The following excerpt, by Pauline Menczer and Luke Benedictus, is from Menczer's "Surf Like a Woman" autobiography, published in 2024. Menczer, in this 1984 scene, is 14 years old, has been surfing for a year, and has just paddled out at the notorious South Bondi—on a foam Coolite board, because she hasn't yet enough coins from recycling soda cans to buy a real board. "I don't get too fazed by the dickheads," Menczer says just before this passage begins. "Having learned to surf in this shit-fight, I don't know anything else."

To catch anything today, I know I can’t just sit and hope. I’ve got to hustle and be proactive, hunting the waves down by finding the best position. As I paddle further out, I decide the spot around the outside peak of the wave looks way too hectic—it’s choking with a thick pack of guys who will try to bully me out. Obviously, I don’t want to sit too wide where there are no waves. But if I edge a bit further inside the knot of surfers, I might catch some of the smaller waves that roll under the main pack untouched.

Gradually, I work my way out, getting the occasional nod from the odd friendly local (they do exist). Once in position, I take a moment to catch my breath, sitting on the half turn to ensure that, when the opportunity comes, I’m ready. After five minutes, my line-up chess pays off when a stray wave rolls through the pack unridden. I’m going to have to take off late, but it’s worth a crack. I whirl my arms as fast as I can and then I’m up and flying along the wall of blue water, propelled by that magic whoosh of oceanic power. Tumbling back into the water, I’m hit by the full-body rush of pure exhilaration. I want to get me some more.

My scavenger tactics keep paying off. I catch a bunch more waves and suffer one minor collision (not my fault) after some drongo yanks my leg-rope to impress his brain-dead mates. As the sun begins to set, the beach slowly empties. Mum insists that I stop surfing before it gets totally dark, but I stay out as the sky fades from orange to gray. When it starts to spit with rain I decide it’s time to head home - I just need one more wave. I have to wait a while, until finally it comes. A guy from the main pack takes off on a wave but looks unbalanced from the start. As he begins to topple, I pounce like a jackal and next thing I’m gliding down the face with a grin.

I’m stepping out of the water onto the cool sand when the fallen surfer runs up to me. He must be about 17, with a mess of kinky brown hair and a blur of white zinc smeared across his face. He’s not happy.

"Oi mate, what’s your problem? You dropped in on me."

"Yeah, it was. Right up until you fell off it."

"Think you’re hot shit, eh? Y’know if you were a bloke, I’d punch your head in."

I jog back up the beach as it starts to rain harder. That chump was just some chancer, but I shoot a couple of backward glances to make sure. Clutching my skateboard, Coolite and backpack, I break into a sprint for the #380 bus, reaching it just as the doors are closing. Yes!

"Yeah, but it’s raining out there. Everyone’s wet."

The driver just shrugs and shoos me out. The doors close and I’m left standing in the stiffening rain. Jesus. I’ve now got a 20-minute wait, assuming I don’t get another wanker of a driver. For a second, I consider heading to Bernie’s for a malted milk and a game of pinball. Then I remind myself I’m trying to save my money.

Starting to shiver, I stand under the bus shelter and prop up my two boards. Although I’m already wet, I’ll sit tight for the next one rather than walk the hill home. Buses are like waves, I reckon: you wait long enough and another will always come along.

When I roll over to get out of bed the next morning, the pain makes me wince. I can’t bend my wrists backwards and they’re red and swollen, like they’ve been jammed overnight in a refrigerator door and frozen stiff. When I try to rotate my hand, it’s like I can feel the joints grinding together. My knees aren’t a pretty sight either: they’ve ballooned in size with extra fluid pooling around the joints. My arthritis has flared up again. I slump back on the pillow and groan.

It took a long time for me to get diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and I understand why. After all, it’s meant to be a disease that affects pensioners and the terminally decrepit, not active 14-year-old girls.

Initially, Mum thought I was getting hurt because my brothers were being too rough with me. To be fair, that was a reasonable conclusion, as Benny and I used to play-fight all the time. I’d invariably come off worse, too, because Benny is a bloody good wrestler. He used to pin me down and tickle me until I’d actually wee my pants. The upshot of that low-level trauma is I’m no longer remotely ticklish. As Mum always says: "In every negative, there’s a positive."

Convinced our scuffles were causing my soreness, Mum forced us to cut out the rough stuff. But the issue persisted. Every now and then, my joints would just rebel. I’d wake up barely able to turn my head, with my elbows and wrists puffy and inflamed. A bone-deep soreness racked my body with every muscle aching. It was like I’d run a marathon the previous day.

At first, the doctors just dosed me up with aspirin, which did nothing. Then my mum started taking me to this chiropractor who really freaked me out. This burly guy would grab my head with his hairy hands and yank my neck and hips this way and that until he produced an ear-splitting crack. The chiro told me, with clear satisfaction, that my skinny body made such a loud noise as there was less fat to muffle the sound. I was convinced he was going to snap my spine in two. At any rate, his efforts proved totally useless.

