Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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But perhaps the most obvious explanation for surf culture’s explosive postwar growth was economic. With the massive expansion of the middle class in the 1950s there emerged a large demographic of American consumers who sought plea sure and leisure at the beach. Nearly all of them were white. For a number of these new beachgoers, especially after Gidget hit the big screen in 1959, surfing became a favorite, if still subcultural, pastime. The beaches of California—not to mention Hawai‘i, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere across the planet—soon resembled an endless sea of bronzed skin. It was, depending on one’s perspective, either a propitious beginning or a dismal end.

TWO

A World Made Safe for Discovery

TRAVEL, CULTURAL DIPLOMACY, AND THE POLITICS OF SURF EXPLORATION

PETER TROY WAS A LEGENDARY EXPLORER. His name may not resonate outside portions of the littoral world, but, to surfers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, it is every bit as weighty as those of Columbus, Cook, and Magellan. A thin, blond-haired Australian, Troy emerged as a highly regarded surfer when still in his teens, winning the Victorian novice surfing title in 1955. He might have remained a mere local figure had it not been for the postwar globalization of surf culture. In 1956, Troy’s Torquay Surf Life Saving Club hosted the International Surf Life Saving Carnival to coincide with that year’s Olympic Games in Melbourne. The carnival included teams from Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), South Africa, England, and the United States, and Troy, as the local titleholder, was asked to give a surfing demonstration. An estimated fifty thousand spectators were on hand to see the young Victorian work his way across the waves on his sixteen-foot hollow board. But it was the American contingent, riding shorter, lighter, and more maneuverable equipment—their “Malibu” boards were approximately nine feet long—that made the biggest splash. These American board designs inspired Australian replication, and the result was equipment capable of tackling breaks, such as Bells Beach, that had previously been considered unrideable.