Nick Carroll's profile on Gary Elkerton ran in the June 1983 issue of Surfing magazine. This version has been slightly edited.

Gary "Kong" Elkerton is sitting on the newly erected, council-inspired sand dune that separates Narrabeen lagoon from the shimmering heat of North Narrabeen Beach itself. Today it is very hot indeed, mid-summer, mid-morning Sydney and the trek from the dune to the flashy accouterments of the 1983 Pro Junior is fifty yards of flat, sandy hill. The famous Narrabeen sandbank is producing two feet of crumbling, windy mess; seen from the dune, the waves and their riders are crinkly blurs through the reflected glare. Elkerton is wearing the customary Quiksilver trunks, a pair of black sunglasses, and a black sleeveless t-shirt with "KILL 'EM ALL, LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT" stenciled on the front. For an eighteen-year-old he's big—stocky but not short, he physically dominates his peers with almost unconscious ease.

Right now he looks dangerously relaxed and rather disconsolate—young Sydney hot Graham Wilson has just taken him out of the contest in twenty minutes of quarter-final tension. Kong spent the first eight minutes of the heat waiting for a wave big enough to carry 180 pounds of violence to the beach. Or if not that big, then at least big enough to have some 

 on. The idea of having been forced to surf waves like that doesn't seem to have made Kong any happier. Up there with Kong on the sand dune is cohort James "Chappy" Jenning. Chappy's tiny frame and wizened features make Elkerton seem even bigger. Together they contemplate fate. All the way down from sunny Queensland and perfect pointbreaks, to the grimy slop of Sydney's worst-ever summer, for a contest they both wanted to win, at least a little bit—this is business after all, for their sponsors (Rip Curl and Quiksilver) if not yet for them, and now! To find themselves, last year's first- and second-place winners in Pro Junior, relegated to the "also-ran" category, sitting up here in the baking sun on this Godforsaken lump of sand—it's almost too much.

Kong sneers at the crowd, growls at Chappy. "Let's get out of here. It's not happening!" His voice is rough, deep and sunburnt, unmistakably Queensland with just a hint of last night's beer. The sweating pair gather up surfboards, bag, towels and wetsuits.

Kong can't just stand to walk away, though. Down in the competition area, photographer Peter Crawford glances up from polishing his fisheye lens and catches a quick glimpse: across the steaming sand, over the oily brown limbs of the adolescent nymphets and the Pepsi-Cola taste-testers and the anxious mothers and grim fathers and screaming babies, through the shimmering haze—a huge young man on a sand dune loosens his boardshorts, turns around and presents the whole thing with a graphic display of distaste, and with a yell 

Gary Elkerton was born on the twenty-first of August, 1964, in Ballina, on New South Wales' North Coast. His father ran fishing trawler after prawns out of nearby Evans Head and the young Gary found himself in close contact with the ocean from Day One.

Evanshead was the starting point of his surfing career. Any young kid who lives near the sea in Australia begs his father for a surfboard, and Gary was no exception. Those early days were restricted to mucking about in the North Coast beachbreaks in between trips on the prawn trawler. Not serious. Competition was unheard of. The family took off on some wild journeys up and down the coast, traveling thousands of miles on the trawler between Ballina and Darwin, chasing the prawns through some of the weirdest tropical waters in the world. Most of Kong's schooling was done by correspondence and it's easy to imagine the scene on the trawler as the youngster wrestled with nets and equipment with his father and scrawled away below decks, surrounded by the stink of the fish and the glowing tropical night. It's the sort of lifestyle that develops self-reliance within a person, especially when there's always the chance of slipping overboard and being taken by a shark.

Seven years ago, the Elkerton family settled down, making a base at Mooloolaba on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. A lot of Australia's super-hot, lesser-known talent originates from this hot, sticky, cyclone-prone, point-infested piece of coastline. This was where Kong began to get serious about surfing. Plenty of his new-found mates at Maroochydore High School were into competing at the local amateur and semi-pro contests; Kong surfed, competed and watched, sealed by distance from the eyes of the national surf media in Sydney. His surfing developed rapidly and radically, the year-round warmth of Queensland giving him the time and the looseness to rip.

The first this reporter saw of the Elkerton style was at the 1981 National Titles, in Victoria. A chilly gray afternoon at Bells Beach, with a six-foot swell hitting from that one beautiful angle that allows the waves to peel from outside Rincon all the way through, section after section, to finally dissipate in the deepwater past the final bowl. A goodly crowd had filled the lineup. I'd just finished a session and was feeling pretty pleased with myself, but all that dissolved in seconds as a bulky figure in a flashy yellow wetsuit spun around on a clean set wave and proceeded to demolish section after section with a feverish, explosive intensity. The figure was slamming off the bottom, then taking it right up beneath the already pitching lip, and waiting for said lip to hit him amidships as he swung board and body back down at a ridiculous angle. Sixteen years old and using the lip's weight for speed off the bottom in order to set the whole move up again and again and again!?

Even at that early stage, Kong and his surfing were getting into everyone's heads. He's combining all that is innovative and exciting in the Queensland surfing at the moment—a touch of Rabbit's style, a morsel of Joe Engel's aggression, a drop or two of the smoothness and flare of Sunshine Coast colleagues Brett Peacock and Jody Perry. But all of this, however, is merely the icing on the cake of Kong's sheer trail-blazing speed and power. Most surfers have experienced the feeling that comes occasionally when it seems impossible to make an error— those days when you can hit a turn every time with no fear of a rail dig or a little fin wobble or a slip of the back foot, when you feel absolutely and supremely confident of your ability, balance and timing. Watching Kong surf gives you that sensation vicariously, as it were: he seems to have those perfect sessions almost continually. And if a rail does happen to dig a bit every now and then, or a fin comes out just a fraction too far—well, the power, weight and almost overblown confidence of the boy simply overcomes such small considerations. He just blasts through them.

