SurfEXPLORE, the book, marks the culmination of a multi-decadal project from photographer and provocateur John Seaton Callahan and his surfEXPLORE personnel. The aim and content of the book is self-explanatory: finding and documenting obscure and novel surfing locations, some of which have been surfed before, some of which are being pioneered for the first time.

A large chunk of the potential readership, judging from reactions below the line on both sides of the Pacific, sees this book and its author as morally compromised from the beginning; an illegitimate exercise in 'neo-colonialism' and exploitation for the enrichment of the author. They see what remaining secret spots there are as sacrosanct and requiring protection from the ravages of commercialism.

Callahan, of course, rejects this view and claims that surf tourism and its related development brings an economic benefit to the inhabitants of a region and thus should be encouraged, even if secret spots are blown out and once quiet corners of the planet become subject to over-crowding.

By inclination and experience, I belong to the former view. We'll ventilate those issues below, but first a look at the actual book.

The book is divided into 28 chapters, each one detailing a separate location and surfEXPLORE mission. It's a broad geographical palette, arranged in alphabetic order, ranging from Algeria to Haiti, Western Sahara to The Phillipines. Each chapter follows a set template with the author outlining a brief history of the location, some of the struggles involved in travelling to and through the location - mostly dealing with government officials and paperwork - and detailing the surf spots and surfing that was done on the trip.

Travel writing has a rich history and while Callahan is competent at composing a sentence, he's no natural born storyteller. His writing would best be described as utilitarian. It's a dry prose that conveys information but lacks spark, originality, and emotion. Tim Cahill, travel writer and founding member of Outside Magazine, famously called adventure, “physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility."

This sense of emotional and physical travail leading to a pay-off of in perfect waves is absent in the book. Sure, the bland descriptions are there but that sense of crushing boredom or disappointment, despair, anticipation, and soaring, almost unbearable bliss known to everyone who has searched off the beaten track for surf is missing. The book is poorer for this lack of emotional amplitude. That may be a bit harsh but the book doesn't quite fit into the other category of guide/information book à la Lonely Planet or some of the more classic surfing guidebooks. It's not quite travel writing and not quite a guide book.

Likewise the photography and layout tends to the meat and potatoes. The sunset shots are there, the surf shots are all front lit and tack sharp, but it lacks highlights and impact. A lot of that just comes down to the impossibly high standards set by our over-saturated surf media where the bar of perfection has been continually raised to try and hold fractured attention spans. Many of the locations in the book, especially surf-wise, just aren't that photogenic. Brown water windswell surf shots where the surf is mediocre and the action only modest just don't carry much impact in the modern surf world. Sure, they would be fun to surf if you were there. But as a lure to create some yearning to escape the work-a-day world they just don't cut it.

I appreciate Callahan wanted to create a retrospective of his work and seek a return on all the images he had created over the decades but the book would have had far more impact on the back of a strong edit. Too much B-grade material dilutes the whole. If the spots weren't named there would be a mystery to be solved via searching the photos for clues but absent that pay-off there's simply not enough narrative work done by the massive amount of B-roll shots to justify their inclusion.

The surfEXPLORE group is pitched as a collective but the personnel beside Callahan are strangely mute. Big personalities with rich histories of surf exploration like Randy Rarick and Emiliano Cataldi seem to function as warm props for the Callahan vision. Sam Bleakley is a geographer and PhD recipient, a published author on surf sustainability. What did they think? What was their input and agency? Their personalities, characters, and individual experiences remain a cypher through the book. Did they have thoughts about exposing these locations to the world?

Any kind of discussion of the ethics of the enterprise, expected from any experienced surfer, is missing. That's despite concerns over the impacts of tourism spilling out of the surf culture into the mainstream.

Whether any of the sections of surfEXPLORE spawn a surf boom à la Nias or Siargao (Cloud 9) is an open question but the response I suspect to most of the locations will be muted. A lot of them just aren't reliable enough, or safe enough or have any infrastructure that can support tourism of any stripe. The vibe shift concerning surf travel has been profound as well. Dirtbag travel just isn't cool anymore in the era of the digital nomad. Infinity pools and fast wi-fi trump camping in the dirt and eating food of indeterminate origin. Callahan recognises this reality when he concludes about one outpost “rational people looking to have a 'nice time on their vacation' go elsewhere.”

Some of the spots will be susceptible to surf booms. Those with warm, blue water and consistent waves chief amongst them. Pacific-facing Phillipines and Indonesian coastlines offer coral reef waves, beachies, wetsuit-free surfing and tradewind and typhoon surf enhanced by deep oceanic trenches offshore. These spots have been off the radar until now for various reasons - some jealously guarded secrets, some hard to get to or exposed to various natural and human hazards. SurfEXPLORE has thrown the door wide open to a surf world full of influencers looking to make a buck blowing out a spot. We live in the era of the digital commodification of everything.

