All it took were a few foreigners facing down sea demons for Bali’s surf culture to bloom, discovers Theodora Sutcliffe.
Fifty years ago, or so, Bali was a very different place. Kuta, today a seething morass of Bintang-clad package tourists, big-block hotels, ropy bars and surf shops, was a strip of little fishing villages on that sweeping, gunmetal beach. There were gardens, fields, even jungle; folk lit their homes with paraffin lamps, drew water from the wells and walked home along dirt roads. Out over the reef, epic swells curled and broke untouched.
Ancient Hawaiians were likely already surfing when they arrived in their home islands from other parts of Polynesia more than 1,500 years ago. Yet for all its world-class breaks Bali has no indigenous surfing culture. Since time immemorial little kids have played in the white water on crude wooden bellyboards, but the first pioneers to brave the waves had major boundaries to cross.
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The ocean has historically been a source of great fear for Bali’s Hindus: demons lived on the beach and other demons in the water. “Our parents weren’t happy about us going on the beach all day,” says Bobby Radiasa, one of the first Balinese to learn to surf. “They were always upset, but instead of talking about demons and black magic, they’d say they were worried about us drowning.”
Nobody recalls who the first foreign surfers to introduce wave-riding to Bali were. During the 1930s Robert Koke had a hotel in Kuta Beach and imported boards from Waikiki for his guests – but they seem to have left no trace on the island’s culture. While hippies came straggling into Kuta during the late 1960s, surfers were slower to arrive. Radiasa vividly remembers seeing his first surfer around 1970 and thinking he was crazy; Gede Narmada, another pioneer, believes he saw his first surfer as early as 1969. It may have been Australian champion surfer Russell Hughes, who spent a couple of months in Bali in late 1969.
Yet in 1971 Bali’s surf scene turned the corner. That was the year that Australian film-maker Alby Falzon came to Bali, and braved the remote Bukit peninsula, with its thorns and scrub and demons. He brought surf champ Rusty Miller and grommet Stephen Cooney with him and introduced them to the perfect waves at Uluwatu, which no one had surfed before. Released in 1972, Falzon’s movie, Morning of the Earth, is still considered one of the greatest surf films of all time. It captured the mood of a generation and inspired the adventurous to travel to Bali and brave the goat track that led to the Uluwatu cave.
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“The place was alive with dugongs, birds diving, dolphins and other big shapes moving beneath,” recalls Miller, who now runs a surf school in Australia. “After we spent the night camped on a mound of fallen cliff that became an island when the tide came in at midnight, there were some strange sounds echoing about the cliff; the strong Bali spirits were friendly to us and from then on I believed in magic.”
Bali’s pioneer surfers tend to be vague on dates but Radiasa thinks he acquired his first surfboard around 1972, after helping a foreigner carry his board. “It had no deck on top, a small fin, no tail: it was a Channel Island board,” he recalls. “There was no leg rope: we used to use coconut string and a handkerchief instead.”
Alongside Wayan Sudirka, Ketut Jadi, I Gusti Made Adi and Sang Bagus Ketut Jina, each from a different Kuta banjar, Radiasa forms part of the first generation of Balinese surfers. Sudirka, who now lives in Japan, would become Bali’s first champion. “We’d meet together at Bemo Corner,” Radiasa recalls, “and we’d go surfing every morning.”
For the first generations of Balinese surfers, life was simple. Ketut Menda was one of the third wave, alongside Made Kasim, now a surfing priest, and Wayan Suwenda, who won the first Indonesian Surfing Championships. “I started by selling postcards and newspapers on the streets,” he says. “Then when I was around 15 and started competitions, I started to sell more expensive things, like jewellery.”
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Of all the colourful characters who flooded Kuta’s waves during the early 70s – a period when ganja was not yet illegal and many surfers fuelled their lifestyle with drug runs and their evenings with mushrooms – Mike Boyum is one of the most controversial. He washed up in Kuta around 1970, and would go on to commercialise (if not discover) Java’s famous G-Land break, screw up a range of drug deals, and die a mysterious death in the Philippines.
To Radiasa, Boyum was a hero. Not only did he help set up the first Bali surf competitions, but he sponsored the first wave of Balinese surfers. “He’d give the money to me, and we’d keep a book: we’d write everything in it, the bemo fare, food, then when he came we’d show him the book and he’d give me more money to share with the boys,” says Radiasa.
By 1974, the year that Surfer magazine published its first Uluwatu feature, it was clear to the favoured few that surfing had the capacity to be an industry, and yield more income than a few rupiahs for carrying boards through scrub or guiding new arrivals to the best breaks. That year, Made “Joe” Darsana opened Joe’s Surf Shop on Jalan Pantai, Wayan Sudirka won the first-ever Balinese surfing championships, and guys like Hawaiian surf star Gerry Lopez were joining the lineups at Uluwatu.
Ketut Menda, one of the first generation to go pro, would surf in competitions as far afield as Australia and Hawaii: now in his mid-50s and a grandfather, he still enters and wins Masters challenges. By 1980, the Suharto government was in on the act, supporting Stephen Palmer’s OM Bali Pro Am competition with sponsorship, and building a road to Uluwatu.
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And yet, says Radiasa, it was around that time that the vibe changed for good. “One day I went to Kuta Beach and this kid yells at me and gives me the middle finger,” he recalls. “I stopped surfing then, said ‘This is not me anymore.’ I had my own work, how to make surfers happy.”
The insult happened in 1982. And, although Radiasa has run Bobby’s Surf Camp on G-Land for almost forty years, he has never surfed again.
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