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If someone asked you to articulate what it means to dedicate your life to surfing, you might point to Rusty Miller as the ultimate case study. Rusty started surfing in 1953 and cut his teeth in the breaks around Encinitas, in Southern California. While he idolised Oceanside’s power-surfing pioneer, Phil Edwards, Rusty also made his presence felt in L.A.’s Malibu beach scene, where Edward’s rival, Miki Dora, was a cult figure. Although Rusty and Dora differed in their methodology they became tight as they figured out how to make a buck from surfing in1960s California. While Dora’s nefarious schemes became a thing of legend, Rusty relied on a mix of wave-riding competence, entrepreneurial nous, education, and persistence. Rusty worked hard at his surfing and claimed the USA Title in 1965. Along the way he earned a B.A in history at college and fashioned a reputation as the thinking man’s surfer. Regular trips to the North Shore solidified his reputation as a notable big-wave rider; combined with his competitive success this meant he could lend his name to a product and make it marketable. Hamm’s beer famously used a shot of Rusty roaring down the face at Sunset in a billboard campaign. Meanwhile, Rusty, Garth Murphy and Mike Doyle had success with the surfboard adhesive Waxmate. In 1968, just before the trio sold the wax company, (it later became Sticky Bumps) Rusty bailed for Kauai where he became good friends with Harold Taylor, the brother of actress Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor had ceded much of the estate he owned to a collective of hippies who established a commune in a spectacular, tropical rainforest setting. Rusty spent three years living in a fisherman’s hut, hanging out with Howard Taylor, and riding the glorious waves of Hanalei Bay. Eventually, he visited his friend and former business partner, Garth Murphy, on the north coast of Australia. Rusty was instantly drawn to Australia’s long, right points, vibrant surf culture and the anti-Vietnam stance of Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam.

In 1971, Albe Falzon and David Elphick decided they wanted to take a bet on Bali as the new surfing frontier that would deliver their film project a knock-out punch. Albe had already recruited Stephen Cooney, a gifted young surfer from Collaroy who had been involved in the early phases of filming, which centred on the NSW north coast. Steve, who had left school to go on the trip, was only 15. Albe and Elphick figured they might need someone with a little more experience if they happened upon waves of consequence. Rusty was the guy with the big wave rep and was already doing part-time Ad’ sales for Tracks, the publication that underpinned Falzon’s and Elphick’s cinematic escapades.

As it transpired a photo of Rusty and Steve standing on the edge of the reef at Uluwatu would become one of surfing’s most iconic images, and once footage of their pioneering Uluwatu session appeared on screens, surfers were forever enchanted by the idea of Bali and the archipelago beyond.

These days, Rusty still resides in Byron Bay where he divides his time between taking surf lessons, publishing books, and Rusty’s Byron Guide with his wife Tricia, fighting against over-development and playing in a band. If his favourite wave, Lennox Point, turns on you’ll likely find 78-year-old Rusty gliding down the line on the 7’4” twin fin Dave Rastovich convinced him to try.

Despite recent battles with cancer and suffering a heart attack a few years ago, Rusty remains upbeat, politically engaged, and passionate about the creative community he has surrounded himself with. Below he shares a few stories from his eventful past and fills in the details on the blueprint for a life dictated by the scent of salt air and the sound of breaking waves.

What sort of a surf scene did you grow up in?

I was born in California, in La Jolla, California. So I’m a Southern Califor- nia native, and I grew up in Encinitas. My home beach was Moonlight beach and my right point break was Swamis.

Did surfing in California in the 50s and 60s feel like an act of rebellion?