A full discussion of the costs and benefits of surf tourism/booms is probably outside the scope of this review but we can at least outline the parameters. It's accepted now that good surf is a resource and people will pay to access it. If local people, particularly those in poor or undeveloped areas, can benefit from that by supplying goods and services to travelling surfers then it's hard to reject that as anything but a good thing.

I spent months travelling by bus, boat, foot, motorbike, and water buffalo through the Phillipines. On an isolated peninsula, hours away from civilisation by boat and even further by bus, we camped in front of an old man's shack one typhoon away from total destruction. He was almost totally blind, hairless like a mole rat, and every day he would hike up a steep hill to collect palm fronds to strip and turn into brooms. Once every month or so he would take an arduous journey into the nearest market to sell the brooms and spend the proceeds on rice. Our arrival constituted a mini economic windfall for him. We exchanged cash to camp in his yard right on the beach and eat his rice in between surfing the perfect left reef out front. It freed him from hard labour, at least for a few weeks.

Likewise the people of Robertsport, Liberia, detailed in surfEXPLORE, who are recovering from brutal civil war have an opportunity to develop accommodations and restaurants to supply surfers who show up to surf the seasonal left points there. Who could begrudge them that opportunity, even if the surf got more crowded?

When booms become uncontrolled and ecological impacts increase, when foreign interests buy up land and displace local people or turn them into low paid service workers, the situation becomes more complex. Bali is the salutary case of a surf boom that becomes cancerous. Other Indonesian locations look sure to follow. Are there any special places that deserve to be left untouched by the unsparing hand of capitalism, even if that capitalism bought money into a community?

In the nineties a pal and I, having our return tickets expired, wandered down to Ala Moana harbour seeking passage back across the Pacific via sail. We found an eccentric bearded English skipper doing maintenance on a 50 foot gaff-rigged schooner. He said he was looking for crew to head through the Marshalls and Micronesia en route to Hong Kong. Still a ways from Australia but at least it was the right side of the Pacific. 21 days of calms and squalls got us to the Marshalls, another week to an isolated atoll. There we found a G-Land-style left breaking down the side of the main islet. It was a surfing dream. My mate and I have never mentioned a word about it to anyone. On days when the world closes in I can look into my mind's eye and paddle across the calm lagoon from the anchorage, walk through the island and see the lefts reeling down the reef unattended. Sit on the sand afterwards eating roasted pandanus seeds bought to us by the locals.

Would their lives be enhanced by surf tourism? I really don't know. I find it hard to contemplate after seeing what happened to Bali.

The antecedents of keeping oceanic secrets are buried deep in antiquity. In her epic 1951 book on the ocean, The Sea Around Us, author Rachel Carson details navigational maps and guides of the Mediterranean hundreds of years before Christ. In the same book, author Lloyd Brown reveals no mariners chart of the first thousand years after Christ has been preserved or is even known to have existed. This he ascribes to the fact that early mariners carefully guarded the secrets of how they made their passage from place to place; that sea charts were keys to empire and a way to wealth and as such were secret, hidden documents. A thousand years of secret spots makes surfing's relatively recent attempts to conceal the magic of good surf seem both understandable and puny by comparison.

Like the maps of yore, commercial considerations and greed won out in the end.

No review of this book would be complete without mentioning the author's search and destroy marketing tactics. Callahan has been relentless in his promotion of the book through online media here and in America. Equally relentless in his dismissal of critics with insult and invective. He accused Australian critics of succumbing to Tall Poppy syndrome, an accusation rendered meaningless by the fact his American critics were equally or more scathing of 'the JSC approach'. In the end, the thick skin of Callahan (*apart from the critics he blocked) has to be grudgingly admired. It calls to mind the approach of French novelist and noted provocateur Michel Houllebecq who offered the following justification for his habit of offending all: “It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think. And when I sense that what I think is going to cause displeasure, I rush to say it with real enthusiasm. And deep down, I want to be loved despite that."

There does seem something forlorn about this approach. The business model of surfEXPLORE - using surf media to fund expeditions to the nether regions - is now largely defunct. Direct to consumer models won't be helped by the abrasive JSC style. And why pay anyway when you can just read the book and do all your own research online? GoogleEarth, modern forecasting, bathymetric maps are all easily available.

This book may be the lasting testament and legacy of an era that has passed. Even if the ethics are complex the surfing core don't want the last remaining secret spots blown out. We prefer some mysteries remain intact, even if that is nothing but a selfish whim.

It might surprise that, having said all that, I recommend the book for its reference qualities and capability of sparking a left-field interest in an off-broadway location. Many of the spots detailed in this book will never become crowded - for reasons mentioned above and others. Its utility would be greatest for those with both time and money - those with the werewithal to use the surfEXPLORE body of work as both template and jumping off point. The low hanging fruit is all gone - groundswell-exposed coasts with favourable winds have been plucked bare - but for those prepared to roam the tradewind belts there is more gold to be found.

Depending on your point of view, you will either praise or curse Callahan for bringing that to our attention.

// STEVE SHEARER

surfEXPLORE: Discovering New Surfing Locations Worldwide is published by Schiffer