That Summer At Boomerang might not be quite the book for your surf crazed teenager but for those of us with a longer experience and interest in Australian surfing culture it is required reading. Phil Jarratt has put Duke Kahanamoku's famous tour into its historical and social context with an exhaustively researched account of the events and personalities surrounding it, with particular focus on Duke's relationship with Isabel Letham, the teenage girl he taught to surf at Freshwater Beach.

Those who research and write about myths always run the risk of missing the point, since the point is the myth, not the reality. Myths are constructed from the rough framework of events, thickly rendered with cultural bias. So it is always brave to embark on an exercise, as Phil Jarratt has here, likely to result in a stripping away of that render. To push the analogy a little further, a builder soon learns not to judge by appearances since they can hide the basic structure of a building. Ripping off the metaphorical render then runs the risk of exposing the myth as structurally unsound.

Although it was probably not his intention, Jarratt's text certainly provides ammunition for those with iconoclastic tendencies by revealing the extent to which Australian surfing had developed prior to Duke's tour, the power of the publicity machine that accompanied it and the exploitation of Duke's talent by his Australian promoters. But myths are nothing if not resilient. Generations of Australians have known that Gallipoli was a shambolic defeat, but it has never stopped them from celebrating it as a glorious triumph. 

So it is with Duke. It is surely beyond dispute that Australian surfing was going to continue to expand, with or without the stimulus he provided. It is even debatable whether, 100 years later, he made any significant difference at all to the long term development of the sport. The myth though will survive that analysis. We need our gods and heroes and anyone doubting Duke's place in the pantheon has never stared at the statue of him erected on Freshwater headland where he stands, as he does in our mythology, so much larger than life.

The irony is that, having placed him on a pedestal, Australian surfing then largely repudiated the values that he taught. The aloha spirit and the relaxed, non-competitive style of the Waikiki beach boys never took hold in a sporting culture dominated by the narrow authoritarian attitudes of the swimming and life saving clubs and even decades later, when boardriders broke away from that culture, it was not long before similar attitudes emerged and organised surfing competition assumed an importance that would have been incomprehensible to the happy-go-lucky Hawaiian beach boys of Duke's era. 

Throughout the text there is a real tension between Jarratt's obvious desire for historical accuracy and the need to entertain. It is a sustained balancing act with remarkably few wobbles along the way but it is one that inevitably subverts the desire to the need. Despite all the research and detail it is hard to look at this as a totally reliable history when, by his own admission in the Author's Note, some undefined quantity of the direct speech comes directly from his imagination. It may be that the best way to view the text is to consider it as layered. There is the historical level, the well researched level of who was where when and what they were doing. The next level might be described as the inferential level where the author draws presumably sound conclusions about the characters' interactions and opinions based on the evidence. The third level is the pure speculation of some of the direct speech.

All this is not only forgivable but a demonstration of the author's craftsmanship. A strictly historical account of these events would be a purely academic exercise. It is not possible to dramatise the limited material available without a liberal application of imagination. The characters portrayed here, walk, talk and breathe but if, at the end, you fail to be quite convinced that they are true to their actual personalities, then you are still left with that underlying level of factual reporting upon which you can place your own interpretation.

The story of Duke also raises the spectre of the cultural cringe; the concept that the native Australian product can never match the best of other cultures. Why else would we ignore Tommy Walker's achievements and idolise Duke? Not just then, but ever since. If we are really interested in the development of Australian surfing surely the story of the merchant seaman who bought a board in Hawaii, surfed up and down the NSW coastline for years before Duke arrived and who was acclaimed as our best surfer of the era, is of at least equal significance. But there is no statue of him on a prominent headland and his name remains virtually unknown.  

The open, non-judgemental style he has adopted restricts Jarratt's ability to directly address some of the more controversial issues raised by the story. The Australian culture of the time was racist and sexist. It allowed already wealthy men to benefit from Duke's achievements while he himself received no financial benefits at all. These are not side issues they are central to the story and its aftermath. Then there was the split-level hypocrisy: that of the white elite in celebrating Duke when they had only recently deported, after years of indentured labour, some of his fellow Polynesians, and that of Duke himself in being prepared to be treated as an honorary white.

Whatever you think of the myth or of Duke himself, this book does us a great service in collecting everything known about these events into a single well referenced text. It is a great achievement to not only have marshalled the research into an entertaining text but also to have produced one that allows the reader an opportunity to place their own interpretation on the events described. //blindboy

That Summer At Boomerang is published by Hardie Grant and retails for $29.95.