Review: 'The Ocean Diviners' by Dean Dampney

We're used to thinking of surfing as an individual pursuit, mostly as a result of the post-war Californian surfing culture which we more or less inherited. Animated by the legendary quote from Surfer mag founder John Severson: “In this crowded world the surfer can still seek and find the perfect day, the perfect wave, and be alone with the surf and his thoughts."

That sentiment would be utterly alien to the ancient Hawaiians who we have reason to believe brought the practice of wave riding into the form we now know as surfing. Surfing was a social activity for the Hawaiians. Strictly regulated and coded according to social classes, yes, with styles and boards and available locations restricted by a system of kapu, but a community activity nonetheless. The Hawaiian form of localism would likewise be utterly inconceivable to modern sensibilities, but there you go. The past is a different country and surfing is no different in that respect.

Modern forms of surf media overwhelmingly follow the Californian individualist template. Vlogs from participants as varied as Jamie O'Brien to Ben Gravy to Laura Enever focus on the individual, who is essentially (and quite literally) starring in their own movie. Influencers of all stripes and flavours follow suit. The best non-fiction book ever written about surfing, Bill Finnegan's Pulitzer Prize-winning Barbarian Days is a highly personalised memoir. There are B characters who occasionally show up in chapters as colour and foil to Bill but the story and richness of the experience belongs to Finnegan and Finnegan alone. Competitive surfing is primarily concerned with determining a winner, with the rest of the field quickly consigned to the dustbin of history and forgotten about.

Lamenting crowds has been a staple of surf media as long as I have read it - with the caveat, of course, that the crowd is everyone else. The dream and pinnacle of the surfing experience has remained the solo session in perfect waves, the rugged individualism under The Church of the Open Sky as laid down by Tom Blake and Bob Simmons.

I offer all that as lengthy preamble because the contrast with that individual philosophy and Dean Dampney's beautiful coffee table book The Ocean Diviners, could not be more stark.

In almost every photo in Dean's book the constant theme is other humans and the shared joy he attempts, and succeeds, in documenting as they experience the ocean together. It's Hawaiian sans the violent enforcing of kapu.

Ollie, Bawley. Big bottle of water, big boards, big waves, big smile – Ollie puts in the work to make the dream come alive. The fact that he’s doing it on one leg has got everything and nothing to do with the motivational role model this man is. Heart is heart. 2022.

Dean is a mate of mine, so accept that bias is inherent here. Although we haven't seen each other much in the last few decades I consider his friendship, along with many others accrued along the journey, as one of the great treasures of a surfing life.

Along with the cult of the individual, self-negation is another common theme amongst the surf culture - or its more nauseating polar opposite, a syrupy pseudo-spiritual insistence on the uniqueness of the surfing life. You know the talk: I could have been this or that if I didn't waste my life surfing, or time slows down in the tube, man. We don't see this in other passionate pursuits. No horse rider laments their time spent in the saddle, for example. No fisherman considers his time wetting a line as a waste.

The truth between those two poles is just so much more prosaic. Asked by Andrew Kidman if his surfing life entailed sacrifices, Derek Hynd was emphatic: “I don't think so. Looking back on it, I never felt sacrifice, never saw it like that even if shit happened. You'd be back on the sand after moments like that [good days] on top of the world. Moments like that can trump any appreciation of typical standards to a square life. The end of a good day is hard to beat anywhere doing anything...Freedom's no sacrifice.”

Guillo’s and a carpark stacked with some of the world's most accomplished big wave riders, snowboarders, spear fisherwomen and photographers alike. Some of the best humans to grace a patch of earth and sea that you could ever imagine. 2020.

All through the book, you will see that sentiment etched on people's faces. And not just people, dogs also cannot contain their joy. It goes beyond surfing to a more primal appreciation of the ocean. The “watery part of the world” as Melville termed it in Moby Dick who found in the sea a way of “driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation,” and described its tremendous pull and attraction is what motivates The Ocean Diviners in Dampney's work. To be next to it, to play in it, to cohabit with it, to raise one's children beside it, to conduct one's friendships alongside and mediated by it. All of that and more. It's a very rich tapestry.

There are photos from around the Pacific Basin but Dean's chief muse is the South Coast of NSW. There are photos of lineups framed by vegetation, walks in along national park tracks where I could almost smell the crisp, fragrant air and feel what Walt Whitman called the, “sane, silent, beauteous miracles that envelop and fuse me."

I can’t look at that left these days without picturing Timmy Taplin slotted perfectly inside the barrel.

Unlike his peers who tend to show the ocean as an abstract, almost surreal and detached force, we feel invited into these images, as participants or observers of people we could know.

As Kelly Slater noted in his “retirement” speech on the glass in Margaret River, it is a small world, it can become, after a time, like family; this richness of friendship we carry and accrue as we move through a surfing life.

Surfing Kirra this Autumn, I got horrendously smoked out near Big Groyne. About to cop a pasting on the bank I heard my name, had just enough time to have a quick laugh with a bloke I'd been on a boat trip with five years ago. I'm sure everyone who has done it for a while has similar tales. There were people in Dean's book I had epic days with, who are still mates. Diggsy, in his tweed sports jacket, cresting one final dune before the Turtles lineup, and Shags, bona fide ripper and 100% rolled gold gem of a man. That gave the book a personal touch for me.

If I had a criticism, I would have liked a few more words. An essay here or there about what was happening behind the scenes, or even a digression of any sort to provide some scaffolding for the photos to rest on. I know Dean is no slouch slinging words as well as images so maybe for the next one.

Freya, Ben, and Marc coming home after a sweet little evening session at Point Nor East. 2016.

What does it mean to live a surfing life? What could you look back on at any point in the journey as the fruits of following that path? The transitoriness of the ride and the amount of time spent not doing it are often held against it. Why waste time doing something where so little of it is actually spent performing the activity, goes the thinking. Where you are so dependent on the fickle variables of Mother Nature? And at the end of all that what have you got?

I think Dean's book offers an answer to that question.

Viktor Frankl, who survived three years in the death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and wrote Man's Search for Meaning to try and make sense of the suffering, claimed we could find meaning in life through “experiencing something - such as goodness, truth, and beauty”. Far from finding depair or nihilism in the transitoriness of life he claimed that “the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualised, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.”

Dampney has done that now in duplicate. First by the actual act of living and sharing this ocean life and preserving it in Frankl's irrevocable storehouse, and secondly by photographing it and ensuring it remains an immortal “footprint in the sands of time”.

That will be a joy for his kids, also for his fellow travellers on the South Coast, and anyone else who considers themselves an “ocean diviner”, who can now reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these photos, on all the life they have already lived to the fullest.

//STEVE SHEARER

'The Oocean Diviners' is available to buy here