NIPPLEGATE v.2.0

Frank convinced me it was the perfect publicity shot but I have a sneaking suspicion he was taking the piss. Well the chickens came home to roost today when the above shot was plastered across page 24 of The Geelong Advertiser. The phone ran hot, and not all of the comments were complimentary. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and the accompanying article by Noel Murphy certainly made up for the “wardrobe malfunction”. “McAloon plumbs the drive behind the nomadic surf addict… the romance, the giants, the characters, the behind-the-scenes image-and-myth builders of surfing,” Murphy wrote. “He’s catalogued his travels amid observations and musings drawn from such disparate sources as James Cook, Charles Darwin and Bruce Chatwin. Even Ireland’s legendary Finn MacCool enters the fray.”

The Geelong Addy are out of the blocks with the first newspaper article about Deep Water, but Australasian Surf Business (ASB) magazine has beaten them to the punch with the first review. ASB ran a review in issue #30 (June/July), describing Deep Water as “beautifully crafted yarn-spinning”. “McAloon also shows himself to be an avid reader of surfing lore and literature, quoting everyone from Jack Finlay to Daniel Duane, Bunker Spreckels and even Alain de Botton, as he takes a good-humoured tilt at the impossible task – a wide-angle portrait of surfing and everyone in it.”

But possibly the strangest by-product of Nipplegate v.2.0 was an unsolicited approach from Ralph magazine (and I thought I looked flat-chested!) asking me to compile a list of “the 10 best unknown international surf breaks”. Cactus, Port Campbell, Kauai… I decided that maybe that there was such a thing as bad publicity.