My First Board I Found in the Rafters

by David Bromley

This story is really about surfboards… making them, restoring them, painting on them, collaging them, and about how they’ve woven themselves through my life.

Over the years I’ve collected hundreds of boards from all eras and every imaginable corner of the coastline. Yet, after decades of living by the sea and surfing almost daily, I made the difficult decision to move inland, away from the coast, and therefore surf very rarely now.

So maybe the best place to begin is with those decades in the water.

There was a time when I only felt comfortable close to the sea. I think it’s fairly well known now that I have a multitude of phobias and irrational fears. Mental illness is something I talk about constantly, probably due to the fact that my life changed dramatically from about age 15 when I started to experience unbearable emotional suffering that debilitated me for most of my life. I have pretty much been a fighter my whole life though, and endlessly try to find ways around every hurdle and challenge I experience. I am well aware that many of the things that go on in my head are irrational, and I am very fortunate that as I get older – with the help of medication and decades of trying to work out ways to live alongside my mind rather than against it, I’ve managed to find ways to cope.

One of the problems is agoraphobia – the overwhelming anxiety I get when I am in open spaces. It can be as simple as crossing a road or walking along a footpath. If I am walking with someone, I always like to be on their left-hand side. Also, I am far better off with something to hold onto. I can even walk with a bicycle, but to stand or walk in an open area makes me feel as if I am going to float off the earth.  This made everyday life an almost impossible challenge.

All of that could fill several books. Even Bromley: Light After Dark, the film that took five years to make, only begins to touch on it. Interestingly, we won an art film festival in Venice Beach, which made sense given the subject matter in art. But we also won at a major travelling film festival in the Northern Hemisphere called Mental Fest, which focused on mental health. It’s as if my two worlds in art and mental illness, were acknowledged in tandem. (And somewhere here I know there’s another chapter to this story, perhaps still forming.)

But what does all that have to do with surfing?

Quite a lot, actually.

When I talk about needing to move constantly, that’s exactly how I surf. Sitting still on a board, bobbing in the deep, makes me hyper-aware of the horizon stretching endlessly away, or the shoreline sitting far in the distance. This is why I love the point breaks at Noosa Heads and Byron Bay. Even after the paddle out, the land is still right beside you, the wave peeling away from the point. There, I can move, catching wave after wave, or paddling around positioning myself. Because if I sit motionless, the fear of open space creeps in.

So how did I even end up on a board in the first place?

I’ve often said I must have a guardian angel. One day, in my early 20’s, while spiraling deeper in my mental illness and directionless life, I was standing in my parents’ shed and I looked up. There in the rafters was a surfboard. I took it down, threw it in the car, and went surfing. As a kid I’d body-surfed, mucked around on boogie boards and occasionally borrowed a surfboard, but this was different. This time I was on a mission, partly driven by my heavy health challenges I’d been going through, and decided I would become fit, tanned, strong, and get myself straight – clear out my head.

Surfing quickly became everything, along with swimming, running along the beach, climbing rocks, skipping stones, beachcombing. It became a constant presence and I surfed as if there was no tomorrow.

Slowly, the phenomenal sickness that had ruled me began to lift, as though a new version of myself was emerging from beneath a cloud.

The clouds came and went, and as I’ve often mentioned, the beast is still inside me – the thing that no matter what success, wellness, or friendships I have, can all be bowled over by periods of overwhelming internal suffering. These dark periods have been there for as long as I can remember. I have experienced times of extraordinary wellness and happiness and success, and then bang, I get a full force blow that knocks me down. But I always find a way to get back up. Work and art have always been my greatest saviours. When I paint, fear and anxiety loosen their grip and I am transported to another space where time becomes irrelevant. I disappear into another place entirely.

Surfing and art both give me the balance, the rhythm, the focus on the present moment. They save me. So this story – about surfboards, art, and all the spaces in between, is really a story about survival.

 

 

I’d love to say I’ve conquered all of this, but what I can say is that meeting the love of my life, Yuge, fifteen years ago brought with it a profound and lasting happiness. Medication helps, too… enormously. Surfing still lives within me, even if I’m no longer by the ocean every day. After decades in the water, from cyclone swells to days of just mucking around in the shorebreak, it’s part of my DNA.

But my deep passion for art, my need for large studios, my love of sheds, collecting, gardening, and land, combined with a longing for a slower life in the trees, ninety minutes from Melbourne, made living inland make sense. Warm water was a luxury I had for years, and it spoilt me. Surfing now requires more effort.

 

So instead, I make boards. Restore them. Reinvent them. Decorate them. Patch them. Glass them. I get to stay connected to surfing through the boards themselves. Strangely enough, I do a huge amount of this work in my swimming pool. After stripping wax and scrubbing away years of grime, sometimes collected from backyards, under houses, or half buried in the bush, I clean them with scrapers, steel wool, wet-and-dry sandpaper, and sometimes a stop at the car wash. Then I patch, tape, collage, carve into them, drop signwriting and quotes into them.

I have such a good time turning them into something new, objects that carry another part of their story. They become symbols of a journey, of a guy who’s gotten older and a bit heavier, who lives among the trees rather than the waves, but who still, almost every day, carries a surfboard under his arm.

Sometimes I think making them is just as much fun as surfing was. David Bromley

See collection of David Bromley Surfboards, Skim Boards at Aravina Estate this summer – situated in the heart of Margaret River’s wine region. 

 

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