In recent years, surf history has become a niche genre in book publishing. Tales of yore printed in ink on paper with the odd period photo to animate our imaginations.

Of course, it's not the only way to record history; stories can be told in many ways, and in the case of Andrew Flitton, a keen if unlikely historian, he's chosen to record history in music.

The stories he's chosen are personal: the people and the places of the town he calls home. Though personal to him they're familiar to many of us as the story of Torquay looms large in surf culture.

Recently, Flinno chatted to Swellnet about Jarosite, his band, named after the old mine near Bells, how it came into being, and also about his Torquay songs.

Jarosite:

I've always played guitar but I couldn’t consistently sing in tune. I didn't understand musical keys and the relative chords. In 2014 I hurt my back doing yoga of all things, herniating my L4 disc in my lower back and damaging the nerve in my right leg. I couldn't surf or even walk for a few months and was mostly confined to laying on a flat surface.

Through this time a friend introduced me to keys and the use of capos so that without knowing a lot of chords, I could move the capo around on the neck to get the key that suits my voice. This was my turning point that opened up the window of song writing and ultimately Jarosite. 

Before this we had lived in Queensland for ten years which was great but I never felt home and being there made me very aware of my heritage in Torquay and the desire to connect with my heart there. There was a lot of song content buried in my feelings and writing and playing songs became very therapeutic. 

The band thing came about very organically. I was on a boat trip with a group of Jan Juc mates and I’d taken a guitar with me. Onboard was this guy who I didn’t know at the time - called Ben Day. He was mucking around with a harmonica, and he was a little bit the same as me: not really understanding keys and how they worked. We were mucking around at night having Bintang singalongs and playing these songs that I'd written, and thinking, ‘We could actually be onto something here...’

When we came back we played a few terrible gigs around the place under the name Southern Freight. We were terrible but underneath it we had good songs. We kept working on the songs and met up with another local guy Luke Batterbury through Chris Hay at Waves. Luke is a great piano player and drummer and he recorded and produced our first album, Sea Away.

Ben and I were still playing around and at one of the shows this guy Oscar Lalor came up and said, "You guys need a lead guitarist." And we went, "Yeah, we do." And he goes, "Well, I'm here!" Then the three of us were playing around and at a gig Tommy Castles, who’s an amazing guitarist himself, and later became our producer, goes, "You guys need a percussionist." We agreed, so he joined as our bongo playing percussionist, then we were playing as a four piece and at another gig, a guy, Jasper Bingham, came up and said, "You guys need a bass player" and that was it, Jarosite was formed.

So we came together organically...and we fell apart organically too. Through COVID we just couldn't keep it together. There were no gigs for us and everybody just did other things. I’ve got a studio at my house so I kept writing new songs and in 2022 we got back together and recorded with the addition of Carl Dickens, an amazing guy on violin and Jake Pickering on drums.

Jarosite (l to r) Tommy, Jasper, Flinno, Oscar, Ben

Springside:

It’s believed that Springside was the first house ever built in Torquay, possibly around 1880 to 1890. Even in the 1960s it was an old house, but beautiful, lined with cedar pine, coloured glass windows, and a wooden kitchen sink. It was located on a big block of land across the road from the Torquay Pub. If you were looking west, towards Bells, from the pub that's where it was. There's a carpark there now.

Torquay has always had these houses where groups of surfers congregated. It's been this thing that they move to town or out from home and in together to save costs and you get this hot spot of like-minded people. Over the years there's been a lot of them, and they’re quite significant as everyone would congregate at them to live and party. I think that’s what I like about Springside as it was one of the earliest of these houses, and the main one of that time.

To talk about Springside we have to talk about Charlie Bartlett, originally from Maroubra, who later became known as 'Charles Of The Sea' and later as Krishna Praceta - One of the God’s of the Ocean. Simon Buttonshaw was the influential guy there, living between Springside while attending Melbourne College of the Arts, a great surfer and artist, designer of the Rip Curl rubber soul logo and good friend of Doug 'Claw' Warbrick, co-founder of Rip Curl. Also living there was Greg 'Fledge' Hill, Victorian Junior Champion at the time, and the infamous John 'Boong' Robinson. These guys were great surfers, as good as any visiting surfer due to their exposure to local Lorne friend Wayne Lynch who they benchmarked off. It was also meeting place for all types of surfers like design pioneer George Greenough and Hawaiians like Reno Abellira.

