In the 1970s Logan Murray was the first Kiwi photographer to sell images to prestigious international surf magazines, enraging the secretive local surf scene. He tells Mark Crysell how he's still shooting – and still hiding.
It was the last thing I looked at before I went to sleep at night, and the first when I woke in the morning. And it was all I thought about in-between. It sparkled, sea green and hollow – the perfect wave, captured in a poster, tacked to the wall of my teenage bedroom, in the last house you passed if you were leaving New Plymouth and heading south down the coast. Printed in the corner were these words: Kiwi Classic, photo: Logan Murray. It was the mid-1970s.
Photographer Logan Murray’s stock in trade for more than 50 years has been Aotearoa’s perfect empty surf beaches, bordered by the green, green grass of home.
He was the first New Zealand surf photographer to get published in the big American glossy publications, Surfer and Surfing magazines. A huge deal.
Logan Murray has been one of the country's most renowned surf photographers since the 1970s, but there's a reason he keeps a low profile. (Source: Sunday)
“He’s done more than any other photographer for New Zealand surfing, for what people internationally think of New Zealand. He’s created that,” says Jeff Hakman, the founder of Quicksilver USA and one of the best surfers in the world in the 1970s.
Local surfies didn’t quite see it that way. “There was a lot of conversation around what a wa**er he was publicising our beach, our beaches, our breaks, everything,” says Piha’s Steve Davis (aka Roachie), a surfer since 1965.
“He had death threats.”
To get your head around this, you need to go back to the 1970s. Surfing in New Zealand had seriously moved on from Beach Boys and hanging ten at Malibu.
“A lot of people were on the government surf team,” says Davis. He clarifies: “The dole”.
“We were kind of regarded as the scum of the earth really, because we were considered as beach bums.”
A small hard-core crew living on the fringes of society in an era when very few knew New Zealand had world class surf.
And that's just how the surfies liked it. Secret spots were fiercely defended.
“We did try to enforce the law, like where they're trying to say hey this is our beach ,” says Davis. “You'd have clashes in the water.”
One of the centres of this underground cult was Mount Maunganui. The Mount back then was a small working-class town, not the mini Gold Coast it resembles today. It was full of baches that were empty most of the year which surfies could rent very cheaply.
Murray had washed up at the Mount and was working as a press photographer for the Bay of Plenty Times, but his secret passion was surf photography. The bibles for this underground culture were glossy surf mags and the big kahuna, Surfer Magazine from America.
“I just saw the American magazines as a real challenge to see if I could get material that was on a par with the overseas photographers whose work I'd always admired,” he says. “To get a cover, it’s sort of like you've won the Oscar”.
He scoured the Bay of Plenty for perfect waves to shoot and sell to the overseas mags.
His partner in crime was one of New Zealand’s finest surfers, Kevin Jarrett – better known as Ernie. Together, not far from home, they hit the secret spot jackpot.
“I called it Puni’s farm”, says Murray. “It had great water colour, powerful waves, they broke really close, so it was easy to get full frame photographs.”
Close enough to the action to snap an iconic shot of Ernie in the tube – carrying a bag of apples.
“We’d been surfing all day and some friends brought us some apples from their boat,” he says/ "I put the bag in my mouth. Straight away a wave came, paddled into it and it just tubed off. I straightened out onto the beach and the boys came down, grabbed the apples. And everybody was so hungry, into them.”
Murray’s lens captured sunny days of perfect, clean and green empty waves.
But one stood out above all the others – the one that would later hang on my bedroom wall.
Murray had scoped out the right location between the trees and waited for two and a half years for the right conditions and the right wave.
It arrived in 1978.
“I could tell that this wave was something special,” he says. “I was a little nervous, because I knew I only had one shot. I had to get the focus exactly right. It started to throw, it started to barrel, and I fired the shot.” A perfect hollow green sparkly wave on a sunny day, trees in the foreground draped with drying wetsuits. It’s been acclaimed as one of the greatest surf photos ever taken. One of a set, including the story of Puni’s Farm, a dairy farm owned by a Māori family on East Cape, that Murray mailed off to Surfer magazine in California.
Creating a fantasy New Zealand
It was the empty utopia surfers all over the world were desperately seeking. “I just went wow, New Zealand looks like really untouched,” says Hakman, who was living in a crowded California at the time. “These just beautiful line-up shots with nobody around in New Zealand. And these little roads, and bays, and mountains, and sheep, and just these rural beautiful images,” he says. “It’s like Logan created this aura, or this dream of New Zealand that was a fantasy in a way.”
