well, it's still there, breaking as fantastically as always.
As Jack McCoy says of his first sighting, in 1980: "It blew my mind. For a surfer, it takes your breath away. You're in a state of shock at what you're seeing: this wave that didn't stop. It just kept going and going and going. And there was another one, and there was another one, and another one, and another one. And it just kept peeling down this reef. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen."
