Seven (1 + 6) surfing stories: the practice of authoring

Abstract

‘History’, Alun Munslow (2010, 148) reminds us, ‘is primarily an authoring activity’. In this article I discuss authoring as a practice in which historians with their political, ideological and ethical dispositions and beliefs mobilize and translate evidence from the past and create narratives, that is, constitute the past as history. My particular interest in authoring concerns the choices historians make around epistemology, content, context, argument, politics and ethics. As the title reveals, I use surfing as a subject matter to illustrate the practice of authoring. The article comprises seven stories: ‘Indicators’, ‘Angourie’, ‘Llandudno’, ‘Beach break’, ‘Jeffreys Bay’, ‘Cazane’ and ‘Burleigh Heads’. (The titles are renowned surf breaks, waterscapes, where material and affective bodies interact with the surf and each other, and sites of experiences which drive the stories.) In ‘Indicators’, I introduce myself as an author and surfer; I mediate the remaining stories, which were told by other surfers. From each story (or pair of stories in the case of Beach break and Jeffreys Bay) I extract a notion(s) – subjectivity, emancipation, affective experiences, intentions and ethics, traces and ‘resolutions’ – for analysis. Inserted into what Munslow (2007, 144) calls the ‘story space’ – ‘the author-historian’s fictively constituted narrative model of when, why, how, what and to whom things happened’ – of constructionism, the dominant genre of sport history, these notions reveal sophisticated, theoretically rich and well supported (i.e. referenced) explanations. But when interrogated as choices, these notions reappear as authorial intellectual, emotional and ethical mediations.

Keywords:

• affects
• authoring
• content
• context
• ethics
• narrative choices
• story space
• traces

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Fiona McLachlan for her perceptive and critical comments on an earlier draft of this article, and to Linda Borish and Murray Phillips for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. More buoyant than shortboards, longboards give their riders an advantage in catching waves and are popular with beginners and less fit surfers.

2. The title of each story simply refers to a surf break; these breaks do not have any particular significance in the rich history of the pastime (e.g. Warshaw 2004, 2010). The stories involve varying degrees of tension/violence and readers unfamiliar with the language and issues will benefit from watching the following short video clips: ‘Don't be that guy—Don't drop-in on other peoples waves’, http://www.youtube. com/watch?v= QrcmxLjuznQ and ‘SURF RAGE and violence in the waves!!’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nVI618SYVI&NR=1

3. Young and Hutchinson met again in October 2000 and reconciled. Young apologized for provoking the circumstances and Hutchinson for the severity of the assault (ABC Television 2000).

4. Historians have explored different types of waterscapes as contested spaces including pools (e.g. Borish 2006; Phillips 2008) and beaches (e.g. Booth 2006; Phillips 2006).

5. Material aspects of the culture – surf breaks, waves, surfboards – can also produce affects. A substantial literature addresses these different material aspects (e.g. Booth 2011; Casey 2010; Kampion 2007).

6. In the context of sexual identity and the (widely acknowledged) misogynist culture of surfing (e.g. Stedman 1997), ‘faggot’ is an offensive slur and Rielly interpreted it as such. Ironcially, the affects associated with surfing are typically gender neutral. Indeed, gender disappears under mountains of collapsing water or deep inside cylindrical waves. In these conditions, it is impossible to tell the sexes apart.

7. Ironically, an epistemological scepticism, which rejects definitive interpretations and compels historians to continually search for new explanations and meanings, underpins this seduction (Munslow 2010, 170).