I’d known Charles for a long time after this - he's fifteen years older than me but I have a huge respect for these guys. A few years back he was staying at Fledge’s [Greg Hill] house in Jan Juc and I went around there to visit him and we had a cup of tea, which he calls char. So we had a cup of cha, and looked at old photos and talked about those times, as he loves to do.

He’s telling me these stories about living through those times and not having a care in the world, not having a job apart from cleaning the Torquay Pub at night for $10 a week so he could surf all day, not needing to do anything, dodging the Vietnam War, and all this sort of stuff. And it all just played in the back of my head with a rhythmic storyline and I went home and wrote the Springside song. It all came from having a “cup of cha” with Charles. It’s about the place and it’s about the time, and it’s perfectly captured in the famous photo taken by John Witzig, even though Simon is unfortunately missing from the shot.

I wrote the song and played it acoustically to Charles and it was a beautiful moment. Sitting out on the deck of Fledge’s house where we ended up filming the clip. He had tears in his eyes as he listened and stared off into the distance lost in thought. We didn’t record it for a few years and when it was done, I was listening to it and thought, ‘Well, the whole song is really written about that photo. So I emailed John Witzig and said, "Look, I've got this song, I'd love to be able to use your Springside photo”

And he replied back expressing his reservations - his photos are sacred and sell for a lot of money. And I was like, "Yeah, no worries, I totally get that, and for good reason, you’re a master, it was worth a try, can I just send you the song to listen to anyway?"

He received it, and this time replied in capital letters, "LOVE IT!" with an exclamation mark. "You can use any photos you want to make the film clip."

Incredible. We'd never met before, but I was like, "Well, that's fantastic, mate. Thanks very much” I’d always heard he was an amazing guy and I just experienced it. 

John was very generous with his photos, and he even started telling me the back stories because he's got a colorful history himself from Angourie to Cactus and everywhere in-between. After this response I was talking to Jack McCoy about it and he goes, "Oh man, I’ve got all Brewster Everett's photos. He willed them to me." Brewster was also a character from those times, so some of those photos also appear in the film clip as well.

Springside only lasted till about 1972. I don't think there was anything spectacular like a fire, it just got old and bulldozed and turned into a carpark. Of the people who lived there, Fledge now lives in Bowen in Queensland with his partner Annie, Charles Bartlett is now in Inverell with his partner Lee, John Robinson sadly passed away recently, and Simon Buttonshaw lives down in Port Fairy on Victoria’s far west coast and is still a prolific artist. As for the other guys in John’s photo like Little Charlie, Chris Young, Nat’s younger brother, and the other guys, I don't know, they all just went their different ways.

However, there's a second generation doing well, like Fledge’s son Randall who’s a good young surfer, and Shyama Buttonshaw, a very proficient shaper and beautiful stylish surfer who is always one of the best guys out at Bell’s or Winkipop on the big days.

Springside was recorded and produced by Tommy Castles at Lotus Studio. The clip was filmed and produced by Scott McClimott from Juc Media.

Hey Joe Sweeney:

Joe Sweeney was the generation of surfers before Charles Bartlett and the Springside mob. They all came from Melbourne or Geelong. They’d come down here on weekends and holidays and rampaged around the original Torquay Camping Grounds. They were known as 'The D’s' - the dropouts of the Torquay SLSC. They lived in caravans and prefabs in the caravan park and later built a house out the back of Torquay called Boot Hill. Aside from Joe there was Owen Yateman, Al Reed, Rex 'China' Gilbert, and SLSC champion Vic Tantau, Dick Garrard Snr, who was also an Olympic wrestler along with Joe. These guys were no slouches, they were ‘peak performance’ kind of guys, hard-working through the week and running amok on weekends, surfing, diving for crayfish and exploring the then new coastline.

