Tim Baker is a well know Australian author and Surf Journalist. His works include: “Bustin’ Down The Door”, “High Surf” and “Occy”. He is a former editor of Tracks and Surfing Life magazines, has twice won the Surfing Australia Hall of Fame Culture Award and his work has been published in many magazines including Rolling Stone, Surfing Life and Surfer’s Journal.

Tim’s latest book “Surfari” documents the fulfilment of his life long dream to drive around Australia on the great Australian surfing road trip. We spoke to him this week about his book and life after being on the road…

GSI: Before we talk about the book tell us how one grows up in Blackburn (Suburban Melbourne, Australia) and becomes a surf obsessed surf journalist?
TB: This is potentially a long story, but I’l try and keep it brief. As a kid, my family lived in Canada for two years and on the trip back to Australia we stopped off in Hawaii for a week. I was only eight but my oldest brother was 12 and he had surf lessons. We stayed at what was the Kui Lima Estate, now the Turtle Bay Hilton, at the north-eastern end of Oahu’s North Shore. I’ve only realised recently, doing the maths, that we would have been there in 1973 around the same time the first generations of Australian pro surfers – Rabbit Bartholomew, Ian Cairns, Peter Townend, etc – were staying their on their early trips to the North Shore. The fact that I ended up writing Rabbit’s biography seemed somehow fated. When I went to Hawaii as a surf journalist I stayed at the Turtle Bay once and had this weird feeling that I’d been there before and then eventually put the pieces together.

Anyway, my brother caught the surfing bug then and when we returned to Melbourne we’d holiday at Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula (Victoria, Australia) or Perth (Western Australia), where my grandparents and aunts and uncles lived. My earliest surfing memories are on a foamie at Cottesloe in Perth. With two out of three sons keen on surfing, a lot of family holidays were at the beach. IN high school, my best friend’s family had a beach house at Phillip Island so we’d get there any way we could – the public transport marathon by train, bus and ferry, hitch-hiking, begging rides from older siblings and parents. It gave me a real appreciation of surfing and the beach because I always had to work to get there and had had an adventure before I even paddled out. I moved to Sydney to work for Tracks when i was 21, then to the Gold Coast to work for Surfing Life five years later and have lived by the beach ever since and surfed at every opportunity. I think because i came to it relatively late, never had the ocean on my doorstep as a kid, I have retained a freshness of appreciation for it and the sheer good fortune of having the ocean and surfing as a part of your life feels like a great gift.

GSI: Tell us about your new book ‘Surfari’.
TB: Australians have always been enamoured with the idea of “the Big Lap” – but most wait until they are retirees, the dreaded “Grey Nomads,” as reward for a lifetime of toil, paying taxes, and raising kids.

I didn’t want to wait until I was old and grey and unable to surf the multitude of mind-boggling waves scattered around our vast coastline. I wanted to do it while I was still young enough to surf at a reasonable level and the kids were still young enough to pull out of school for a year without damaging their education.

The result, while often challenging, was probably the greatest surf trip of my lifetime – and I say that as someone who has spent much of his adult life surfing and traveling around the world, writing as I go.

From the frigid environs of Tasmania and the empty isolation of King Island, the madness of Easter at Bells and the splendor of the Great Ocean Road, the mystical desert camps of South and Western Australia, this is a country with endless empty coastline. Australia is the size of the USA, only slightly smaller than continental Europe, with just 20 million souls to enjoy it. I was amazed how often I surfed alone.

Surfari is a book about our adventure covering nearly 20,000 miles over eight months with a family of four, six surfboards and a caravan…

GSI: How has it been settling back into ‘normal’ home life since you got back from the trip?
TB: I’ve actually found it really difficult. There is a good reason most people wait until they retire to do a trip like this – having tasted freedom it is hard to knuckle down to the work routine again but I think it just means I have to find ways to keep the dream alive, to do what I love and be prepared to live a slightly unconventional life to allow the kind of lifestyle I aspire to. On the road, just waking up each day and making it up as you go, pulling out a map and choosing your next destination, just really agreed with me. I’ve never felt fitter, healthier, more alive. I think deep down the nomadic lifestyle really resonates with something in our DNA.

GSI: Now that you are home how often are you getting in the water?
TB: Never as often as I’d like, though the recent two weeks in the Mentawais has really helped. I’m 47 and as I get older I don’t need to surf as much or as often and going away for a two week wave binge is a pretty good option just to get my fill, and trying to build in the freedom to just drop everything at home and surf when the waves are really good. But I also find I need to keep up my fitness more as I get older too, and if I don’t surf for too long it is easy to lose condition. Twice a week is probably my average but I get a bit picky. Ideally I’d like to get in the water every day, however briefly.

GSI: Are you working on another book?
TB: I’m just finishing the great unfinished novel, called Flow, about a fictitious surf mogul who goes through a kind of spectacular mid-life crisis, realising his business empire has, ironically enough, obscured his connection to surfing and embarks on a quest to redeem himself. I plan to self-publish it as an ebook as a bit of an experiment to see if there’s a market for surf fiction. I’ll be posting updates and extracts on my website: www.bytimbaker.com

GSI: Tell us about your favourite wave or session.
TB: That is so hard to pin down. On our trip round Australia, is was possibly on the Victorian west coast on the Easter/Anzac Day long weekend. On the Easter Sunday I had been at the Rip Curl Pro in a crowd of 10,000 people watching the final. Less than 48 hours later, 100 km to the west, I surfed perfect breachbreaks alone. It really showed me how much empty surf there is in Australia and you only have to look and be prepared to take the path less travelled to find uncrowded waves. That and the SA desert coast, which is notoriously sharky but has so much amazing, empty surf. In my entire life, there have been days at the Coolangatta pointbreaks that are mind-boggling, tubes peeling for 500 metres, three tubes on one wave but of course crazy crowds. A recent trip to the Mentawais staying at the Kandui Resort included some of the best surfs of my life.

GSI: Here at GSI our mantra is ‘Life is better when you surf ‘. How does that statement resonate with you?
TB: Absolutely. I feel clearer, fitter, more on top of things if I am getting in the ocean on a regular basis. I feel better even just knowing what the wind, swell and tide are doing, like I am tapped into the natural rhythm of things more if I stay tuned into these cycles. But I also aspire to a well-rounded life. I think some surfers try and pursue surfing at the exclusion of all else and they can miss out on a lot. Surfing is a like a fuel you can use to drive you on in other areas of your life I reckon. It’s all about balance I reckon.