Wendy Botha at the Stubbies.
COASTALWATCH | SEAN DOHERTY | BOOK EXCERPT
The following is an excerpt from Sean Doherty’s new book – Golden Days: The Best Years of Australian Surfing – which tells the story of Australian surfing through the lives of the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame members, one year at a time from 1915 to today. Last week met Albe Falzon in 1970, before that we jumped into the story of 1990 World Champ, Pam Burridge, as a 13-year-old Manly grommet in 1979, this week we time-travel to Wendy Botha in 1984.
Getting on that plane was a remarkable leap of faith for Wendy Botha. At just 16, she’d boarded South African Airways flight SA280 from Joburg-to-Sydney with no idea what – or who – was waiting for her at the other end. Regardless, she knew she had to go.
As the South African junior champion, Wendy was starting to outgrow her home break of Nahoon Reef, outside of East London. Nahoon was starting to feel a long way from anywhere. As a kid the place had been good to her. Her dad was a rock fisherman, but neither her dad nor her mum could swim. Wendy found her own way into the ocean. ‘I used to live eight kays from the beach, so if mum or dad couldn’t take me I just ran down after school. There was a tree which was past the last turnoff, so anyone who drove past the tree had to be going to the beach. I’d wait under the tree, but we’d surf when it was howling onshore and rubbish so most of the time no cars came anyway so I’d have to run.’ Wendy did the last three kays barefoot on a dirt road, Zola Budd style, board under her arm.
The Nahoon crew was small, but welcoming. ‘I had a different experience to a lot of the Aussie girls who had a hard time out in the water getting abused and hassled. I was more treated like a princess,’ she laughs. ‘But I was such a little shit to them. They soon accepted that and the old guys were actually quite sweet to me.’
South Africa at the time was not only isolated geographically, it was politically isolated as well. The country’s Apartheid racial policy was facing huge international opposition. Surfing was one of the few global sports that still toured South Africa, but it was under increasing scrutiny. Tom Carroll, the world champ at the time, would famously boycott the South African events the following year.
For a young surfer with stars in her eyes, the world of pro surfing felt like it existed in another dimension. ‘We had magazines. We had Zig Zag and Surfer and Surfing. My dad wouldn’t buy them and I couldn’t afford them, so I’d go to surf shops and flick through them till we got chased out. Then this guy, Dave had a pub and a room out the back where he’d screen surf movies and we’d all be in there hooting. It was mainly movies of the guys, but I also remember watching Margo [Oberg] and Rell [Sunn] surf. But that’s all I had to look at.’ But what Wendy did have was Shaun Tomson, world champion, South African and by then and possibly also the world’s coolest surfer. ‘I’d never met Shaun but I’d watched him in ’78 when they had the amateur world titles at Nahoon Reef. I remember Chapstick was a sponsor and to this day if I smell the original Chapstick I think of that day. They were free and I was a typical grommet with 20 of them stuffed in each pocket. I even had the T-shirt from the contest.’
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