Malcolm Knox interview
HUCK talks to the Australian author about his new book inspired by legendary surfer Michael Peterson.
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Surfing has its fair share of fallen heroes. But perhaps the first, and the most spectacular, was Michael Peterson. The former Australian champ, who took on legends like Rabbit Bartholomew (of Bustin' Down The Door fame), Peter Townend and Mark Richards throughout the seventies, captured the imagination of many wannabe pros and fans around the world.
But the deep tube-riding wild child struggled with drugs and (then undiagnosed) schizophrenia at the end of that decade and, after a year in prison, dropped out of surfing and the public eye altogether. Now Sydney-based journalist and fiction writer Malcolm Knox has written a book inspired by his tale. The Life is a punkily put together book in which the syntax and narrative structure reflect the ephemeral yet lyrical nature of waves and the sea. There are no halcyon days in this novel, and that, says Knox, is a surfing story that hasn't been told.
Why did you want to write this book?
I've been a beach person all my life but I only started surfing in my mid-30s. It's become quite an obsession. And this book, in a cheeky way, was a chance to call what I was doing ‘research’. The story itself was something that had been hanging at the back of my head for many years since I came across the sort of cult Australian story about Michael Peterson. He had been the subject of story-making by surfers ever since he’d been in the scene and then ‘disappeared’ abruptly and become a mythical figure. People had almost turned him into a character from fiction. Here was this person who had more talent than anybody, but he flamed out really young and left a hole behind him. There are always people who look back on figures from their late teens (and it doesn’t have to be in sport or surfing), at a person who was really talented, charismatic, and enigmatic, and then just vanished. These people may have moved on but they always hold the image of that person, like, “What happened to him? He was so much better than me and then he was gone.” So that was the kind of mythical figure that fascinated me and I just chose this moment to crystallise it in a novel.
It's a story that can be seen again and again in surfing.
It’s funny; when you tap into something, it then seems specific. People commenting on this book were talking about Andy Irons, like, “Oh this is the Andy Irons story.” But there are plenty of these stories in surfing. Clearly wasting your youth and surfing are tangled up in a way that’s not really common to a lot of other sports because the drug-taking side of surfing is antithetical to health and sport and looking after yourself. But it has always been a big part of surfing. With other sports, like skateboarding, for example, there’s also that cultural interweave. This book is very surfing intense and surfing specific, so in that way you could say, ‘Yes this story is totally indigenous to surfing.’ But always, as a novelist, you’re trying to burrow deeply into a specific experience in the hope that you’ll find something universal way down deep. You’re getting in to a very particular experience and hoping you’ll come out with an experience that everyone can connect with.
Do you think surfing is inherently self-destructive?
I don't think it's inherently self-destructive because there are so many great surfers and not-so-great surfers who are not self-destructive. Although, of course, there are those who are. It's so frustratingly ephemeral that if you have anything addictive or extreme in your personality, surfing feeds it. Being self-destructive is often synonymous with drug use and the more addictive drugs leave you just short of where you want to be, that's why they're addictive. The least addictive drugs, like LSD, take you fully there and probably beyond. I think surfing, like music, leaves you with such a brief glimpse of eternity, and then nothing to show for it, because it's gone. Recorded music, or videotaped waves, are still not the thing. So if you have that in your nature, you just want to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it, as if you can build something you can hold on to. Self-destructive nature is exactly the same. I wouldn't say it's inherent, but it plays well with self-destructive tendencies.
Do you think fiction can be more 'truthful' than non-fiction sometimes?
I was a struggling unpublished novelist for ten years before I was a journalist – a fiction writer who became a journalist to pay the rent. And I was convinced of that thesis long before I was a journalist. I always thought the truths found in art were of a different order from the truths you find as a reporter. And they’re not higher or lower or anything like that, but maybe more durable.
Do you think there's a strong tradition of surfing in fiction? Were you inspired by that?
No not really. Tim Winton wrote a book called Breath which had a large surfing element, and there’s an American crime writer called Kim Nun who did a couple of really good crime novels in the 80s with a California surf background. But it has always seemed a bit of an empty ground - as a fiction writer - to go into. And really it’s rich. Surfing is full of language and it loves its language. And not just the jargon of surfing. Surfers tend to use a language that is pseudo literary anyway, with words like “epic” and “legendary”. There’s a lot of soul and spirit associated with surf writing but that wasn’t my experience at all because I’d become a surfer in 2003 in a city. So you’re not having the cosmic, watch-the-sunrise-from-the-lineup experience. And I didn’t know any surfers and still don’t know any surfers who think of surfing in that way; as a oneness with nature. The way they see surfing is as a kind of utility that you’re trying to get stuff from. It’s competitive and it’s ruthless. It can be quite unfriendly. And certainly Peterson’s significance in surfing is that he was just about the first really uncompromising competitive surfer who left the whole hippie thing behind and went out to win money, beat other people and do anything he could to achieve that. So I liked the idea of a character from way back then, who was at the origin of something that I was right in the middle of now. And certainly nobody had written about that.
