I wrote this book some years ago when I got sober. It was the first time I was able to write about the past with clarity. It’s a story about a boy that plays with flowers and can look into the sun without going blind. This is Chapter One.
Edited by Dave Parmenter
It’s a blend of surprise and joy to encounter a young writer who can sketch a vivid mise-en-scène and be new enough to the craft to be an un-self-conscious narrator. Meet Joshua Hoffman, 23-years-old, who at 19 migrated in a rusty old van to the Tweed Shire from Adelaide.
Harken back to the close of pre-URL Hawaii. The Honolulu Advertiser comes to your house every day. No Craigslist, cell phones, webcams, or social media. Only landlines and the coconut wireless. You can see Israel Kamakawiwoole at the Waikiki Shell.
Herein, Black Hole Transmissions focuses on 1984. To wit: Mark Occhilupo's fall, and Cheyne Horan's rise, stemming from entwined negative and positive impacts in the same movement.
Andrew Kidman shares a personal philosophy of tending to sacred flames while exploring the profound connection between fire, trees, and the echoes of nature.
Join Andrew Kidman on a South African escapade with Derek Hynd back in 1995. Along the way, you’ll be privy to the squirrel’s nest of surprises that arise from hanging out with Hynd.
Derek Hynd vividly recounts his experience being mentored by Terry Fitzgerald, sparked while surfing a spot linked with Terry’s legacy. At this surf break, Derek muses over crowd dynamics, recent changes in the wave, and the paradox of safety in surfing.
Before getting to the catalyst — the most successful gentleman in Manly in 1911 blowing his head off with dynamite at a males-only artists’ camp of his own founding — a stage to set.
Jeffreys Bay, 1995. Into his 60's, Miklos Sandor Chapin Dora has seen, done, been it all. He is the one God of surf. Conservatively, 999 in every 1000 lives of surfers over the last 60 years exist solely due to this one person.
“Awwwwww there goes Big Rog.” Flippy Hoffman growling, sitting on his deck off the sand at Pupukea. The surf had been dismal. Waist-high slop rolled in like the day before and the week before that.
Worse than inserting yourself into a conversation is making a living out of doing it. Consider surf writing. 9 in 10 surf writers cop out with first-person narrative, flogging personal ego by 'being there for the reader.’
In 2012, I wandered into the Valla Surfboard Factory in Nambucca Heads and was struck with those same tinfoil emotions Warhol had been struck by whilst having his hair cut in Name’s apartment in 1959.