Abstract
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. That was certainly totally cool. However, there are other north coast New South Wales towns like Mullumbimby that also embraced a counterculture back in the 1970s - but were usually a bit more low-key about it all. And believe it or not - once upon a time - long before Billabong and Quicksilver and Mambo cashed-in on surf-culture big time - a vaguely creative down-at-heel anti-capitalist counterculture grew up in suburban Wollongong. Your mum made your board shorts and, even before modern sunscreen (apart from then totally uncool ‘Pink Zinc’) was invented, whipped up a ‘Grannie Hat” (which you rarely wore and regularly came home with sunburn all over your already badly sunburned face and shoulders) on her very old Singer sewing machine.
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
Summary
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.
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