The Big Business of Surfing’s Oceanic Feeling: Thirty Years of Tracks Magazine.

Margaret Henderson, Contemporary Studies Program, University of Queensland, Ipswich

m.henderson@mailbox.uq.edu.au

Since the first issue in October 1970 at the height of surfboard riding’s counterculture phase, Tracks magazine has been central to the formation of Australian surfing’s subcultural identity, and prototypical for a number of surfing magazines. With its open embrace of the counterculture, unusual format, and self-proclaimed role as chronicle of an authentic surfing lifestyle, Tracks was a vanguard text in defining surfing not as a sport, but as radical play, an art form, and an expression of the Australian counterculture. After thirty years Tracks remains paradigmatic of Australian surfing, but in a very different shape and form: glossy, commercialised, rebelliously adolescent, and hypermasculine. This paper traces how Tracks, and surfing more generally, arrived at this current location.

A diachronic reading of Tracks allows the fate of a countercultural leisure form (with its implicit critique of modernity) to be traced through a period when consumer capitalism (and its related cultural and aesthetic movements/moment termed postmodernism) impacts most fully upon Australian sport and leisure. Further, Tracks is an interesting case of how a leisure form’s gender codings and symbolic identities respond to the forces of consumer capitalism and the modern women’s movement. Thus my narrative of Tracks is a tale of how the oceanic pleasures of surfing became a big business, and remain big business for masculine identity.