Aussie Surfing Heroes


Book Description

Two surfing legends in one book! Occy is the magically talented child star who crashed and burned, then miraculous crawled from the wreckage to claim his destiny. Mick is the ferociously determined, disciplined athlete, who overcame personal tragedy and devastating injury to pursue his dreams. Australian surfing has produced many great champions, but few have overcome so much, and inspired so many, as Mark Occhilupo and Mick Fanning. Though dramatically contrasting characters, Occy and Mick's life stories both serve as powerful primers in the power of dreams, the importance of never giving up, and the courage required to claw your way out of the deepest trough and climb all the way up to the highest peak. Occy : the Rise and Fall and Rise of Mark Occhilupo and Mick Fanning's Surf For Your Life, both written together with renowned surf writer Tim Baker, have become modern Australian classics, within the surfing community and beyond. They have inspired elite athletes from all walks of life, launched innumerable grommets on their first forays into the surf and spurred countless mature age surfers to get off the couch and back into the waves. Now combined into an inspirational omnibus, Occy and Surf For Your Life, are essential reading for anyone wanting to overcome adversity, blast through their personal limits and achieve their goals.




Aussie Kid Heroes


Book Description

Tells the remarkable true stories of some of Australia's youngest heroes. At different times and in different ways, these brave, clever, adventurous, creative, athletic, caring or enterprising young Australians have done something amazing. Age 6+.




Immortals of Australian Surfing


Book Description

The Joy of Living is a story that touches the soul and gives us heart-warming, fascinating and deep insights on the hard road from diagnosis to treatment and eventual survival from throat cancer. Barry Eaton, author and radio presenter, describes the careful preparations he made for his journey, using his experience and understanding of the spirit world to deal with and survive the ordeal. Balancing holistic and spiritual methods with modern medicine, he found the means of coping as well as developing a deeper understanding of his life’s purpose. Barry tells his story in his own inimitable style as a broadcaster, sprinkled with amusing anecdotes and recollections. Dealing with customary fears surrounding cancer, Barry’s story unfolds with insights from his partner Anne and son Matthew, as they support him through his emotional roller-coaster journey.




Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell


Book Description

A finalist for the PEN Center USA Award for Nonfiction Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell, is surfer and former war reporter Chas Smith’s wild and unflinching look at the high-stakes world of surfing on Oahu’s North Shore—a riveting, often humorous, account of beauty, greed, danger, and crime. For two months every winter, when Pacific storms make landfall, swarms of mainlanders, Brazilians, Australians, and Europeans flock to Oahu’s paradisiacal North Shore in pursuit of some of the greatest waves on earth for surfing’s Triple Crown competition. Chas Smith reveals how this influx transforms a sleepy, laid-back strip of coast into a lawless, violent, drug-addled, and adrenaline-soaked mecca. Smith captures this exciting and dangerous place where locals, outsiders, the surf industry, and criminal elements clash in a fascinating look at class, race, power, money, and crime, set within one of the most beautiful places on earth. The result is a breathtaking blend of crime and adventure that captures the allure and wickedness of this idyllic golden world.




The Rip Curl Story


Book Description

The Rip Curl Story is the remarkable tale of two young surfers – Doug ‘Claw’ Warbrick and Brian Singer – who pursued an audacious dream to make a living in pursuit of the ultimate ride. The brand they built, Rip Curl, not only satisfied their own surf wanderlust, but also inspired countless others, riding the wave of the global youth revolution of the late ’60s. Rip Curl’s mantra became ‘the Search’: the pursuit of new waves on distant shores, new thrills – skiing, snowboarding, windsurfing – and better equipment to elevate the experience. Along the way they supported the careers of many of the world’s great surfers – from Midget Farrelly to Michael Peterson, Tom Curren to Damien Hardman, Pam Burridge to Stephanie Gilmore, and of course Tyler Wright and Mick Fanning. Bestselling surf writer Tim Baker tells this implausible story in an irresistible series of ripping yarns, offering rich life lessons, a maverick business primer and a wild ride of adventure, good times and outlandish ambitions spectacularly realised. The Rip Curl Story will make you want to surf more, travel further, follow through on that great business idea and pursue your own Search.




