Surfing in the third millennium: commodifying the visual argot

In the third millennium, mention the word 'surfing' and many things spring to mind: surfing the net, windsurfing, sky surfing, channel surfing, surfing as a commodified form and, lastly, the act of skimming across the face of a wave on a 'surfboard'. Here I limit the manifold understandings of surfing to the last activity that I have just described and its commodified form, Surf Wear. The wider profile of surfing has been achieved by 'surfing capital', a term that I have coined to describe the three major, global, Surf Wear producers, (1) and identify these businesses as the core of surfing capital. However, these are not the only producers to be included in surfing capital, as there are many other manufacturers who currently remain on the periphery, but may, in the future, become part of the core as consumption of the surfing lifestyle shifts. I will discuss later why these producers are peripheral to the core manufacturers and how surfers and consumers distinguish between the different producers of Surf Wear. As a result of surfing capital's influence since the 1980s, surfing in the third millennium is firmly entrenched within the mores of wider society and has reached a level of acceptability in Australia that is unprecedented in the history of the activity.

The focus of this paper is to outline how the physical act of surfing has been appropriated by business interests and commodified to create a lucrative market based on the sale of 'lifestyle clothing'. As a result, a distinction needs to be drawn between the physical act of surfing in which the body is used, and what can usefully be considered to be the politicised, or commodified, surfing body; that which exists away from the beach and is recognised not by the act of surfing, but rather by a style of clothing. However, both of these formulations--surfing as an activity and as a politicised form--coalesce to become surfing in the third millennium. Surfing has become a more acceptable leisure activity than it was in the past, to the point where in Australia it has come the 'full circle'. As a result, a short history of surfing and its location within Australian society is addressed, followed by a more in-depth account of the process of commodification, as it is this facet that has transformed the sport, shifti ng it out of the wilderness and into a place in the sun.

Methodology

The substantive information in this paper is based on an amalgam of observations and interviews with surfers, consumers, surf media and a small-scale attitudinal survey. Information about Surf Wear, in any form, is limited due to the closed nature of the industry, as the major Surf Wear manufacturers are relatively small companies, in terms of their management structure, and do not disclose their marketing, sales and distribution information readily. However, there are other sources available, such as videos about Rip Curl's marketing practices (see Rip Curl 1993; Rip Curl 2 1997) and articles in the popular press (see Browne 1991; Collins 1997; Safe 1997; O'Meara 1999), which offer a limited insight into the major producers of Surf Wear.

The survey mentioned above was administered to 200 university students at Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia, with a 41% response rate (75 useable responses). When this information was combined with observation and interviews with surfers and consumers of Surf Wear, an account of the Surf Wear market and its wider effects on surfing was possible. In this rendering, I have included the two, not necessarily mutually exclusive, categories of consumer and surfer. The reason is, that of those people who consume Surf Wear, the majority of them are not surfers, and conversely there are surfers who are not always consumers of merchandise marketed by Surf Wear companies. The importance of such diverse sources is that Surf Wear has proven a more complex social space than first anticipated, as it is a confluence of business interests, fashion, and surfing as a current and an historical activity.

The making of surfing

The origins of surfing is difficult to pin-point. Some authors locate it in the Pacific Islands around 3 to 4,000 years ago (Tristram and Wilson 1993; Crawford and Wright 1994:5; Finney and Houston 1996:21) with the first written account being recorded by Lt. James King in 1778 (Finney and Houston 1996:97). Although Pearson (1979:31) concurs, he notes that this was not the only area in which pre-Western surfing occurred by adding that '... there does appear to be some Atlantic surfing in Africa earlier than the twentieth century ...'. However, the cultural importance of surfing in Hawaii and the manner in which it was developed by the islanders at the time of colonial contact, suggests that Hawaiian surfing has a continuing history of at least 1000 years (Finney and Houston 1996).

Surfing was introduced into Australia in the late 1880s (Basch 1971:248), and from 1907, when the Surf Lifesaving Association began, until the early 1960s, it was firmly located within a structure of surf lifesaving clubs (Booth 1994:263-66; Pearson 1979:47-50). As Pearson (1979:48) points out,' ... very few people who were not members of the surf-lifesaving association used any type of equipment or craft in the surf. Resulting from this, surfing was extensively regulated and surfers were encouraged to undertake their sport within the framework of the existing surf life-saving clubs.