Sometimes activism just finds you, and that was the case for Ben Brown.
As a teenage surfer on Manly Beach in the 1980s, you didn’t have a lot to complain about... until the wind turned southeast. “There'd just be shit in the water, big clouds of it, condoms, plastic... it was just gross,” he recalls. It’s hard to imagine that the two most iconic beaches in Australia today – Manly and Bondi – once had ocean outfalls nearby that pumped raw sewage onto them.
But this was a different time, before these beaches had multi-million dollar buy-ins, so the job of saving them fell to surf rats like Ben and his mates. “The place was still pretty real in those days. This was before Manly was fully gentrified, so it was just the surfers and some middle-aged greeny lefties who lived there, rather than all the middle-aged right-wing millionaires who live there these days.
“There was a couple of us – a couple of guys from North Steyne, a couple of Queenscliff – and we had the idea of doing a march along the beach to protest.” The local surfers formed a protest group POOO – People Opposed to Ocean Outfalls – and took the campaign to the Steyne. “They were huge,” Ben remembers of the marches. “The first couple went from Queenscliff Surf Club up to North Head. People were marching the entire length of the beach.”
The local surfers would soon learn that when it comes to environmental campaigns, even when you win, you often lose at the same time. “They just moved the outfall further out to sea so nobody could see it,” recalls Ben. The other unforeseen outcome was that with Manly Beach now clean, the big money moved in and the scumbag surfers living in share houses were forced out.
There was a distinct crossover between the worlds of punk and protest at the time. “Punk back then – as opposed to punk now – was pretty new,” offers Ben. “It was pretty progressive and left wing, but in those days, it was just a weird crew of like-minded people. Punk kids were the kids who wanted to be different and wanted to speak up against all this bullshit they saw in society, which for surfers were the ocean outfalls.”
