AustLit

'I CAN’T REMEMBER exactly how it started. With a random sighting, perhaps, of a lone surfer carving up a sunlit wave: like entering a cathedral for the first time and seeing all that stained glass. But from that point forward the sight, smell and sound of a storm swell steaming into shore exerted a devastating pull on me. I was a thirteen-year-old provincial boy from Swansea in South Wales, and already a student in the science of Atlantic swells, the way they travel to shore in neat parallel lines, in sets of three – a prime number. Swells have order but it comes from disorder; their source is always chaos. They arrive on shore in graceful step, wearing bridal veils of pale spindrift. What the eye can’t see is their fantastic propensity for violence.' (Introduction)