Fellow surfing identity and one of the original Coolie Kids, Peter Townsend was devastated by the loss of his good mate and Tweed-based surfing legend, Michael Peterson, last week.
“I’m at loss for words, feel like I have lost a part of me,” Peter ‘PT’ Townsend said.
“The following is the intro I wrote for his autobiography, it says it best!”
The MP Foreword:
Where do you start to write about someone you grew up with, in the teenage years into manhood.
MP was the first “Surf Freak” I knew, I’ve only known a few. What’s a “Surf Freak”?, Occhy, Curren, Slater, people who have something more going on than the rest of us when it comes to them and the ocean.
Whether it is the way they think about riding waves, the fact that they always seem to catch the best waves, the boards they ride, it all seems natural for them, like they don’t have to think about it. That was MP.
Our relationship through the years was a classic on again, off again, odd couple.
The early years of competing, starting in the Kirra Surfriders Club, building “Cut-Downs” under our parents’ houses a block apart up behind the Catholic church in Coolangatta, to our first surf trips, like to Noosa with Gordon Philipson scoring perfect Ti-Tree, to Bells in ’71 with Joe Larkin, camping on the point at Lennox in a two-man tent with Steve Core, whilst making “In Natural Flow”, to shaping boards at Goodtime with our mate Billy Grant, our lives were consistently entertwined. The first trip to California with the Aussie team in ’72, the “Rainbow Bay” years when we all lived on Enid Ave, MP with Eddie Conlon’s sister down from “The Patch” and up the street in my “Old Man’s” units, the shapers den with Darby, Perry, Gil Glover, sometimes Rabbit and our assorted friends. As my focus took more of a North Shore influence and at the same time my “Cronulla Years” working for G&S, we drifted apart until the winter of ’76 when he’d hang out at the house I was watching at Beach Park for a friend. After that he destroyed us at the first Stubbies at Burliegh and I went off to do “Big Wednesday” leading me to end living in California to the day, whilst MP’s legend grew as you’d hear of “MP Sightings” on the Eastern shores of Oz and mysto appearances at Kirra as he faded from sight into the Eighties.
As for MP’s surfing, he’d taken Nat’s approach and taken it to the next level. His surfing was faster than Nat’s and he packed more manouveres in than anyone thought possible, but he did it with power. In contrast I was more in the flow routine, blending with the power of of our Gatta waves instead of against it, with Rabbit somewhere in-between, but we all rode the tube well and in those early Seventies days of Kirra, there were memorable barrels every day. At his peak coming into the ’77 Stubbies he had taken his surfboard designs to a new frontier, narrower and super sensitive, that he rode in the pocket and he was clearl, I think, the most progressive surfer in the world at that time, kinda like when Slater started the amped out narrow rockered boards in the Nineties.
As for Kirra, MP ruled. In that period, never a day went by where, if he saw it pumping and Rabbit and I were out, he’d be straight out there to catch a better barrell than you’d had that day, just to let you know he was the “King of Kirra”. We were the original “Coolie Kids”, like Fanning. Parko and Deano today.
I think Michael sym-bolises Australian surfing from its Seventies golden era of the short board push that led to the Aussie domination of the Seventies and Eighties until Curren came along.
My mother once told me, “Son, be the best you can be”, the best I could be was to try and be better than MP and for that reason alone I became a great surfer in my time, for that I owe Michael.
As far as any modern day pretenders, there’ll only ever be one MP “Surf Freak” , he was our Miki Dora, James Dean and Marlon Brando all roled into one, only he surfed like a man on a mission and rode our waves in the Gatta like it mattered so he could be, as my mum said “to be the best he could be”.
