Aug 1973 - Tuning In

Beneath a bold, purple masthead, a perfectly balanced David ‘Baddy’ Treloar slings through an Angourie bowl. Inside issue #35, co-editor, David Elfick, talks of ‘Paradise found in Bali’ – a return flight for under $300, cheap transport on the ground and all those perfect waves to plunder. Elfick and Albe Falzon’s new film, ‘Crystal Voyager’ gets a full-page promo. It stars George Greenough on a transcendent quest in search of ‘curving arcs, full-bore power and the sunlit tube’. Meanwhile, the record reviewer takes readers to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon where ‘few have seen and no-one’s been’. Coincidentally, Elfick pulls off one of the biggest coups in surf movie history and secures a Pink Floyd soundtrack for the final section of ‘Crystal Voyager’. The film within in a film is called ‘Echoes’ and features Greenough’s fabled inside the tube footage. Around the world audiences embrace Greenough’s circular-framed, psychedelic adventure. Back in the already legendary columns of the Tracks letters page, a young woman succinctly espouses the surfing philosophy she and her friends live by. ‘We don’t do it for the pose, we don’t do it for the novelty, we do it because it makes us what we are.’ The words still ring true.