Nippersjungen, Breeze (2024)
The January edition of the mongrel matter almanac is concerned with the beach, specifically the east coast from Byron to Eden. January is the middle of summer downunder when we commemorate its colonisation.
Breeze is a coastal music band, and Nippersjungen was part of an installation at perfume.copy called Music for Wave Pools. It was about, among other themes, Rip Curl’s idealisation of The Search for the perfect wave, and whether wave pools are an ontological problem for surfers or not. There’s this romantic tendency that there is something more to the real wave. The Morning of the Earth was filmed to the backdrop of Suharto fascism, Red blood soaked sand just out of shot, glorifying The Search and the drop-out lifestyle, complacent in the face of America’s imperial wars. Australia, a British colony, is nonetheless occupied by America.
Captain Cook’s search for the southern continent was only a byproduct of a scientific expedition to witness the transit of Venus. Cook was the first European to write about surfing as he passed through Hawaii. These surfers killed Cook on his way back through, and it is part of his myth that they confused him for a god, rather than a dog. Surfing was eventually imported from Hawaii in an effort to merge the geographically disconnected island with the rest of The United States through the figure of the surfer. Californication is the soft-power force which perpetuates US hegemony across the globe. Thus the image of the surfer upholds the tripartite schema of colonialism, national unity, and soft power. There’s nothing chill about the beach.
On some Tally Ho packets it says “Did you know that between 1838 and 1902 it was illegal to swim at the beach?” The opening of the beach was something of a national myth for the Anglo-Australian imaginary as a way to discern themselves from the British pom - whose noses turned red as pomegranates in the sun. This allergy to the climate was something that D.H. Lawrence in Kangaroo never wanted to overcome. Jean Curlewis follows similar racial lines when she argued in an essay called ‘The Race on the Sands’ that the beach has transformed the Anglo-Australian body and mind. The waves sculpting them into Greek statues tanned bronze in the sun. Psychically, the beach also produces a peculiar kind of worker: because the beach is free, and all they want to do is be at the beach, they are not impelled to work long days.
In ‘Bodies That Matter on the Beach,’ Eileen Moreton Robinson proposed that suntanning domesticates black skin as a temporary alteration which affirms white masculine dominance of the beach. She also shows how returned servicemen from imperial wars militarised the beach through Surf Life Saving Clubs. This militarisation of the coast sees the nipper protect the land with their strong tanned backs. After the cedar getters got all the cedar, the coast became the most populous zone. As an island, the only geographical demarcation with the rest of the world is the beach, and so the beach is that boundary and possibility of fantasy.
Nippersjungen is an allegorical work which depicts an SS (Schutzstaffel - ‘protection squad’) helmet in Surf Life Saving Club nippers colours in Poska pen on Neoprene with a Holden SS badge. We used to use Poska’s to paint our boards, and they make wetsuits out of that stuff. It is nailed to the wall with lengths of garden hose which they use for the nippers game called flags, where the kids race to get a bit of hose stuck in the sand which are always numbered one less than the number of kids, preparing them for a life of artificial scarcity. This length of hose is of course also used to make a bong.
Compositionally the huge helmet in the centre is in reference to Shaun Gladwell’s official war art commission in Afghanistan. He liked the way that soldiers expressed their individuality by putting stickers on their helmets, making reference to skaters’ brand adorned decks. Apart from such a facetiously liberal engagement with war, we are interested in the role of art more generally as a way of shoring up soft power in the Asian Pacific.
California via the colonisation of Hawaii, becomes commodified and all these Australian surf brands begin to dominate the market - which have since been bought by BlackRock. The brands really ruined surfing for some. Then wave pools. Then it became an olympic sport. The reaction is a return to The Search, to some pure image of the surfer at one with nature.
The figures of the countercultural surfer and the militarised nipper united through the 2005 Cronulla riots. In response to an alleged attack on a lifesaver, hoards of white men from the beach came to Cronulla to indiscriminately attack Middle Eastern men. On that point, check out this from Tracks Magazine last year
Surfing is not only a form of soft-power that operates to exclude a colonised group, but is also a way to forge national unity. The Cronulla riots led to migrant communities becoming more Aussie and their Anglo compatriots becoming less proud, homogenising a new Australian identity, as flimsy as the cotton helmet on the nippers head, useless, for larping purposes only.
Cite this article: Breeze (2025), “Nipperjungen.” Almanac: January (mongrel matter), date accessed