Eventually I was sent to a specialist at the hospital, who diagnosed me with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. My immune system, it turns out, was attacking my own joints. Next thing, I was having to take all this medication to calm the inflammation and relieve the pain.

What really gave me the heebie-jeebies, though, were the splints. My wrists were giving me the most grief and the doctors were concerned I’d lose my mobility. To try to fight that, I was made to sleep in these hard plastic splints to keep my wrists bent backwards. Once tightened, they were so rigid it was like wearing handcuffs. I just couldn’t sleep with them on. As soon as Mum was out the room, I’d whip them straight off and keep my hands under the sheets so she wouldn’t know.

The doctors reckon I’m fortunate that my arthritis comes and goes. But on days like this, I don’t feel lucky at all. I had so much planned for today. This morning I was going to ride my bike over to Parsley Bay and go fishing for yellowtail off the wharf. Then I was going to head out for a surf with Tanya in the arvo, before combing the beach at sundown for lost property to sell at my next garage sale. What I’ve learned, though, is that when I get a flare-up the best thing to do is just rest. Today is now a total write-off. I’ll stay in bed as long as my mum will let me, then sit with Shirley on the sofa and watch cartoons. The rest of the world will no doubt proceed to have loads of fun without me. Meanwhile, I just have to accept it and rub my swollen knees.

Lying in bed, I listen to the sounds of the house. Even at this early hour, it’s noisy as hell. INXS’ "Original Sin" blasts out of Trevor’s bedroom, while Benny is hammering away in the garden, making the dogs bark and yelp. Tracy is crashing down the stairs late for his baking job at the French Pâtisserie. In the kitchen, no doubt, my grandmother is moaning about something or haranguing my poor old mum. Our home is always chaotic, and usually I don’t mind it. Right now, though, when I’m feeling a bit fragile, I long for a bit of calm. It’s at times like this I wonder how different life would be if my dad was still alive.

My father, Imre Menczer, was a Hungarian immigrant who moved to Sydney from Budapest as a small boy. He supported our family as a taxi driver, but money was an issue even then. One of the few memories I have of Dad is of a nasty argument between him and Mum, the pair of them standing by the kitchen sink yelling at each other because he wasn’t leaving enough money to cover the groceries.

My father died when Benny and I were five years old. His death is cloaked in layers of speculation and guesswork. Never a big talker, Mum is still cagey about the details, so my brothers and I have had to stitch together fragments of info with the odd whispered inference from my godfather. Out of this patchy source material, we’ve learned that our father was killed in shady circumstances.

The only indisputable fact is that on February 27, 1975, my father’s dead body was found in his taxi on Birrell Street next to Centennial Park. Beyond that, nothing is really clear. Police ruled the death to be suicide but, as Mum suggested, that never added up. First up, Dad was a strict Catholic for whom suicide would’ve been a cardinal sin.

Another murky dimension has to do with the other side of the family business. My grandmother’s husband was the local milkman around here until he also died suddenly, killed in a hit-and-run on Hewlett Street. The circumstances around his death remained suspicious as well, and the killer was never found. My father subsequently took over the milk run to supplement his taxi driving. Eighteen months later, he was found dead, too.

Whether or not the two deaths were related, my mother was now a single parent with two sets of twins, aged five and eight. Her only income was a monthly welfare check and a taxi license that she started to rent out. When my grandmother moved in with us, she found Mum the odd bit of secretarial work to support her own job as a chiropodist. But all my life, money has been tight, and my brothers and I have learned to hustle for every cent.

I don’t feel hard-up, though; I feel lucky. That’s because living in Bondi, we have access to some of the best beaches in the world, and they’re absolutely free. Our family has always milked this geographical windfall to the max. As far back as I can remember, we’ve practically lived at the beach, with Mum taking us to Bronte before we could crawl. In the Menczer household, childcare basically consisted of the sand and sea.

It’s a love affair that’s passed down through the generations. My grandmother still goes for at least one swim every morning and often squeezes another in after work. As kids, we’d hit the beach every day after school and usually have a picnic dinner there. We’d spend most of the weekend there, too, my mum taking up her familiar position on the patch of grass at Bronte, about 50 meters from the red-brick toilet block. There, she’d set up her homemade wind shelter and deck chair, along with an esky full of cold bottled water and a stack of jam sandwiches for us kids. We’d proceed to spend entire days at the beach, exploring the rock pools, building sandcastles, treasure hunting and trying to catch eels. But most of the time I’d be in the ocean, swimming and bodysurfing for hours on end. In almost every photo from my childhood, I’m barefoot, staring at the camera with sea-wrinkled fingers and sunburned cheeks.