It was rebellious in the sense that there weren’t that many people doing it rela- tive to the population. But luckily, I had an elder lifeguard/mentor, a guy named John Elwell. He was a good friend of Bob Simmons and he talked about Simmons a lot. I never met him, but he died about a year before I started surf- ing in ’53. And my guru, of course, was Phil Edwards who lived in Oceanside. And Phil Edwards would come down to Swamis. And so I got to surf with Phil who’s still my guru and he’s still alive… he was a very cynical and quiet and recalcitrant kind of person. And then I call him up a couple months ago and I was so happy because he was in such a good state. He was in a really cheery, chatty stage… I’m 78 and he’s about sixorsevenyearsolderthanme. They made a statue of him in Dana Point.

You also became friends with Miki Dora.

I got to know a photographer called Grant Rohloff from LA, and he was a good friend of Miki Dora. No one could tell Miki to do anything except for Grant. He’d get Miki to come over

for tennis and gin rummy with Jon Severson and Miki would arrive there, but otherwise Miki would never do anything for anyone.

The reason was that Grant and Miki had gone through Hollywood High together. They met at the Principal’s office because they were both about to get thrown out of school. While they were waiting for the Principal, they decided to leave the school and go surf- ing. Haha. That’s how they became friends. I knew Miki as being one of the older surfers I hung out with.

When we went to Hawaii to ride the big waves in December, I lived in a house with Grant Rohloff, his wife, Miki Dora, and a guy called Napoleon who made a movie called ‘Ride the Wild Surf’. Miki was also working as a model.They would tell Miki, ‘listen, you’re getting a bit jowly, we don’t want you to eat so much, lose a bit of weight’. I used to sneak peanut-butter and banana sandwiches into the room, so Miki and I were like that (holds two fingers together) haha.We were friends for life. It wasn’t hard to get to know him and I had a great connection with him, but he was a person who was really, very exceptionally different. He could work the system – understand the system.

You put your time in on the North Shore. What was that chapter of your life like?

So, in California I had done a lot of competition surfing and done well, and when I went to Hawaii, I got a bit of a

reputation riding big waves as well.You know, take off on those monsters. Haha. But I had older guys looking after me, guys like Buzzy Trent. I was just begin- ning, and he’d say, “Go on Rusty go for that one.” So I learnt from him. And there was Pat Curren, who only rode big waves; you know he only went out when it was 15–20-foot kinda thing. So, I was living and surfing with him and then the day came, when the ground was shaking, and we went to Waimea. So, I went out with Buzzy and Pat, and I was paddling (motions paddling up a giant wave face…whoa). There was a lot of others out there like Jose Angel and Sammy Lee and they’d say, “OK go for it” and I’d say that’s OK , but no thanks hahaha. But I was lucky to have those guys.

Kauai is a pretty magical place. What was it like to live there in the late 60s?

It was pretty secret. Kauai was sort of off the track. And I knew Joey Cabell, who was building the Chat House in Honolulu and he said, I bought this land in Kauai and you can come over and have a job working on my prop- erty? And I worked with a Japanese guy, and we rebuilt his roads and fruit trees and everything like that. Graham Nash ended up buying it over the years… I stayed in Kauai for three years. And then when I sold the business (Waxmate) in ’68, Mike Doyle moved down to Mexico and then I came over here to Australia.

Was the fabled Taylor Camp in operation when you were in Kauai?

When I moved there, there weren’t a lot of people living at Hanalei, which is near the end of the road. And there was only a house that Joey rented. So, I lived in that home and next door was Howard Taylor and his family. They felt sorry for me, and I used to have dinner with him. So, I got very close to Howard Taylor who just passed away a couple of years ago. So he’s the elder brother of Elizabeth (actress Elizabeth Taylor),ofcourse.Hehadapropertyat the end of the road as you know, where the Taylor camp was. They put these hippies in detention in Kappa (also on Kauai) because they overstayed on a campsite in Hā’ena. So Howard Taylor gave them sanction to be on his prop- erty, and they had this beautiful tree house. It was an amazing commune, and like most communes, it worked for three or four years. Chris Brock lived there for a while. And it was a family. It was a fantastic place. And I lived next door to the Taylor Camp in a little fish- erman’s hut for years. I didn’t I spent a lot of time at the camp, but I did with with Howard and his kids and Eliza- beth’s kids and Tommy Taylor, who is still there.

