In the backyard of his mother's Angourie home stands Laurie Towner, setting a fishing rig with mum's man, the legendary Dave 'Baddy' Treloar. Loz is a monster, six feet and still moving skyward. His build lean but not in a waifish way. Laurie has wings on him like a 747, man. Like an action hero. And his chest, as big as it already is, manages to look deflated like there's room to expand. Puberty ain't done with Laurie just yet, God help us. His face is dotted with hormonal bumps and freckles, both noticeable only under revealing light of the sort that is breaking through the paper-bark trees and into this tranquil scene. Laurie's eyes are the rich green of the surrounds. They lift from a glittery fishing lure and welcome his guest. Appearing from behind a similarly over-proportioned esky is Laurie's hound, a coal-black Staffordshire Terrier, and Jack, a local kid and one of Laurie's good mates. More slap-skin.
"Thought we'd go fishing. The waves are shit and I haven't taken my boat out in a while," says Laurie (whose Christian name we've toughened to Larry for the sake of the title), motioning to one of two boats deeper in the yard where the manicured lawn ends and Yuragir National Park begins. It gets torn through by bushfire every five or so years but for now, life is prospering, especially the blade grass, waist-high and hissing in the cool autumn breeze.Laurie's boat is a 14-foot tinny painted in light yellow, though it's turned more of a cream colour with the sun, just like Captain Loz's wig. "Seen better days," says Laurie, of his ship. "But it does what it needs to do and the motor started first pull and I haven't started it in about three months... (he pauses as his concentration and strength shift to removing a tyre from under the trailer)... I love being home, haven't been here in what feels like years." As Jack, who's also cut with a superhuman frame, hooks the boat on to a white Hilux, Dave tells us of a drainy inside bank he spotted while fishing yesterday. But as good as he says it has been, Dave's going to sit this one out.
The Yamba-Angourie area indulges in surfing heroes. It's here that Dave, MacTavish, Young, Greenough, and other Morning Of The Earth pioneers laid their revolutionary early tracks. It's where four-time world champion Mark Richards, industry icon and Billabong founder Gordon Merchant, and a host of the nation's best shapers including Rod Dahlberg, Greg Webber and Luke Short, came to spread their wings, slow time, and test the latest designs. It's here where many of the aforementioned have decided to set up permanent camps. And it's here where second, even third-generation Aussie surfers like Laurie have been spawned. A small coastal fishing port, it's home to an obtuse number of beautiful young ladies, and one particular world-class point break that "has it all." Right now Angourie is at its best. Quiet. Summer having just ended and the Easter holidays yet to begin.
The boat ramp is a generous pissing distance from Laurie's crib. It is a wild set-up: down a steep pebble track to a beach drop-off at the base of Spooky Point. Bungs in. Boys in. We drift at first before Laurie pulls on the engine. It starts with a light puff of smoke, not more than a drag on a dart. Captain Loz assumes his position and we motor out to sea. But as quickly as the revs build, the engine dies. And it doesn't come back. "Fuck, maybe I flooded it," says Loz, yanking at the rip-cord in disbelief. The swell, although small, is building and the current is dragging us toward the next rocky point. But Jack's in the drink now, swimming out front, rope in his teeth, pulling the boat to safety. Your reporter just sits in the vessel, legs might as well be crossed, like a dandy lady on the river fucking Thames, until we reach shore. And now for the first sign that a new town hero is born: A man, stocky with black hair covering most of his body and carrying a longboard, approaches the three defeated sailors.
"You did us all proud," he says nearing the trailer, but his words are lost in the paranoia that he's writing off on our short-lived fishing tour. He comes again: "That wave (Shipsterns), it was crazy, you did us all proud." And then it clicks. Laurie accepts the praise with thanks and a wave, his grill exposed. And then two more men with big sticks, Nat Young and his youngest boy, Bryce. Nat's been in the US and picked up the latest edition of The Surfer's Jot/ma/which, he says, features a photo of Laurie. He'll drop it around sometime over the weekend.
