The swells start in Antarctica. The whole bloody thing started when someone decided to fix up a dirt road out the back of Torquay.
For two years in the mid-1980s, Australian Crawl even became the first (and seemingly only) rock band to sponsor a surf event, with blood spilling on the streets of Torquay soon after.
The Bells Beach Pro, in one form another, is the longest running surf contest in the world. Its roll call of champions since 1962 (with a few years off during the pandemic) aligns with Kelly Slater’s apt observation after he rang the famed bell trophy for the third time: “The bell is arguably the best trophy you can win in surfing.”
Shane Dorian boiled it down even more succinctly after his victory in 1999: “No kook has ever won Bells.”
Two-time winner Sally Fitzgibbons laughs: “That’s because it’s a really difficult wave to wrangle, you can be out there wondering what the hell’s going on, why does this suck?”
“It’s like playing on clay courts in tennis, driving in the rain at the F1, it’s favoured to the locals.
The Bells Beach line-up.Credit: WSL
“You’ve got to finesse your surfing to the wave. There’s so many different wave faces and within a week you’ll have different winds, shifting tides, different swells, you’re always adapting. Especially at the bottom of Australia, the weather can do anything.
“And you’re trying to get your boards right to grip the wave if that makes sense, because you’re still going at high speeds, but you won’t be getting barrelled. If you don’t have speed and power in your turns, then you’re wondering what the hell’s wrong.
“To get it right and ring the bell, to get that ‘ding, ding’ of approval, that’s a serious achievement.”
When Bells does get it right, it is indeed a world-class wave. That final scene of Point Break was set here (but filmed in Oregon) for a reason.
That same reason is why mad locals would paddle up to six kilometres from nearby Torquay to surf the breaks in the 1940s and 50s. Never mind that longtime event sponsors Rip Curl didn’t begin making wetsuits to brave those icy waters until 1969.
But Bells is often a fickle beast too. Slater, the undisputed greatest of all time, leads a slew of pro surfers less than enamoured with it. Love the history, the theatre, “the vibe”, as Fitzgibbons sums it all up – channelling The Castle.
But Bells waves themselves are often big and beefy, brooding and temperamental, bending their way into a surfing colosseum set beneath yellow ochre limestone cliffs.
Big bad Bells during a 2011 swell.Credit: Drew Ryan
When the ocean doesn’t co-operate, which has been often enough for the competition to go mobile up and down the Victorian coast previously, competition shifts around to nearby Winkipop.
The local Wadawurrung tribe hunted crayfish and abalone here for thousands of years in a history that predates and has long been acknowledged by organisers of the Bells Beach Pro, one of the first Australian sporting events to involve Indigenous culture.
“There’s so much history with the place, it’s got the spectators up on the cliff looking right down onto you and the wave. There’s nowhere else in surfing quite like it,” 2023 champion Ethan Ewing says.
“And the challenge of the wave adds to the prestige for me. It’s a really hard wave to surf well.”
Bells has tales worth telling for days. So it goes with an event that started largely because the Torquay locals grew tired of bush bashing their way to those iconic cliffs and the peaks rolling in below.
Bells Beach lights up during the 1999 Ripcurl Pro.Credit: Getty Images
In 1960, local Joe Sweeney widened the clifftop track to Bells with a bulldozer and charged surfers using the track one pound each to cover the costs. Within a year, locals Peter Troy and Vic Tantau figured on a “surfing rally” being a fine way to sell surfboards, and thanks to Sweeney opening up access, Bells was the location.
What started with a casual contest held on Australia Day 1962 (a year later than first planned), with a megaphone and a couple of card tables on the beach for the judges, has yielded some of surfing’s most iconic moments.
Local pioneer Gail Couper remains a universally revered figure for her 10 wins at Bells in 11 years across the 1960s and 70s.
Surfing in the 60s: Early days of the Bells Beach Pro.Credit: Australian National Surfing Museum
Simon Anderson rewrote history in 1981 when he introduced the world to the thruster – the three-finned board design that is the model of modern surfing, still yet to be bettered.
In true Bells fashion, while Anderson stunned all and sundry on his newly designed board in the iconic 15-foot swell of “Big Saturday”, it dropped to two-foot slop for the final a few days later.
Mark Richards, Mick Fanning, Slater, Stephanie Gilmore and Lisa Anderson have all “rung the bell”, that famed trophy that was actually designed by Sweeney, grader of that fabled dirt road, four times apiece.
Some of the greatest heats in pro-surfing have been run, won and lost here.
Emotions have run incredibly high for others too. Mark Occhilupo’s 1998 triumph was dedicated to his late father. With not a dry eye in the house, Occy was finally back after years spent in a depressive, couch-bound spiral and on his way to a remarkable world title.
Ewing’s 2023 victory came 40 years after his mother Helen Lambert rang the same bell, before she was lost to breast cancer when Ethan was just six years old.
A man of few words, he told the crowd afterwards: “Tell your mum you love her, you never know what’s going to happen.”
Now he says: “No matter what happens in my career that’ll always be a highlight.
“I think Bells ends up being that way for a lot of the guys and girls who ring the bell, it’s just something extra special.”
Backstage with Australian Crawl in 1984.Credit: Gerrit Fokkema
And then, of course, there’s Australian Crawl. The band was long associated with surf music and could hold their own in the water too. In 1984 they were flying with chart-toppers Reckless and Things Don’t Seem.
Having joined thousands of surfers making the Bells pilgrimage for years, Australian Crawl wound up on the books alongside Rip Curl as sponsors. They duly organised for a new film clip for their 1980 hit The Boys Light Up to be shot when they played the Torquay Hotel on Good Friday, 1984.
Put it on a t-shirt: The 1984 Bells Beach Surfing Festival, presented by Australian Crawl.Credit: Australian National Surfing Museum
“We just really wanted to do it and it didn’t matter financially or anything, we just wanted to be part of it,” bassist Paul Williams told a WSL podcast in 2021.
“We wanted to play at the tournament … we thought that was such a privilege for us.”
As only Bells can, the whole thing lit up spectacularly when Australian Crawl played the same show, with cameras rolling again, to round out the event on Easter Sunday.
While pro surfers partied with the band inside, local kids swarmed the pub outside trying to get in, brawling with police as the night went on.
Williams’ own bass guitar clipped him across the eyebrow and drew an inch-long cut as he wheeled around on stage, claret spilled inside and out of the famed watering hole as the band kept playing.
After 62 years and all manner of yarns and moods, waves fickle, feared and fantastic, Bells does the same.
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