So you met Elizabeth Taylor during that period?

Yeah. And Howard was building a house. Howard was a really beautiful guy, a real real Hemingway. He was a graphic artist and he worked for scripts. He’d also been in the Korean War. So we knew we were both very sort of anti- Vietnam during that time. You know, we could hear the echoes of the war coming. And we were very cynical about that. So one of the reasons I moved here, of course, was because when I came here, I saw Gough Whitlam and these older guys speaking against the war, so I came here as a political refu- gee in one way, but I didn’t escape the draft I just evaded it. Ha.

So how did your personal history coincide with ‘Morning of the Earth’?

Yeah. I knew I knew Paul Witzig early because I came here (Australia) on a University program in 1966 as part of

a program called ‘University of The Seven Seas’. It was a ship that goes around the world, and I went on two trips around the world. And on one of the trips we ended up in Sydney for a week, and we had a sister club for Windansea Boardriders, which Max Bowman and Robert Conneely were part of. And so when I went to Sydney in ’66 the guys from Windansea picked me up and took me out to Long Reef and all around. I also knew all the Australians who would go to surf the big waves and to make a reputation on the North Shore.

Was it hard to leave Hawaii?

I love Hawaii… It was quite beautiful, but there’s a heavy underground when you live in Hawaii, you know, it’s nice as a visitor but if you live there for a while, there’s some undercurrents that are very, how do you say – dark. Yeah. I don’t discount there are some really amazing people there, but I was happy to move to this place.

So back to ‘The Morning of the Earth Connection’?

Through Paul Witzig I met John Witzig. John was starting at Tracks. I drove down every month from Byron to Whale Beach and stayed with John Witzig and went out to Brookvale (then the epicentre of board making and the Aus’ surf industry) and sold advertis- ing. I was the salesman. They never gave me credit for it by the way, but I was the salesman for advertising in Tracks to Brookvale. Because I knew some of the surfer manufacturers from Hawaii, right? They’d tease the hell out of ‘Septics’ and it took a couple of years for me to realise that the reason Austra- lians like you is that they tease the heck out of you… money.

And the movie?

Eventually David Elphick and Albe thought, oh Rusty’s this big-wave rider from Hawaii, can he take this 15-year- old boy over to Bali, perhaps it’d be better to have older guy? Steve Cooney was 15 and I was 31 and so when we surfed Ulu I was the guy on the left on the logo. The big-wave rider who was gonna sort of more or less be a mate of

Stephen because the movie obviously was about Stephen.

When Albe said you were going to Bali? What picture did you have in your mind? What was your percep- tion of Bali at that stage?

I did political science and history at University, so I read about the coup in the mid 60s, the coup against Sukarno and all the horrible killings of hundreds of thousands of people and stuff. That was only like five years before. I also knew the history of the Bukit, you know, there was apparently at one point a lot of people that were physically forced, at the end of the end of the island, to jump off the cliff. So I knew there was sort of a heavy thing about Bali, but when I went there, I realised how amaz- ing the Hindu Island was, their tradi- tion, you know, and then how beautiful they work, after Bali I think I started to believe in magic. I loved their ability to see spirit in everything. So it really influenced me. Bali was my spiritual revelation… it really changed my life.

Are your memories of that first session at Uluwatu still vivid?

… It was teeming, I mean there was, you know, whales and dugongs and porpoises and sharks and fish and birds; it was just thick… It was beau- tiful. Uluwatu…it was awesome, but it was actually like, friendly to us. We never got hurt.You know, of course, no leg ropes so we lost our boards, but it was friendly. And then we spent the night. And that was really strange at night because we were up against the cliff, we just sort of slept on top of this landfall overnight. I was scared because the water was coming up and the echoes and spirits of that area were pretty alive as I remember… we had afire,andIhadaharmonica–I’ma harmonica player. And we had quite an interesting kind of deep connection, how you say.