They did the transition from 16-foot toothpicks to fibreglass boards. When the Olympics came to Melbourne in ‘56, the Americans brought fibreglass boards and did a demonstration at Torquay, that was the turning point from plywood toothpicks to longboard surfboards. This was their time.

Joe’s son Jeff is one of my best mates. And when Joe passed away, Jeff asked me to MC his funeral. Through that process, with Jeff telling me all these stories, the song just came together.

As the verses go in that song, he made the bell for the Bells Beach Rip Curl Pro for 40 odd years – an honor which has now been passed to Jeff. Joe also rallied the local surfers to bulldoze the trail into Bells. He was involved in many of the town’s significant moments like the building of the original Jan Juc Surf Life Saving Club. Joe was an amazing man and has left an incredible legacy in Torquay.

The track was recorded and produced by Luke Batterbury.

Everything Must Change:

This song is about inevitable progress. The change that is happening in all surf towns, not just Torquay, although this film clip is purely about Torquay. Many surfers are blessed to live in these amazing places, drawn by the surf and the space. As things progress, non-surfing people move in for other reasons to exploit business or real estate opportunities, changing what we all came to enjoy.

There are some great old photos in this clip provided by Torquay Museum Without Walls and Barrie Sutherland, and some old 70’s Super 8 footage that was shot by young Torquay guys Kym Potter, Rod Belton, Glen Turnbull, and Adrian Borsje - who later died in a car accident. They were doing a school project at Oberon High School and needed footage for the story, so they wagged school, 'borrowed' one of their mums’ cars, without licenses of course, and drove down to Bells from Geelong filming it all on a Super 8 camera.

They drive along the old road before Bells Boulevarde as you go today. Coming in through Addiscot Road and down into the old dirt Bells car park. The surf's small but they go out riding these Pat Morgan twin keel fin boards that would be collector boards today, wearing original zig zag stitched Rip Curl springsuits.

Everything must change, but some things stay the same. We pull up into a bitumen carpark now but the foliage is better due to work by council and dedicated local groups like SANE - Surfers Appreciating Natural Environment. Coincidentally, one of the founders of SANE was Charles Bartlett, along with Grayme and Phil Stockton and Gordon Stammers. The cliffs are the same and the waves are still the same although a few more crew out..

This song was recorded and produced by Tommy Castles at Lotus Studio. Photos thanks to Chris Barr at Torquay Museum Without Walls and Barrie Sutherland Watermarks Gallery. Film clip produced by Scott McClimott from Juc Media.

Storm Coming:

Storm Coming is written about the passing of Steve Perry. Steve is a long time Torquay local who ran the Rip Curl retail store for twenty or more years, and later Oakley Sunglasses in Australia. He gave me my first surf industry job in the retail store and was my next door neighbor for 22 years. Steve became unwell and fought for quite a few years. 

When it was getting close, Jack McCoy came down to see him and stayed at our place. When he came back from a visit he said he didn’t think he had long and I was very distraught. Not knowing what to do or how to deal with it, I stood outside with my guitar looking up at the sky and started stumming until I found a chord progression and started playing my heart out sobbing with tears falling onto the guitar. I was just looking up in the sky howling and a big storm came out of nowhere. This big black rainstorm with a wind change rolled through for a few minutes then cleared and calmed down to a beautiful big rainbow contrasted against the dark clouds in the distant.

I just stood there and sang what I was seeing and feeling. Feeling that it might have just happened. This eerie strange weather as if God had taken him in the storm. 

I found out later that that Steve had passed away that day.

After I’d written and recorded the song, I sent it to Jo, Steve’s wife, hoping she was ok and that it wasn’t an intrusion of privacy, and she said, "I can't believe it...that was the moment." And she sent me a photo of her standing at the window looking out at the rainbow.

It’s a very special song about a special man and a very special family.

The song was recorded and produced by Tommy Castles at Lotus Studio and the video was produced by Jono Spiteri, a local photographer and filmmaker and son of prominent local fisherman and hell goofyfooter Mick Spiteri.