Abstract

The Green Cathedral: A Little Memoir of Working Class Suburban Hippie Surf Culture on the South Coast of New South Wales, Australia

Highlights

  • Most people today, if they think about it at all, probably identify Australia’s counterculture as something primarily to do with Nimbin’s 1973 Aquarius Festival

  • My first was a “glue-up” pocket-rocket short-board made at Point Street, Sandon Point in 1969 from the off-cuts of the foam blanks of two larger surfboards and sold much more cheaply

  • Dreaming like Jackson Browne, but in our own unreconstructed and totally sexist way, about Everyman

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Summary

Soul Surfing Poverty

Apart from the cost of some wax and maybe a pair of thongs, and there was really nothing left to spend if you just wanted to surf all day. I was personally receptive to this – and so was my wharf labourer (ex merchant seaman) father who, he never went near a surfboard, had a philosophy that capitalism was totally fucked and tried to subvert it by constantly going on strike and trying to only buy stuff second hand if you couldn’t make it yourself We even had his homemade solar hot water panels on the roof of our house, which he constructed in the backyard after reading about the idea in a library magazine in 1967. My mum was not a political person like my father, but she was a sort of suburban housewife protohippy who hung out in the garden all day growing vegies as she was a life-long vegetarian, having, as a child, had her pet calf on a dairy farm at Cambewarra killed for food She had very little in common with most suburban housewives and was not at all much like the mothers of my school friends.

The Bible of the Green Cathedral
We used to get out kicks reading surfing magazines

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