Naturally, it wasn't too long after that Victorian appearance that people's interest in this young Queensland radical began to translate into practicalities. He switched from Sunshine Coast boardmakers Pascoe-Hopper to the Gold Coast-based Hot Stuff. Quiksilver rapidly stuffed his massive frame into a pair of flashy boardshorts; Rip Curl covered him in rubber and nylon.

Just a few months later, Kong really came on the boil, right there in front of the whole Aussie surf community during the 1982 Pro Junior. The long-winding Narrabeen lefts were the scene for a backhand performance the like of which had never been seen in this most vital of Australian junior events. The surf media went mildly berserk, confronted as they were with the full display of Kong's talents. "A Beast is Unleashed!" screamed the headlines, and magazines positively bulged with shots of Kong's animal re-entries, or of the Boy Himself clowning with ludicrously small sidekick Jennings. They made a classic duo—the big, glowering Elkerton moving solidly over every obstacle in his path and the tiny, waif-like Chappy leaping about the place pulling lunatic faces at anything that moved. Perfect! The magazine advertisements ads came thick and fast.

In fact, almost too thick. The Kong phenomenon was a larger-than-life eruption that threatened overkill on a grand scale. The praises heaped upon the young trawler fisherman from Mooloolaba were verging on the excessive. Filmmakers Dick Hoole and Jack McCoy just shot a twenty-minute short featured titled 

 depicting with clownish good humor the lunacy of Kong in his natural environment—the surf—and accompanied by his two hardened traveling companions, Rabbit and Chappy. To many, it seemed that never had one person received so much publicity from so many sources for so few contest results.

This sort of star treatment would be enough to turn many a surf gremmie head so far around that he'd never face forward again. Oddly enough, however, it has been Kong himself who counter-acted it all; although the possessor of a healthy ego, he has both a large fund of common sense and a useful naivete inherited, one suspects, from those long and difficult nights on the trawler, out of contact with the shore. These qualities, along with the occasional cheeky reminder from Jennings, help to keep things morel less in perspective as both he (and Quiksilver) hold off from the big ASP pro events and instead prepare for the 1984 World Amateur Surfing Championships next year in California—the first step in what everyone hope will be a lucrative surfing career. Kong knows he can win and he plans to go into the pro ranks immediately afterward.

Indeed, early preparations are already in effect. One of Kong's major plans is to travel the world pro circuit this year as a noncompetitor before his real campaign begins in 1984. This, he figures, will give him more than a headstart on other young rookies, who often find themselves thrown right off base by their unfamiliarity with the foreign customs and surf conditions encountered as a matter of course by the traveling pros.

One of the places where he thinks he will be strong in the years to come is Hawaii. Last year he spent two months there, getting totally involved with the power of island waves, and developed quite a relationship with some of the hollower locations—Backdoor in particular, where he managed to snap three surfboards. The terrible trio of Rabbit, Kong and Chappy put on one of the outstanding team displays during the winter. They set up home base at a condominium in the Kuilima Estates and apart from surfing their hearts out during the day the threesome could often be found at the Kuilima bar as the tropical night drew down, having a better time than anyone would previously have thought possible.

One memorable, blurry night the two younger members of the trio decided it was time to loosen up a bit. There is a drink available at the Kui bar called, somewhat euphemistically, "iced tea"—it is designed with the aid of five different kinds of rum, to render the unwary drinker senseless. On this night, Kong emptied ten glasses of the stuff, Chappy six. A shocked Bugs tried hard to figure out a way to get the two lunatics back to the condo, but it was useless—by the time he had maneuvered them into the compound, their mad antics had rung alarm bells everywhere and the condo was surrounded. There was no escape. "This is it, Bugs," grunted Kong. "I'm up a tree,” and true to his word was within the space of a few seconds lodged high and dry at the summit of the nearest coconut palm, swaying back and forth with laughter as coconuts fell to the ground and Bugs' voice could be heard trying to reason with the enraged security guards.

Antics like this are a good indicator of Kong's reckless confidence. He stands for the great Australian surfing tradition of having a good time regardless of consequences. It is almost as if one of the great "animal" surfers of the late sixties and early seventies has been reincarnated in the massive frame and hard-edged good humor of the young Queenslander.

Or another way of looking at it: Kong can be seen as a representative of the Aussie surf underground—a kid who can rides waves every bit as brilliantly as many of the professionals on the circuit, yet who disdains the modern Puritanism of the pro lifestyle. There are dozens of them out there, and Kong it seems, has been chosen as their leader.

And there we have Gary Elkerton: eighteen, determined, confident, outrageous, and a brilliant surfer. A throwback to the days when pro surfers didn't bother with vitamin pills and training programs and instead warmed up for a contest at the local bar. Maybe, just maybe, Kong is the most important new surfer to emerge from Australia in years.

[Photos: Hugh McLeod, Craig Fineman, Bill McCausland]

"THE HOTTEST SURFER YOU'VE NEVER SEEN," GARY ELKERTON PROFILE BY NICK CARROLL (1983)

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