Well, I guess the famous photo of you and Steve standing on the edge of the reef before you jump into that teeming ocean, it’s almost a little bit of a metaphor, you’re almost standing on the edge of history because that was a real turning point, I guess for you two person- ally but also for surfing in Bali?

Yeah, well, for me, particularly, because, you know, I’d been to Hawaii and ridden big waves except the problem was (in Bali) that there was all this surf and I was going you know, there wasn’t Joey Cabell, you know, there was nobody around, it was just me and this young boy you know? I had to really pull on my own experience of surf knowledge to do the right thing; you know, how to get out and how to approach that kind of stuff. So basically we walked out on the reef and then paddled towards Kuta.Yeah, that was a big experience.

Did you ride a wave and think, ‘Wow, this is pretty unique’? This is a discovery?

There were good 8 to10 foot waves. There was a significant swell… It’s a heavy wave. As I remember, I think it was incoming tide, which is good. You know, I think it was relatively friendly compared to low tide… I went out 10-to-12 years ago on a nine-foot board and I broke my board and nearly drowned myself, and it was a vey differ- ent experience. (laughs at himself.)

Did you did you go back often, after the first trip?

I’ve been back about four or five times.

When you go back to Uluwatu and you think about the distinction between what it was like when you were sitting at the base of the cliff playing a harmonica 50 years ago and the scale of development now, is it quite striking?

Yeah, of course. But you know, I’m from California, I’m not naive to what they call progress, and even right now in Byron the cliché I like to use is that the billionaires are pushing out the millionaires. So I know about what happened to California because I lived in Encinitas. And then one of the reasons I left California in ’67 and moved to Kauai, was because it was getting too crowded. All these people from New York were moving in. But I’m not, I’m not upset or anything. I mean I can understand why people come to Byron.

If you can’t halt progress what steps can you take to check it or influence how it takes place?

Developers are much more mature than ever.They know how to push; they make big sort of claims on blocks and then they can cut it up. Remember of course, local government in New South Wales do not have any horsepower in a sense. They’re under state legislation with anything over $20 million, which is not that big a deal these days. It’s taken into State Ministers – basically people in the city – make the decision on for instance the west Byron development. But we’re still fighting you know; we do get concessions.We have a Green council, but every second it’s push push push push and anytime there’s any kind of weakness there is 24/7 365 pressure
from developers because they’re paying people right. I read a lot about Rome,
and it’s the Patricians and the Plebes.

The gap is huge but we keep fighting… the big issue we fight here (in Byron) is a high-rise. So we’re trying to stop over three stories and people are trying to go for four. And we are fighting that. And the other one is, of course, the workers; the people who service the tourism. They can’t find a place to rent because there’s so much Airbnb and high rental that it’s hard for the workers to stay.

Well, it does sound like you’re still very politically engaged. I can hear the passion in your voice kicking in.

There’s another generation who is coming up and that’s healthy. A young, entrepreneurial group who’ve been successful in business. Like the guys from Affends, Ben Gordon from Parkway Drive, Johnny Abegg whose wife owns Spell. They’ve been really good about it. There are some young and middle-aged entrepreneurs who are taking the mantle more or less, which is great.

You’ve managed to live a life of a devoted surfer, what’s the secret to doing that?

I guess persistence. I’ve had some health issues. I had a prostate taken away, which is fine. And then I had stage four lymphoma. I finished with my radiation over a year ago and it’s working, completely working to date. So I’ve gone through this amazing system of medical assistance now, like, people in America would have to sell their homes, and, I haven’t. The Australian system, you know, it’s really good.

So your partnership withTricia has been crucial?

I don’t know how I could express it, other than it’s a miracle. Yeah, it’s a miracle.

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