Saltwater Legacy – The World’s First Surfers?

By Thommo Saunders-Sheehan on August 28, 2014 in Other

The locals of the Eastern Suburbs, diverse as we may be, are united by our love of the ocean. Saltwater runs through our culture like the blood through our veins. We are Saltwater People.

Australia’s early adoption of this life and the pleasure to be derived from the ocean was a decidedly un-European development. Yet it is little recognised that the Saltwater heritage of our Country is Indigenous, not European.

The Cadigal were adept watermen. Early settlers marvelled at their prowess in the water, and diarists offer many accounts of their feats:

“Getting onto the rocks that projected into the sea, [TOs] plunged from them to the bottom in search of shellfish. When they had been down sometime, we became very uneasy on their account… at length however, they appeared, and convinced us that they were capable of remaining underwater twice as long as our ablest divers. An instant was sufficient for them to take a breath, and then they dived again.”

Another early observer noted, “the natives are not… Cowards of the Deep; … they are bold and surprisingly expert, both in swimming and diving.” He witnessed a TO retrieving a fishing line “stand upon the verge of a rock” and in an instant “plunged through a rising wave and disappeared”. The TO stayed under water “full a minute” before he emerged with line and hook intact, then rode a “heaving surge” back onto the rock.

The account incites visions of children and teenagers diving into the rising waves off Ben Buckler or Mackenzies Point on hot summer days, employing the exact timing and mastery demonstrated 200 years earlier by this unnamed TO.

The Cadigal were expert watercraftsmen as well. TOs were seen paddling their canoes not just in the calm waters of the harbour, but several miles into the open sea. One early account records having “seen them paddle through large surf without over-setting or taking in more water than if rowing in smooth water.” The same diarist recorded he had witnessed TOs landing their canoes in Manly “which they did with ease altho’a very great surf was running”. This record has inspired one surf historian, Ogden, to speculate the Saltwater people of Sydney may have ridden a wave back to the beach, making them the world’s first surfers.

While the account above was observed in Manly it is fair to assume that the Cadigal were equally adept in their watercraft mastery as their northern neighbours. Obed West (1807-1891), an early source of local history, recalled that he had seen in the early 1800s TOs fishing in canoes “out near the island at Coogee Bay (Wedding Cake Island)… They would carry their canoes on their heads to Coogee, Bondi and Maroubra, embarking at a convenient place”.

Importantly, the settlers did not just witness the Cadigal fishing, they were observed to take great pleasure simply “enjoying the surf”. And in the hot Australian climate it didn’t take long for the new settlers to follow suit.

Swimming for pleasure and enjoyment was alien to the British. They perceived the ocean as dangerous – concealing sharks and mythical monsters. It was in observing the TOs that they gradually gained confidence and skill in the water. R J Stone, a Bondi surfing pioneer, reported in 1924:

“As far as Bondi the Beautiful is concerned, it was almost unknown to the white people until about fifty years ago (1874). Yes it was about 50 years ago on a bright summer’s day that a party of we boys stood on Bondi Beach watching the Blacks who were camped at Ben Buckler, enjoying the ocean waves, with their wives and children… said one of the boys, ‘if the sharks do not touch them, what about us?’ You may say that was the start of surfing in Bondi… And how we made them laugh when we said we would join in a corroboree with them…’

One of the significant observations of Stone’s account is that it records a continual presence of TOs living in Cadigal Country long after the Cadigal clan had reportedly disappeared. It is likely that those TOs who shared waves with Stone and his mates in Bondi had kinship ties with the Cadigal.

More significantly though, Stone’s memoir is a local history of the Indigenous influence on the lifestyle we celebrate daily and which is perhaps the greatest hidden legacy of the Cadigal, and other Saltwater clans of Australia.