Later at the Towner home, Laurie directs me to my sleeping quarters. It's a big room n the lower level, with a toilet and shower. Laurie is going to move in here when he can be bothered, relocating from upstairs. "Watch out for the mozzies," he cautions me, but their buzz got me first.
Only a purple glow of light is left in the day and the night is showing all the signs of being frosty. Laurie, who has retrieved his new Apple iBook, says he loves nights like this - a guarantee of offshore wind in the morning. Sitting on the outside veranda with his Mac he admits that he's "not up with tech" and asks if a man who hits these things for a living can open a disc of images snapped by his mate, photographer Hilton Dawe. The laptop hums intensely as it takes up the disc, just as you'd imagine a UFO would if ever the fabled martians were to land on earth. The files appear to be mostly stuff from Hawaii. Hilton was shooting the day Loz weaved through Off The Wall, a wave some declared as the best of the season. Coincidently, the tube ride occurred almost simultaneously with the wave that killed Malik Joyuex up the reef at Pipe. Malik was the last young man to get sky-high with fame after riding out heavy water. He was also a friend of Hilton, who has a memorial inked into his foot. The wave is not on the disc. Understandably, Hilton missed it.
Laurie has been riding on Billabong since he was 11, one of the good kids at every beach in Australia that always get discovered. And he had an under 12's Gromfest title to his name. With these kids though, the telling point is the follow-on years. By the time they're 19, they're either high on rotation or a waste of money. Laurie remained in virtual obscurity. That is, until now: Laurie and those two waves, Off The Wall and Shipsterns. Two super-sized rides that had the media extravaganzoids going mad for this crazy 19-year-old from Angourie, at the ready to squeegee his third-eye clean.
"You'd swear he was eating chunks of Charlie for brekkie... if his balls were made of gold he could retire!" gushed one gleeful reporter, of the Shippies ride. Suddenly young Loz had a nomination for the biggest tube at this year's Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards, a place at the round table of the Superstar Surfers, and a sweet hit of confidence that would see him make, and win, his first Junior Series final and be topping the ratings after seven events. (His digits sit at high-priority inside Billabong's Adventure Division; and his new homeboys Parko and Dylan Longbottom want in on a ledge Loz has the keys to, and it could be on tomorrow.) Despite the sea of kudos, including contributions from his guest, Laurie is palpably nervous at this discourse. With a lick of self-effacement, he says: "I'd be embarrassed if I won for Biggest Tube, Dorian's [the closer in Campaign 2 at Teahupoo] is soooo much bigger." But he didn't paddle, I inject.
Nervously pumping his knee and fiddling with his tee shirt at the chest, Loz claims it doesn't matter. "He still rode a tube that is waaay bigger than mine." At that moment the descending scroll bar on Laurie's computer unveils something other than Hawaii, It's the Shipstern wave, but shot from the land. CHRIIISTN!... HOOO-HOOO!!!... DIDN'T KNOW HE WAS THAT DEEP!!! THE FFFI... Your reporter is dangerously close to slipping into a ridiculous surf parody, usually centred on the size of a man's testicles, that ensues acts of extreme braveness.
Does Ritalin ease hyper-sensationalism too?
I drop two and slip back on Angrourie time; the blade grass hissing in the breeze,
the rustle of foliage drooping from the paper-bark trees like nature's chandeliers.
The following day, as we drive to meet Dylan Longbottom at the righthand ledge Laurie called on for today (Parko didn't make it), Laurie speaks of getting into surfing. The last of four children, all boys, it was by way of both familial competitiveness and Angourie tradition. "It was the normal little brother following his big bras. Plus, everyone just does here," says Laurie. "They still surf, but are pretty into playing union now," he adds. One could assume size is in the Towner DNA.
