Aboriginal Surfing: Reinstating Culture and Country

University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 2007 Aboriginal surfing: einstatingr culture and country Colleen McGloin University of Wollongong, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation McGloin, Colleen, Aboriginal surfing: einstatingr culture and country 2007. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/1625 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Aboriginal Surfing Reinstating Culture and Country Colleen McGloin, University of Wollongong, Australia Abstract: Mainstream surfing in Australia is a discursive cultural practice, institutionally sanctioned as integral to national identity. Surfing represents the nation through a mode of white heterosexual orientation that is encoded into its practices and its texts. Surfing represents an historical transformation in the national psyche from the bush, inaugurated by the nation’s literary canon, to the beach, which has become the modern site of the nation’s identity. Indigenous surfing provides an oppositional view of nation and country that reinscribes the beach with cultural meanings specific to Aboriginal cultures. Surfing in this context can be seen as a reclamation of culture and a challenge to the dominance of white conceptions of nation and identity. This paper examines the indigenous surfing film, "Surfing the Healing Wave" and explores the film's representations of histories that are relevant to Aboriginal people. The film's narrative disruption of the surfing film genre instates a pedagogical practice that functions to reinscribe Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal histories through the contemporary event of the indigenous surfing contest. Keywords: Australian National Identity, Indigeneity, Surfing Cultures, Pedagogy to the indigenous people who have generously shared When Aboriginal people are in the ocean, they their information about surfing and country3 with know they are in their country. They belong to me. The paper provides a reading of the Indigenous it. They don’t own it … we know there’s always surfing film, Surfing the Healing Wave, 4 that another wave. Surfing’s about being part of the foregrounds personal indigenous histories and 1 wave. simultaneously asserts Aboriginal conceptions of Some fellas, they talk about ripping the wave nation and country through the cultural practice of to pieces. I reckon the wave tells you what to surfing, and through culturally relevant do, just catch the wave and ride the wave, flow conceptualisations of the ocean. In recent years, with what the wave’s doing. And if you get a indigenous surfing5 has gained increasing momentum good score for it, well that’s good. If you don’t, in communities across Australia. And although 2 you had a good time riding the wave. Australian indigenous surfers are subject to the marketing conventions of mainstream surfing, there S I FRAME this article about Aboriginal is a distinction in philosophy and practice, in surfing in Australia with the words of conceptions of the beach and the ocean, and within indigenous surfers, I locate my own the broader significance of Aboriginal conceptions Aposition as a non-indigenous academic who of country, that introduces an oppositional discourse enjoys the privilege of working in an indigenous of country to that encoded within mainstream surfing teaching and learning centre. This paper constitutes and national identity. part of a larger study about mainstream surfing’s In the construction of white Australian national connection to national identity, and Aboriginal identity, the ocean represents both a real and surfing, which challenges this connection through symbolic power: to enforce, to reinforce, to welcome the foregrounding of indigenous worldviews. In and reject, and to provide a simultaneous point of engaging with this subject matter, I seek to do credit reference for ‘one-ness’ and diversity. Its ambiguity 1 Dhinawan, G. Indigenous surfer, Interview conducted at the Aboriginal Education Centre, University of Wollongong, March, 2003. 2 Slabb, K. Surfing the Healing Wave, , NEUGH P/L in association with the Australian Film Commission and SBS Independent, 1999. 3 “Country” in the indigenous context refers to a cultural and spiritual place of origin. It can refer to land or sea. “Country” incorporates cultural values and practices, stories and histories. The term “country” does not carry the meanings associated with a nation state. It is, however, a political entity in that it denotes a place that ascribes identity and stewardship, and dictates the Law and the obligations of its indigenous custodians. Country encompasses the geographical location of spiritual belief and communal kinship networks. 4 Surfing the Healing Wave, NEUGH P/L in association with the Australian Film Commission and SBS Independent, 1999. 5 Indigenous surfing denotes both Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in surfing as represented by surfers in the film. However, the film was made by Aboriginal surfers and its historical focus is on Aboriginal histories as distinctive from, and different to, the colonial history of Torres Strait Islander peoples. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 4, NUMBER 1, 2006 http://www.Humanities-Journal.com, ISSN 1447-9508 © Common Ground, Colleen McGloin, All Rights Reserved, Permissions: [email protected] 94 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 4 as a cultural signifier marks the potential for realised through new, upcoming scriptwriters and representational shifts, for the manifold ways in authors. Huey Benjamin, one of the creators of the which nation can be construed through imagery and surfing video Surfing the Healing Wave told me that, imagination, and, more importantly, the ocean’s as a keen surfer himself, he was interested in making ambiguity provides the capacity for intervention into a documentary film that provided “a positive its impetus as a signifier for a cohesive and unified Indigenous story.”8 This burgeoning field of cultural national identity. The beach, a site for recreation and production is about taking control of representation re-creation, is the materiality of nationalism; it and re-presenting Aboriginal stories and cultures in produces subject positions, national bodies. In white forms and narratives that are relevant to Indigenous conceptions of nation, the Australian male surfer viewers. As an Aboriginal colleague says, represents the national corpus through the individual body of the male surfer, often represented within I think we are witnessing a shift in the mainstream surfing texts as white, blond, tanned, fit, representation of indigenous people, which is competitive, and heterosexual. The ocean is his due mainly to the fact that representations are performative place of becoming. increasingly being made by indigenous people. As the twentieth century emerged, the newly We are therefore controlling how we see federated Australian nation was depicted through ourselves and how we want to be seen by cartoon images such as “the little boy from Manly,” others. This change has begun to channel the oedipal surfer who represented the nation’s viewers away from what we call the “poor infancy. In the words of the cartoon’s American bugger me” syndrome that characterises creator, Livingstone Hopkins, the little boy from Aboriginal people as victims. Of course Manly came to typify “the well-meant impetuosity Aboriginal people are victims. But that’s not of a young colony.”6 As the coast became more all they are. They are also survivors, fighters, inhabited, literary figures and myths, such as the and challengers to the oppressive forces that larrikin, the bush pioneer, the iconographic “digger”, have regulated and represented them. Our job mateship and the Anzac, and their associated as cultural producers is to balance our ideologies, were transposed onto the texts and representations with an accurate history of practices of modern surfing and beach culture. colonial violence and an accurate account of 9 National identity’s representational shifts began by our tenacity in overcoming that violence. incorporating new iconographies, new ways of narrating old stories within the discursive framework Surfing the Healing Wave of colonialism that kept intact the beliefs of white Lumby’s words echo the political efforts of the supremacy encoded in the White Australia Policy indigenous surfing documentary, Surfing the Healing and a vast range of canonical texts. The “little boy Wave, a 1999 documentary film illustrating an from Manly” eventually transformed into a mature annually held indigenous surfing competition, the surfer where he “ride[s] history in a process of on- “Billabong Indigenous Surfing Invitational.” This going inscription,” which, in turn, “guarantees that competition brings together indigenous surfers from past Australian literature can be recuperated into a a range of Pacific countries in an annual event held lived present, into the synchronicity of a continuing 7 in Australia. Surfing the Healing Wave won the modernity.” But as I have noted, the potential for award for best Australian documentary at the 2000 disruption, remains one of the effects of the “Real Life on Film” festival. ambiguity of national

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