WET DREAMS - Growing up in the 1960's surf era

Rob Willis @copy 2005

I graduated from being a bodgie in the late 1950's and approached the early 1960's with an identity crisis. For those who don't know I give you the dictionary explanation of 'bodgie'

BODGIE:

noun - something (or occasionally someone) fake, false, worthless.
Frequently as adjective - an Australian male youth, especially of the 1950s,
distinguished by his conformity to certain fashions of dress and loutish behaviour;
analogous to the British 'teddy boy'. Female of the species, widgie.

To overcome said identity crisis I started to look around, as we teenagers did, to establish a new persona. The enlightenment came in the form of surf music and its associated culture. Surf Music, with its driving rhythms and mad dance – purely Australian I believe – THE STOMP.

A roof (surfboard) rack consisting of a couple of pieces of electrical conduit was attached to the top of my Morris Minor (1000) and upon the rack I threw a trusty inner tube from a tractor tyre, the closest thing I could get to a genuine surfboard in the bush. My mates and I would then spend our leisure hours surfing the waves at 'Cottons' Weir on the Lachlan River.

This was in my childhood town of Forbes by the way – central western NSW on the banks of the Lachlan River - a long way from the sea! We also listened to the latest 45 vinyl records on an HMV portable record player that did wondrous things to the speed and tone as the 9 volt battery flattened.

The Atlantics at the National Folk Festival

The Atlantics at the National Folk Festival

I can also vividly remember dancing to the surf band The Atlantics in the Forbes Town Hall in the days when famous bands would tour to remote country areas – thank you.

Let's go back in time for a moment, a long way past my youth to the early days of Australia and our love of the sea and surf. I suppose our convict forefathers did not have much of a love of the briny after the long cruel voyage from mother England, but given a few years we started to appreciate the beauty of our beaches.

Bondi beach is one of Australia's best known stretches of sand and it was here in the 1880's that the first Sydneyites broke on old law that forbade swimming between sunrise and sunset - it was considered indecent and many people were arrested. The breakthrough came in 1903 when a respectable bank clerk defied the ban.

Soon after the law was removed and crowds flocked to this beach.

The rich and fatuous have discovered Bondi is a great place to live and moved in en masse. Even the blind mullet, a feature of Bondi in the past, rarely run these days.

It does not take long for we Aussies to make a parody of anything and when Jack O'Hagan wrote his popular song 'Along the road to Gundagai' in about 1922 a parody about Bondi Beach emerged
This version that includes both the verse and the chorus comes from the late Ebb Wren of Forbes.

“There's a scene that lingers in my memory.
Of the time we went down by the sea.
Someone stole my trousers, I hid among the houses.
Down by the beach at old Bondi.

When the policeman came and found me.
I'd the evening news around me.
And some girls were passing by.
It gave me quite a shock, when they put me in the dock.
I said I came from Gundagai.

Well the magistrate looked at me and he said “how old are you”
Well I looked at him quite gladly and I said “I'm twenty two”
Well he looked at me and said “you'll be twenty three instead
When you get back to Gundagai”

Parodies abound and during the 1970's we cringed at the Adventures of Barry Mackenzie. Who will ever forget the gem of an Australian folksong – based of course on the old seafaring song Maggie May – “Chunder in the old Pacific Sea”

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