We arrive at the wave, the angriest but still rideable three-to-five feet of water you can imagine. Laurie is happy. This is why he loves being home, he tells me. A small pack of local bodyboarders are already on it and there's only a small window with the dropping tide. Laurie knows the lids, all happy to see him. The Shipsterns wave is lubricated some more. And for the next hour, this kid Laurie and his pal Dyl rule. And it suddenly becomes clear how Laurie came to hone his skills. Laurie talks endlessly about two waves - this ledge and another, a left. They are generally havens for the local bodyboarders who have got more chance in Thursday Powerball than they do getting waves on the points. Loz's is a permanent head in the line-up. "You do enough time with waves like this," he says, back on land watching a set max-out the ledge. "And you realise how good they are." All those years in relative obscurity, Laurie was dialling in at waves like this. Now the kid swims in the spoils as Billabong gives his contract a steroidal increase to ensure he's everywhere he needs to be when swells hit.
But there's one other piece to the puzzle of how Crazy Little Laurie came to ride giants and win contests. Baddy Treloar is the local hero. He was a star of Morning of the Earth. He will never miss a swell. He'll sit on the point at dark and be there all day and ride the best waves of the swell. And god forbid if you ever pull back on a wave. "You don't get two bites at the cherry," he once said to a man who heaved on the brakes on a bomb at Angourie. "End of the line." Big Daddy.
Baddy used to see Dan Boss's mum for over a decade. He'd have Dan, then a whimpish 50 K-gees, riding huge boards so he'd develop a good style - not be a flimsy, whippy little punk. Dan went on to win the junior series, he charged and he was the town's most successful surfer. Then, Baddy and Dan's mum Josephine split. Dan continued his attack on the QS and got close. Real close. Baddy and he were still tight and Baddy continued to, and still does, mentor the kid. Baddy's next girlfriend was, is, Jane Towner. Jane is recently divorced and has got a son called Laurie. And the same experience and expertise followed for Loz. Thirteen onward.
After the slay at the ledge and one more at Spooky Point, Laurie has decided it's time to replenish his reserves. We hit a little cafe, again just a few minutes from his house - everything is close in this little corner of the world. A pull-out from the Shipsterns sessions is tacked to the wall. The staff know Laurie by name and greet him. He orders a fish burger and recommends I join in on his menu selection. And then a juice. We take a seat at a table with an impressive history of surf mags stacked at one end.
Laurie is flicking the pages of one when I ask him about his experiences with the local ladeez. He looks around as if to see if anyone is watching him, then leans in and lowers his voice. "See that girl," he says, wanting me to look but not look obvious. "Umm, yeah." A blonde girl, Ashlee Simpson-cute, crosses the road. Has the kid done-in his monster grapes? Nup, he assures me, Loz ain't got no time for love right now.
Forty-eight hours with this kid and I'm a fan. Despite laving left school short his HSC because of the number of absent days he accrued with his commitment to the Junior Series, Loz is smart, even sharp. He has travelled enough to be worldly, yet he's tinged with enough small-town reality to remain invariably levelheaded. According to Dyl Longbottom, he's one of the most nicest young guys around particularly when you consider the status he's recently been thrust up to. "Loz has come a long way quickly, but he's always had it in him. He's loves this kind of stuff [the ledge] but he can surf a long wave too, or take it to the sky. It's just the beginning I reckon."
As I get ready to depart from this glorious serenity, two carloads of Loz's mates pull up and fuse on the front lawn. They heard about the ledge and want to know what it was like, first-hand, from the king. One of them moans about a hangover. Then, almost as if on cue, Nat Young rides into the mess of bodies on an electric scooter. He's got that copy of The Surfer's Journal. The image was taken at the same ledge surfed this morning. Nat's impressed. So too is the pack. And just like that the floodgates of froth re-open. There's talk of the Big Wave Awards, which Loz is booked to attend in LA next week (Doz wins, not Loz), of the building swell and of a nearby bombie a few clicks offshore. There is a lot of expectation beginning to weigh on this young Star and you've got to wonder what he's going to have to do to satisfy it - to build longevity in this cut-throat sport. Then again, one need only look at those wings, in all their colossal glory and you know this kid is going to fly. H
