Just in time for Christmas...err, the New Year, comes Phil Jarratt's latest book, 'That Summer At Boomerang'. Here's the press release:

A century ago a young Sydney schoolgirl goes to the beach near her home and sees a tall, dark and handsome stranger carry a plank of wood down to the water and paddle it out into the churning waves. Then, wonder of wonders, he turns around and launches the plank and himself onto a huge wave and rides majestically to shore.

Within a couple of weeks, 15-year-old Isabel Letham is riding to shore in the arms of the world’s most exotic athlete, the full-blood Hawaiian swimming and surfing champion Duke Kahanamoku, in front of huge crowds of disbelieving onlookers. Her life will never be the same.

Veteran author and journalist Phil Jarratt has written about surfing for most of his career, and has penned best-selling histories of the sport and industry as well as biographies of surfing legends Kelly Slater and Jeff Hakman. But the surf story that intrigues him most has more to do with manners, morals, love, loyalty and the birth of leisure on the eve of the war to end all wars, than it does the act of riding waves.

Taking Duke Kahanamoku’s tour of Australia and New Zealand in the first summer of the Great War as his canvas, Jarratt has painted a detailed and fascinating picture of the intersecting worlds of sport, business and politics in Australia and Hawaii at a seminal moment in history, “when fun was young”.

When the fun-loving, ukulele-strumming Waikiki beach boy arrived in Australia, the beach was still to most a daunting place where only a handful of years earlier surf bathing had been punishable by law. After his visit surfing became a national obsession. But many of those Duke introduced to wave riding would never return from the shores of Galipolli or the fields of France. This is the poignancy of That Summer At Boomerang.

Phil Jarratt has written more than 35 books, edited national magazines, run his own publishing house, been a marketing head at surf company Quiksilver, consulted to the investment world and run more than a dozen world championship surfing events. He is regarded as one of Australia’s leading surf historians and has received Surfing Australia’s prestigous culture award three times. In 2010 his history of the surf industry, Salts and Suits, was shortlisted for the Blake Dawson Prize for business literature. With daughter Sam Smith, he also finds time to run the annual Noosa Festival of Surfing, the biggest event of its kind in the world.

Phil is an accomplished public speaker and an amusing and informative interview subject. “Jarratt was excellent company when he joined us on ABC News Breakfast… and he was charming in his desire to poke fun at himself,” said ABC’s Virginia Trioli. He is available for media interviews at any time, and will also be touring his “magic lantern slide show” from January 2014.

“It’s actually not a slide show at all,” he says, “but a talk show and video presentation about Duke Kahanamoku’s groundbreaking 1914-15 tour, inspired by the shows put on by one of Duke’s contemporaries, Elias Burton Holmes. I’ve been time travelling back to the birth of beach culture for years, and now I want to take people with me.”

That Summer At Boomerang will be published by Hardie Grant on 1 January 2014.