The marketed image of surfing is sometimes far removed from the reality of surfing. Your book is a refreshing departure from that. Was that a conscious decision?
I definitely wanted to say something about that through DK. He’s the marketers dream! But he flames out five minutes before the marketers arrive. He’s the ideal property but when the marketers arrive he’s just left the building and disappeared for good. And certainly that was Michael Peterson’s story as well. But Peterson has never talked about how it feels to be the ultimate surf icon who disappears just before the age of celebrity (even though he was made into a commercial icon later). He was always exploited in his absence and that’s where I wanted to go in to the whole surf market/surf culture thing, at that human level. Now, if you’re a good surfer by the age of eleven you’re going to be sponsored and branded. They’re walking billboards! You open up a surfing magazine and half the ads are kids you’ve never heard of but they’re being fed into this pipeline which is voracious for fresh meat. I don’t have a really personal emotional reaction to that like a lot of old surfers do, like, ‘The whole sport’s been just wrung out by commercial forces.’ I don’t feel that because I don’t come from a long surfing background myself. But I see it in the world, I see it generally, and therefore surfing is just another aspect of what’s happening all over the place. Surfing does try to resist it though. Nature always fights back against any effort to bottle it for commercial reasons. That’s the nice thing about surfing, it can’t be mastered.
The surf world is quite divided into an inside circle and outside circle (your protagonist DK straddles both). Why do you think surfing values authenticity so much?
I think because surfers are competitive. Surfing’s really hard to master and people who do it feel like they’ve paid their dues through all the pain, embarrassment or frustration. All the negatives of learning how to be a surfer give you a sense of ownership, which may even be inherited from fathers or big brothers. There’s also a big class dimension to it. People who ‘own’ surf breaks are usually people who don’t own anything else. And very often in Australia they’ve been driven out of the place where their parents grew up or they grew up because property prices have gone through the roof. […] Coming to surfing late, I always see myself as an outsider and it’s very hard to break out of that, even if you’re not trying to break into a group. I don’t want to be mates with those people, but I want to be able to surf unmolested there. DK is very much of that [scene], but he’s also a non-joiner, just because of his character. So he’s the ultimate insider in this group that owns this break and yet he’s not the leader of the pack telling other people where to go. His brother is more like that. I wanted to explore male groups in that way and the violence that can emanate from them, from the point of view of somebody who’s not quite of it.
Why did you set the novel on the Gold Coast?
Everybody who knows anything about surfing knows about the Gold Coast. They know about Snapper, they know about Kirra; those are two of the most iconic breaks in the world. And I think it’s always great to keep people informed of the history of a place, so it’s not just a fun park to them. Those places are significant in Australian history because one minute people who lived there lived in broken-down wooden shacks, unemployed or peeling prawns and the next minute, literally within twelve months, it had turned into high-rise hell. It was a deeply corrupt government in Queensland and they just handed the whole place, lock, stock and barrel, to property developers. It was like, ‘Oh we’re gonna have a city of high rises here. All of you, get lost.’ […] I didn’t want to make a [straight-up] Michael Peterson story because there have been many biographies, it’s a well-known story, but it was like a piece of elastic: every time I tried to move the story away from the Gold Coast, it would spring right back. There's just nowhere else you could imagine that this thing, which has happened throughout Australia, could happen so quickly, so dramatically and so corruptly, leaving people in such a state of shock and outrage.
What has the reaction been like from surfers?
I would say generally the reaction has been great, because surfers like to read surfing and there's been very little surf fiction. A lot of surfers are looking for a way to put surfing into words, which is very difficult. The feedback I've got has been, 'Here's something we're looking for.' Tim Winton had the same reaction. There's also a bit of a reaction from the older surfers, 'Who are you? You're not part of the surf mafia.' Just like locals protecting their break. But it hasn't been too damaging. That's kind of been helped by the fact that I met Michael Peterson's mother. She came along to a writer's festival, and at the time I thought, 'Oh shit,' because I'd sent her a manuscript before publishing and never heard back. I thought, oh I'm gonna be hit with a handbag here, but she was lovely. She said she was in the middle of reading it, really getting a good laugh out of it, and reading bits to Michael too, who still lives with her. It was really a happy ending to all that anxiety I'd felt. And beyond that, she was nothing like Mo. Mo was a fiction, and if it had been her, she would have come up and belted me. But Joan, Michael's mother, is quite small, finely built and very softly spoken. I said, 'You're much nicer than Mo!' And she said, 'Ah I'm not that nice, you gotta be tough to bring up Michael!'
The Life, published by Allen and Unwin, is out now.
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Malcolm Knox interview (text) by Shelley Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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