Jim Banks was 36 when he did this interview with Australian surf writer Tim Baker. The Q&A sections here were part of a longer profile piece titled "The Never-Ending Journey of Jim Banks," which ran in the Summer 1996 issue of Surfer's Journal.

You're known mainly as a tuberider. How did that come about?

Just because I love ’em, I love getting deep tubes that are sometimes beyond people’s comprehension, sometimes beyond my comprehension too. It almost feels like it's not my doing. Like, once I put myself into position it’s just something that happens to me. I think it started at the '78 Coke contest at Narrabeen, when I got a tube that blew my mind. I thought there was no way I was coming out, but I did, and everyone was just screaming, the whole beach was screaming.

(Clears throat) Yeah, I do. But not so much like, Oh look at the incredible thing I just did! It's more like, Fuck, look what just happened to me! Because it really is up to the ocean. I mean, you can be as determined as you want, but if the ocean wants to give you the flick it will give you the flick.

How did you start to get waves at Pipe when you first went to Hawaii?

I was lucky because at the time Sunset was still the main focus. Shaun and MR and Rabbit and PT and that crew would be surfing Sunset, and the photographers are up there, everyone’s trying to make their names and reputations, you know, and that was just something I was never too interested in. I just wanted to go surfing, so instead of Sunset I’d go to Pipe and surf with maybe a dozen guys. The first time, I was sitting on the beach watching, just blown away by the takeoff, going, How the fuck do I do this, because it was a new swell, lots of sand, pretty nasty. Guys were taking off and the thing would jack and they’d just fall out of the sky. So I’m sitting on the beach and Terry Richardson runs down, waxes his board and paddles out. Then Jeff Doig, a friend of mine from back home, runs down, waxes up, paddles out. I didn’t know at the time that Doigy was a total madman (laughs). I just thought, if Doigy’s doing it, I’m doing it. So I got my board, paddled out, took off on my first wave—and decided to choose a double-up. A double wave at Pipe to get things started. And it was big, like eight- or ten-foot Hawaiian, and I pulled into this double-up pit. I think from surfing Cronulla and all the beach breaks, it’s like, Yeah, double-up waves, they’re the ones that barrel. You see a double-up wave, man, you don’t let it go past. So I pull into this double-up, this giant pit, the biggest barrel I’d ever been on in my life, and my heart's going, KABOOM, KABOOM, KABOOM, I'm just totally shitting myself. The thing erupts, the spray blows back in my face and stings the shit out of my eyes. I just get pasted, and when I make it to the beach I just sit there for 10 minutes trying to get my vision back. And I thought, fuck, that wasn’t too bad, I survived, so I paddled back out—and didn’t catch another wave for the rest of the day.

After that I surfed it all the time. It was basically a pretty good crew, just a few local Hawaiian guys surfing it, Richo would surf it. I’d go out on a lot of substandard days, when Gerry and Rory and the rest of the boys wouldn’t bother. Mostly they'd wait till it was really good. And on the really good days, it was crowded and I wouldn’t bother. It was too hard to get a wave.

How would you feel about a contest at Desert Point?

Oh man (heavy sigh). I don't know. Just the concept of Desert Point as it is now is painful, you know? It’s like Desert Point was my lover and I would surf it by myself for hours on end. That’s where I had my peak surfing experience.

Eight-foot waves, 20 waves to a set, perfectly offshore, each wave a top-to-bottom barrel the whole way with no sections. Just this endless peeling tube. It was so perfect you couldn’t do a thing wrong. And I was the only person in the water. I'm sitting out there, and I just went, This is it, this is what I’ve been searching for all my life, what I’ve always dreamed of, this incredible, mindless surf, and here it is. And it was that funny feeling, like . . . what do I do now?

What did you do? At the end of that session, I mean. Can you remember?

(Long pause, then a laugh.) Smoked hash, ate rum-laced chocolate cake on this boat with my friend Pirate Pete. There were three of us out there. We were all fucked at the end, we were so exhausted. The surf was still pumping but we couldn’t catch any more waves, we were just stuffed, so we lay there on the deck and watched it pump—an amazing experience. The sad thing for me is that experience is gone now. The chances of experiencing that now are almost nil.

Yeah, well, there’s sort of a camp on the point, and guys live there now. They hang out for the season or they’ll stay for a month.

Hanging there, waiting for surf. Like, a dozen to 20 guys.

Just these old seaweed farmers’ huts. They were farming the seaweed and something happened, the price of seaweed dropped or they moved somewhere else, and they left these huts, so these guys just set up camp in them.

Sad. My lover’s gone, and I played a part in it by telling people how good it was.

But don’t more perfect waves get ridden there now?

Sure, sure. But that really mind-blowing, incredible experience is gone. At Deserts, anyway.

I’m sure there are, it’s just a matter of finding them. But the chance of finding something as good as Deserts? I don't know. That's a needle in a haystack

What would you do if you found another Desert Point?

I’d be a lot quieter about it. If I found another one I wouldn’t leave. I think I’d go live there.

Yeah. So if you ever stop hearing from me . . . (laughter).

You’d get lonely though, wouldn’t you?

I would, yeah. I’d probably invite a few friends.

And those friends would invite a few friends. I figure if I found somewhere it would probably be good for three to five years.


