A “surfboard cemetery” in Prevelly, at the mouth of the Margaret River.
Margaret River’s main wave, known as Main Break, was first surfed (in the modern sense of the word, though I’m sure that the local Noongar people surfed it in their own way for thousands of years prior) in 1958 by a handful of pioneering Perth surfers, who bumped down a boggy dirt track to Prevelly with hollow wooden boards. Through the 1960s a small band of locals and visiting Perth surfers gathered at Surfers Point, and in 1969 rounds of the Australian Surfing Championships were held at Main Break for the first time. The first Margaret River Pro followed in 1985, with the judges working from a double-decker bus parked at the point. The event returned to the world’s top tour in 2013, and the reef is now known as one of the country’s most consistent big-wave breaks – a long way from those first hollow boards.
The picture above is a little bit away from that action; just back from the river mouth itself. It’s something of a surfboard cemetery. And strikingly beautiful, in the early morning light, it is too.
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This was part of a set of images of Margaret River (and environs) published as a phot-essay.
