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

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This heralded a new era in the history of Australian surfing. The sport metamorphosed from an activity undertaken by lifesavers patrolling a particular beach to one in which individual surfers set out along the coast in search of the best possible waves. For some of these surfers, the local beaches were soon not enough. Working at the time as an accountant for Price Water house in Melbourne, Troy’s global yearnings—the seeds of which, he said, had been planted by the Americans in 1956—only intensified. “I had no desire to be an accountant but I wasn’t sure how to leave my job,” he recalled. “When I saw my first Surfer magazine, I saw a glimmer of hope. . . . I realized that here was another way of life.”¹

Troy was twenty-four years old in 1963 when he left Australia, surfboard in hand, to become what Brendan McAloon called “surfing’s first vagabond.”² Over the course of three years, he tackled Europe’s Atlantic Seaboard, surfed the warm waters of Hawai‘i, helped popularize his beloved sport in Brazil—now a competitive Surfing powerhouse—and explored the African coast. He did so by air, boat, foot, road, and rail. He toasted the children of Europe an diplomats, sweated through a South African gold mine, rode in stuffed freight cars with Peruvian peasants, and consumed his fill of cheap wine in Franco’s Madrid. Surfer christened him “one of the most effective roving ambassadors for the sport.”³ And the travel bug never left him. Troy would be back at it years later, discovering, in 1975, the world-class right-hander at Indonesia’s Lagundri Bay with two of his Australian compatriots. By the time he died in 2008, he had visited well over 140 countries.⁴ Troy’s travels are now the stuff of legend. In that long-ago era before blogs and YouTube, he wrote occasional dispatches for the monthly surfing press. This not only made him something of a minor celebrity but also situated him as an exemplar of Cold War surf culture.