“I had guys tell me they saw that poster on guys walls in France, South Africa, the East Coast of America, in Hawaii, of course, and California obviously, and in Australia,” says Murray.
And it absolutely infuriated local surfies. Steve Davis remembers flicking through Surfer magazine and seeing it for the first time.
“And then suddenly there’s New Zealand, and it’s like what the!”, he says, “It’s like, wait a minute, who’s taken this? And then, and you'd see his name at the bottom: Logan Murray.” Logan Murray, to many, had broken a code.
“It’s like oh my God mate what are you trying to do? What are you trying to do to us?” says Davis. “We don’t wanna go international, we want this little country down here [where] we have our own waves, to be nice and quiet.”
What happened next beggars belief.
Logan Murray had a target on his back.
“They threatened to, if you came to their town, that they would break all your fingers so you couldn't type stories. That they would smash your camera gear. That you would be badly beaten,” says Murray.
Surf shops and cafés carried wanted posters with Murray’s image on it.
Tracks, a local surf magazine, devoted an entire section to Logan Murray hate mail.
“This is your last warning Logan, next time you'll get f***ing brained.”
“You’ll be put up against a wall and shot, then strung and quartered like every other pig.”
It was more than just words. Twice in one night, someone tried to burn down a cabin he was staying in at Mahia.
“One night a car drove up to the flat at the Mount,” says Murray. “Guys got out and banged on the door, and I went to the door in my pyjamas. One guy had an axe, and one guy had an old 303 bolt action rifle.”
Murray talked them out of it, threatened to sue Tracks magazine and they shut down. “I sort of felt that if I buckle to this, then I'm letting down all the other future young men and women who would want to be surf photographers,” says Logan.
But it changed him. “I was already a shy kid, but it made me even more shy and unwilling to really be hugely sociable,” says Murray. “My social skills were not really well developed, because I wasn’t getting the social interaction that a normal young man would get because it simply wasn’t safe.”
To this day very few surfers would recognise Logan Murray if they passed him in the street.
“Hopefully not, up until this point,” he says. “I went to a lot of trouble to ensure that they didn't know what I look like.”
Looking back, Steve Davis reckons many older surfies will have serious regrets about how they reacted to Murray’s photos. The behaviour seems outrageous in hindsight, he says. “But you've got to think back to the thinking and the feeling around, and the protection of breaks in New Zealand back then? It was really protective.”
But here’s the kicker.
Puni’s farm wasn’t a real place. The surf photos and the photos of the bay's bucolic sheep-dotted surrounds, fringed by mountains, were all snapped in different parts of the country and sold as a package around a fabricated story of "Puni's farm".
“I used Matakana Island as the location for all the action shots, and line up shots," says Murray. The Island is a paddle from the Mount across the channel leading to Tauranga harbour.
“I shot around Tauranga, Te Puke and beautiful forest scenes against some of Rotorua’s prettiest lakes,” says Murray “I combined it all into this sort of utopia and the American publishers at that time were looking for somewhere different, somewhere new. And bingo, delivered on a plate, was Puni’s Farm.”
A large hunk of the surfing world, including me, fell for it completely.
“Later surfers overseas wrote that they went to New Zealand looking for it, and then just could not find it,” says Murray.
The feared hordes of Californian surfers never invaded our shores, but this year Jeff Hakman finally made it to New Zealand
“It’s just, it’s amazing there’s not more people, and it’s not more crowded. And there’s not more places being ruined by too many people,” he says.
Still shooting – still sleuthing
Fifty years later, Logan Murray is still out there somewhere, hunting down Aotearoa's empty uncrowded surf breaks.
“The underground rumour factory within surfing, and surf culture. Loose lips, the vague comments, whispered comments in carparks are how I find them,” he says. "Truck drivers are a good source, if they surfed when they were young. They go onto remote farms, and they often sight these breaks, and they know a good wave when they see one.”
The international magazines are still buying but he takes extra precautions these days. He wears a Ghillies suit, military camouflage clothing designed to look like the surrounding foliage, to avoid detection.
“My closest shave was a very angry farmer with a pump action shotgun,” he laughs. “It comes down to, if you want to be published in these prestigious magazines, you've got to do things that are different to get the shot that is different.”
Who knows maybe the next Puni’s farm is just over the next ridgeline, wrapping around a lonely coastline, sparkling in the sun.
“Seek and ye shall find,” he says with a wink.
For more on this story watch Sunday, tonight 7.30pm on TVNZ 1, and TVNZ+
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