Surf For Your Life


Book Description

An inspirational tale of overcoming the odds to become world champ Mick Fanning might only be 28 but he already knows how a lot of things feel that most of us never will. How does it feel to lose a brother? Win a world title? Rip your hamstring muscle clean off the bone? Weave through a zippering Superbank barrel for 20 or 30 seconds or paddle over the ledge at places like Pipeline and Teahupo? Have scoliosis so bad you can't get off the floor? Address the NSW state of origin team before a match, bowl to Matty Hayden and have Dave Warner belt you for consecutive sixes? Walk into the bar of a Brasilian hotel dressed only in a bikini to make your mates laugh, only to find your mates have left, and there is only a puzzled bartender staring blankly at you? You'll notice that not all these experiences fall neatly on one side of the ledger of good or bad. Mick's journey so far has definitely been a mixed bag, but it is the extremes of that journey that make him so interesting, and his readiness to learn from each experience and use it as fuel to drive him on that might provide lessons for the rest of us. Mick's only young but he already exudes a quiet wisdom beyond his years, and now he's ready to share it with anyone wanting to further their surfing, whether competitively or for sheer pleasure. Mick tells his life story candidly - in turns funny, sensitive, thoughtful, self-depricating - while providing intimate insights into the personal lessons gained along the way - with practical tips on surfing technique, fitness, nutrition, board design, travel, competitive strategies and mental clarity. Mick has overcome personal tragedy and career-threatening injury on his way to claiming the 2007 world surfing title. Universally acknowledged as the most focussed and driven competitive surfer of his era, Mick's approach to surfing, sports psychology, life and relationships, makes fascinating reading. The essential principles of perseverance, hard work, and overcoming obstacles in pursuit of your dreams, will inspire anyone keen to get the best out of themselves. Ultimately, though, it's Mick's humanity, his readiness to give back, which might provide the greatest surprise and inspiration.




To the Extreme


Book Description

An international array of authors, including some prominent extreme athletes like Jake Burton and Arlo Eisenberg, look at a variety of issues and concerns within the new action extreme sports that are gaining popularity throughout the world. For each sport, an interpretation is presented through two essays: one written by a scholar active in some aspect of research for the given activity, and another by a practitioner/athlete who writes "from the inside out." The juxtaposed essays confront questions about the essence of sport such as, What is sport?; How does it originate?; and What is its use, value, and function? This book offers a fascinating look at how twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport forms emerge, proliferate, and take hold in a sport-crazy world.




Church of the Open Sky


Book Description

What makes for a surfing life? With a blaze of groundbreaking performances and a swag of titles claimed from all over the world to his name, Australian world champion surfer Nat Young might know. His seventieth birthday inspired some reflection on exactly that, and on the waves and characters that have marked his remarkable life – Miki Dora and Midget Farrelly to name a few. But surfing for Nat Young – and so many like-minded surfers – has never been about winning, never been about the sport. It’s a calling, an endless quest, a philosophy, a religion. Most of all, surfing is a way of life that has underpinned his other identities as board shaper, film producer, writer, raconteur, conservationist, activist, pilot, husband, father. Candid and wryly observed, Church of the Open Sky explores what it means to be a surfer, with a collection of true stories of Nat’s surfing life – and the friends, foes and heroes he’s met along the way.




Mark Richards


Book Description

Authorised biography of an Australian surfer whose revolutionary technique led to him becoming four times consecutive world champion from 1979 to 1982. Includes a chronological listing of his sporting highlights and an index. The author is a surfer, journalist and assistant editor of the Sydney TSunday Telegraph'.




Becoming Westerly


Book Description

'Peter was always looking for a princess, he wanted to find his princess. Unfortunately, the princess was me. I'm the princess that Peter always wanted but never met.' Westerly Windina 'Westerly's affection for Peter comes in many guises. Most of the time it's wistful and forlorn. When she talks about his awkwardness, his pretending to be something he was not, she sounds like a mother remembering her deceased child.' Jamie Brisick, from Becoming Westerly Peter Drouyn was a champion surfer with a touch of genius who forever changed the face of surfing by introducing the concept of the man-on-man competition format. Known for his aggressive yet elegant style on the wave, Drouyn was also a lawyer, heartthrob actor and showman extraordinaire, famous for his eccentric behaviour and ambitious ideas. For nearly a decade now, Peter Drouyn has been living as a woman, Westerly Windina. The surfing community is at once awestruck, sceptical and supportive. As one renowned surf journalist put it, 'Is this Peter's greatest performance ever?' In a recent issue of Surfing World, surfers voted Peter/Westerly 'the most interesting surfer in the world'. And the world is taking notice. Beginning with her 2012 trip to Bangkok for gender reassignment surgery, Becoming Westerly retraces Peter Drouyn's odyssey from teenage Queensland hopeful to 1960s global surfing sensation to embittered, middle-age has-been to the phoenix-like, glamorous, sixty-four-year-old Westerly. As Westerly herself notes, 'It was like a Supernova. It just kicked in one night and, bang, Peter was gone and Westerly was there. Part biography, part memoir, part documentary, part saga, Becoming Westerly is as much an exploration of surf culture and Australian society as it is of sexual identity. But most of all it is a portrait of two extraordinary people in one, and a very personal account of the courage and self-belief it has taken for Peter to become Westerly.