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Showing posts from March, 2018

The Middle Aged Spectator goes (to the) Surfing

I was born in Melbourne (no surf beaches there), and within a few months my family had moved to an inland area of southern Victoria. Since then I have lived inland, and have only visited the coast for holidays. As a child my family went to Queenscliff, a Port Phillip Bay town with no surf. As an adult, I have taken my own children to the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but the opportunity to learn to surf never really eventuated for me. As a middle aged spectator on the southern Gold Coast beaches I have watched with some envy the many, many recreational surfers doing their thing of an early morning. My big chance came at a primary school beach camp a few years ago when the group of children I was supervising (I was Deputy Principal at the time) had surfing as one of their activities. I enthusiastically took part in the various beach exercises, theoretically learning how to go from lying on the board to standing. But when it came time to enter the water, I was