Review: 'When The Ocean Awakens' by Marti Paradisis

The digital age promotes rapid sharing of information, and yet whatever it is we’re sharing, it’s not meaningful stories. They seem rarer than ever. Even when someone finds the time or place to type and send, where can we find it a year later when we want to reread it? Stories are meant to endure, to be revisited, by you and by others, and a world without them exists in a permanent ‘now’ with no link to its history.

With thirty stories - surprisingly well written - there’s a lot to read in When The Ocean Awakens, the recent book from Marti Paradisis. In a sharp bit of editing, a great many of the stories don’t just sit there as words naked on the page. Very often the photos match the story being told so the response is multi-sensory.

An example is Tyler Hollmer-Cross’ story on the ever-elevating risks that he and his friends were taking during their ascent from Tassie beachies to Shippies to Govs to Pedra Branca, which culminated in a 2013 wave at Pedra that turned dream to nightmare in an instant.

In the same time it takes to read this sentence, Stu Gibson captured a breathtaking six-shot sequence of Tyler. Yet in the accompanying text, Tyler expands time, giving voice to his thoughts during those horrifying moments between thinking he would get the barrel of his life to being pressed against the seafloor while running out of oxygen. No need for the reader to call upon their imagination when the actual images sit on the opposite page.

It’s not the only coupling of words and photo with similar stories from his brother James Hollmer-Cross - also a Pedra Branca horror show, Kelly Nordstrom, Kyron Rathbone, Sam Thomas, Alex Zawadski, and others too. Yet even when the photos tell a different tale, the imagery is nothing short of excellent. With work from Stu Gibson, Andy Chisolm, Matt Tildesley, Nick Green, and Nick Nairn-Smith, it could quite easily stand alone as a gallery-level photo book. Instead it’s more than that.

Though a compendium of stories, When The Ocean Awakens is Marti Paradisis’ project. Through an extended introduction, Marti details his migration from Hobart’s northern suburbs, to intermittent beach visitor, and onwards to a life far beyond the Clifton shorey. But not too far, it’s a Tasmanian collection of stories after all. Marti is the ideal MC for this collection, as he and his group came of age when Tasmania itself also rose to prominence. No longer a cold surfing backwater but a wave zone that surfers the world over could recognise by photo alone.

Many of the stories detail these wonder years when the Tassie crew realised they had a wave in their backyard that people would travel far to surf. The discovery of Shippies didn’t just give credit to what was largely an overlooked state, it gave purpose to a whole host of people who wondered about the possibilities. Surf Shippies well enough and you could get noticed by the international surf media. The same goes when photographed well. Shippies jumpstarted the careers of many surfers and photographers, and even putting the professional aspects aside, it simply became the place around which their island surf culture grew.

A wild ocean doesn't discriminate, and similarly Marti has looked beyond his tight group of #southernlords, handing the quill to earlier crew such as Andrew Campbell and Dustin Hollick, rising groms such as Noah Hassett, and to bodyboarders such as Harley and Charles Ward.

Though mainlanders made early inroads, it was locals who really discovered the bleeding edge of possibility at Shipsterns Bluff. How late can you hit the step? How big can it be ridden? With Shippies among one of the heaviest waves in the world, this made the surfers who rode it the world’s bravest and/or craziest.

It also caused the Shipsterns crew to wonder what else broke around the rim of their small rocky island. The open ocean bommie their mate Dave Wyatt once saw? The rock outcrops near Port Davey that promised so much? Among other things, When The Ocean Awakens is an ode to being young, of itching to discover, of driving highways in the middle of the night as storms rage up the coast, or setting out from port on a repurposed fishing trawler to intercept a swell somewhere over the horizon.

It’s a small island, but Tasmania is home to big waves which give rise to big surfing stories. When The Ocean Awakens is home to the best of these stories, now and forever.

Published by Salty Minds, 206pp, 'When The Ocean Awakens' is available online.