It’s only in the last couple of years since I’ve started surfing that I’ve graduated to Bondi after tiring of Bronte’s dumpy shorebreak. As a beach, Bondi is a different proposition and one that, beneath the postcard image, harbors a menacing edge. While Bronte is more family orientated, Bondi has more druggies and homeless people—although what really lowers the tone is that it’s got way more surfers. Still, that’s where the better waves are to be found, so I really don’t have much choice.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon when I catch up with Tanya down at South Bondi for a surf. The waves are less crowded on a weekday, but a brisk northwest wind has left the ocean pretty much flat. Tiring of the conditions, Tanya decides to go in but offers me a lend of her fiberglass board. As always, part of me wishes she hasn’t. When a rideable set finally comes in, the fibro delivers a way better ride than my Coolite’s puffy foam. It’s so much more responsive and gives you more snap on each turn.

I stay out for another half-hour before heading in, too, and find Tanya sitting on the wall crunching through a bag of Burger Rings. She passes me the bag as I sit down next to her, and I wonder as always why salty chips taste so much better when you’re fresh from the ocean.

"Hey, where did you get your surfboard from again?"

"Dunno. It was a birthday present. I got it when I was ten."

"How much do you reckon a fiberglass board would cost me?"

Twenty bucks. Not cheap but not totally impossible either.

Side by side, Tanya and I watch the surfers’ efforts, critiquing their re-entries and turns. Most of our time, though, is focused on a rare appearance from our local boy made good, Cheyne Horan, who’s now carving out a professional career.

"You know he came third in the world last year?" says Tanya, licking grains of salt from her fingers.

I don’t follow the pro circuit, but I can see this muscle-bound kid with white-blond hair is special. He surfs with a strange, open-kneed squat stance that generates unusual speed.

Tanya is more interested in boys than me. In fact, she’s more developed in every respect. Although we’re in the same year, she’s more than a foot taller, with a strong, athletic physique that makes her one of the best runners in our year at Dover Heights High School. That sporting prowess gives her a bit of extra clout in the playground, and she’s always made sure no one hangs any shit on me.

We met at primary school on my second day at Bondi Public. A bunch of kids started picking on me because, as usual, Mum had dressed me in old hand-me-downs—a daggy pair of maroon jeans that were, admittedly, way too short. The kids circled me and started chanting "ankle freezers, ankle freezers" over and over again. One of them also knew my dad wasn’t around, so they began teasing me about him being dead as well. That’s when Tanya stepped in to defend me, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. Initially, our friendship revolved around roller-skating and cricket. Now surfing is our mutual obsession.

Tanya’s dad isn’t on the scene either—she lives with her mum in a unit on Bondi Road. But she does have an Uncle Michael, who last year took us on a life-changing trip. We drove up to the Gold Coast, stopping to surf all these different spots along the way—Moonee Beach, Crescent Head, Ballina, Byron Bay. Both Tanya and I already enjoyed surfing, but after that we were totally gone. If I’m now addicted to surfing, then Uncle Michael was the dealer who got me hooked.

After a bit, Tanya has to split as her grandparents are coming over for dinner, but I decide to do a bit of beachside scavenging and try to source some more items for my next garage sale. I’ve just got level with the stormwater drain and am picking up a discarded bucket and spade when someone starts yelling.

"Ay! That’s the bitch who dropped in on me!"

It’s the brown-haired boy from the other day, but this time he’s with a couple of loser mates. They break into a run towards me. Immediately, I sprint up the beach, but one of the guys is too quick and grabs my arm.

The brown-haired boy bares his crooked teeth and grins.

"Yeah, grab her. Let’s take her to the dunnies."

One of the guys, who’s a beefy six-foot lunk, grabs me under my arms, while the other two seize my legs. I thrash and swear and kick and scream. But they’re too strong and start carrying me up the ramp halfway between the southern hill and the swimming pool.

"I’ve got three brothers. They’ll kick the shit out of you if you don’t let me go."

They just laugh as they carry my writhing body into the men’s toilets. The stench is revolting and I’m getting scared now. What are they going to do?

The boys change position. The two holding my legs lift my body vertically so it’s dangling over a urinal trough full of stagnant piss. Then they start to lower me down.

The next moment my face is too as they drop me headfirst, my body landing hard, half in the metal trough and half on the concrete floor. I pluck a deodorizing cube from the urinal out of my piss-sodden hair.

"Shall we dak her?" one of the kids says.

"Fuck that. Who wants to see an ugly bitch like that in the nuddy," the ringleader sneers. 

He leans over me, getting so close that I can smell his Juicy Fruit chewing gum.

"Drop in on me again and I’ll shove one of these trough lollies right down your throat."

I run down the beach and dive into the sea. I need to wash off the reek of  piss, humiliation, fear. I stay in the water for a long time, getting a bit teary as I run handful after handful of water through my hair. Gradually, the enormity of the ocean calms me down, dissolving my fear into anger. As soon as I get home, I’ll be straight onto Tracy and Trevor and get them to sort out those creeps. 

"I'M UP AND FLYING ALONG THE WALL OF BLUE WATER" - EXCERPT FROM PAULINE MENCZER'S "SURF LIKE A WOMAN" (2024)

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