Along with the continuing quest for surfboard design advancement, a new impetus for methods of understanding and co-existing with top-order predators has taken precedence.
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In recent months, the area has been put on the map for more tragic reasons, as the tight-knit surfing community was rocked by a series of devastating shark attacks which have given the place a new reputation as not just a subtropical wave haven, but one of the sharkiest places on Earth. In his words: "Any board you can imagine, you'll find it being made here, as well as anywhere in the world." Local shapers like Wayne Webster have taken cues from the old master craftsman of Hawaii, branching out into making modern guns to pilot on the biggest of days. Responding to this, the local surfing community has shown remarkable fidelity to local shapers, and the area has maintained a vibrant boardbuilding industry despite the prevalence of mass overseas production and big-brand incursions. From the short, Greenough Spoon-inspired hulls refined by Chris Brock and Ted Spencer to the channel-bottom single and multi-fins designed and ridden by Phil Myers and the Lismore crew to the South African impetus of Gunther Rohn and Tony Cerff right up to present-day experimentation carried out by Dan Thomson and his modern planing hulls - Lennox Point has been a litmus test for a multitude of design concepts. In his memoir Barbarian Days, Bill Finnegan describes the "first order" problem of the long-term, longitudinal study of a break - of getting it wired, of truly understanding it as the "basic occupation of surfers at their local break." The concept cut across to surfboard design neatly and - in the case of a long, complex, moody pointbreak like Lennox Head, which breaks from two-feet to the biggest a cyclone or Southern Tasman Sea swell can offer - the area has seen every conceivable design innovation tried and refined. Greenough's in-the-tube sequences, shot for Echoes, were filmed inside the hollows of Lennox Point, and his tracks and design principles were embraced and extended by the vitality of blue-collar collaborators like Bob McTavish, Chris Brock and Ted Spencer. The marquee pointbreak of Lennox Head was a vital testing track, ranking alongside globally revered Honolua Bay, Malibu and Rincon as far as being instrumental for this important era in surfboard design. Migrating waves of surfers settled in this Shangri-La in the 1960s, finding the clean, hollow point surf a direct stimulant for the Shortboard Revolution of 1967-69. Servicing this super consistent concentration of quality breaks is a thriving community of surfers, shapers and designers. The Lennox-Ballina area is the ugly, redheaded stepsister that hipsters shun, but it turns into Cinderella when swells arrive, lighting up a plethora of high-quality pointbreaks and shapely beachbreaks. While Byron Bay, immediately to the north, brings all the boys and girls to the yard with its flashy, bohemian hype, the real surfing powerhouse of the region sits right next door.
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