It was 1977. I was 17 years old. I was making boards with this guy in a shed in Cronulla and he’d been to Bali and told me the stories. Then SURFER came out with these photos of Ulu, and my friend's going, Let's go to Bali, let’s go to Bali, and I said, Yeah, I'll go! So I went down and bought my ticket . . . and my friend ended up not going (laughs). So I went by myself. Got on the plane, had no idea where I was going or what to do. Arrived and stayed at this little losman near Kuta Reef, and for the first two or three days I thought that was it. This is Bali, a few losmans and some coconut fields. Finally figured out where Kuta proper was, and found all these people and restaurants. In those days Kuta was just these leafy, quiet little streets with a few market shops, and by eight o’clock at night it was absolutely dead quiet. So basically you surfed all day, ate dinner, then you'd sit around in someone's losman, tell stories, play guitar, and get stoned out of your brain. Or eat too many mushrooms and think you were going to die.

I remember arriving at my losman and the lady who ran the place said, “You want hashish, Thai sticks, we’ve got Thai sticks, girl, mushrooms, whatever you want” I didn’t know what to say, and she goes, “It’s OK, my husband, he’s chief of police.”

I think I’ve become like the Balinese about it. There’s no point in freaking out. Just take what you want and leave the rest. I mean, the whole tourist economy could collapse and fall apart, but the Balinese culture would still be there, and they’d get back into having cows and growing their food again, and they’d just keep going.

Do you think you’ve acquired some of that way of looking at things?

Yeah, yeah, I think so. I try to maintain a balanced state of awareness, without being tense or fearful or angry or frustrated.

How different is the Western mindset from what you experienced in Bali?

We're programmed to get the job done. We're looking toward the outcome, we’re very much into the result of whatever’s happening. The Balinese are into the actual moment, and staying true to that moment, because they know the outcome is not here, it’s somewhere else, so there’s no point being attached to the outcome.

And if you stay true to the moment, does outcome take care of itself?

Yeah, that’s right. Whereas we’re so caught up in the outcome that we do all this stuff to achieve it, losing our balance and our integrity on the way.

How simply would you be prepared to live if it came to that, to achieve that?

I don’t think you have to live simply. It’s not so much what you do, it’s the way you do it. You don’t have to be out somewhere living totally self-sufficient on the land. But we've taken it to such an extreme point with, Let’s have money and real estate and interest rates and media and control and manipulation and power. And it’s pretty clear this experiment doesn’t work.

What’s it going to take for people to realize that? A complete financial collapse?

Well, I suppose for some people it could be as simple as hearing a line in a song and they click and go, Yeah, that’s right, this is crazy, I don’t want to live like this anymore. They might not become totally self-sufficient, but they might start approaching their life differently, like just trying to figure out what you have to offer your fellow man and your planet .

How do you go about integrating that into your life if you need to keep generating an income?

That’s right. Money. That’s right (long sigh). I face this challenge every day.

Like juggling your [surfboard] business with travel and family?

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. A lot of people see my trip as this totally idyllic, blissful thing, that I’m always off surfing incredible waves somewhere. But they don’t realize the financial stress and strain and how many times I’m just, financially, pffffftthhhh (makes a farting noise). It’s just this stack of cards, and if the breeze happened to come in the wrong way, the whole thing would come tumbling down and I’d lose it all.

Have you ever contemplated sacrificing the travel to knuckle down and get on top of the business side of things?

No, never. But sometimes I get determined, like, I’m going to really get serious, make some boards, get some money coming in. And I do it for a while, then I go, This is my life? This is what I’m living for? To achieve this? And there’s this little pile of money from the boards I made, and it’s like, Oh, that'll buy a ticket somewhere. Or, we could go skiing with that, let’s take the family skiing with that.

Do you find it hard to understand those people who can spend their whole lives in servitude to work?

It’s totally beyond my comprehension. It’s not that I disrespect people who do that, it’s just not something I can relate to. Life is this incredible, wonderful thing and to spend it struggling away in an office, commuting, struggling to make the mortgage and the car payments and insurance payments . . . .

How come surfers as a group aren’t more spiritually enlightened? Given that we have this connection to the natural world, you know, we’re a pretty materialistic lot.

Surfers just reflect society. In the ’60s, surfers were a lot more countercultural. Then as it progressed through the 70s and into professional surfing and the ’80s, where it’s become a sport and an accepted thing, it’s just another mainstream part of society, and reflects society as a whole, which for the most part isn’t spiritually aligned or environmentally aware. I mean, I remember going into Mrs. Palmers [an Australian surf wax company] and they had this new wax wrapped in recycled paper instead of plastic cups, and I was going, fantastic, this is great, much better than those cups. And they went, yeah, but we can’t sell it. People want the plastic cups. I mean, how many surfer’s houses do you go to and there’s all the glass bottles in the rubbish bin, making no effort to recycle? It’s only a little thing, but it just shows a lack of concern and respect for the planet. And meanwhile we keep riding our toxic petrochemical toys.

Do you think the human race is progressing?

Parts of it are. This is what I believe. It’s like, each one of us has a responsibility to deal with their own shit, and as we start dealing with our own shit and becoming more honest with ourselves and more nurturing of ourselves then we can start doing that outwardly, too. We start doing that with people around us and the creatures around us and the planet around us. Hopefully that creates a ripple and a resonance, and it keeps going.

[Photos: Jeff Divine, Hugh McLeod, Dave Shaw]

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos