It was the late 1960s, I was in my early twenties and the boat captain at the Jan Juc Surf Life Saving Club on Victoria’s Surf Coast, near Toquay. Like most young surf club blokes, I spent a good deal of my life in and around the ocean, rowing surfboats, training, patrolling the beach and enjoying that wonderful freedom that came with being young, fit and never too far from the sea.
One summer afternoon a large group of motorcycle gang blokes arrived at the beach. They were drinking, laughing and making enough noise to ensure everyone knew they were there, but that did not worry me greatly. What did was watching their empty bottles and cans being tossed onto the sand.
As boat captain I felt some responsibility for our beach, although I remember looking across at this rather intimidating gathering of leather, motorcycles and beer and wondering just how far that responsibility ought to extend. There were a lot of them and only one of me, but eventually I decided somebody had to say something.
I walked over and asked if they would mind putting their empties in the rubbish bins rather than leaving them on the beach.
It did not go particularly well.
A couple laughed, one bloke told me where I could go, while another suggested rather forcefully that I mind my own business. I could feel the mood changing and, for a moment, wondered whether I had made a serious error of judgement.
Rather than arguing, I told them a story.
I knew of a young girl who was a very promising sprinter. Running was not simply something she happened to be good at; she loved it, trained hard and had the talent to go a long way. Then one day, while running barefoot along a beach, she stepped onto a piece of broken glass hidden in the sand.
The glass sliced deeply into her foot, damaging tendons and putting an end to her running for years. In one careless moment, because somebody had left a bottle behind, something she loved and had worked so hard for was taken from her.
As I spoke, something began to change.
The smart comments stopped and a few of the men looked down at the bottles scattered around them. I hadn’t accused them of being bad people or told them what sort of men they ought to be. I had simply introduced them to a young girl they would never meet and asked them, in effect, to imagine what it might be like if one of those bottles changed somebody else’s life.
One of the bikers stood up and began collecting the empties. Another joined him, then another, until these tough-looking blokes who only minutes earlier had been giving me a hard time were wandering around the sand picking up bottles and cans and putting them into the bins.
I thanked them and walked away, somewhat relieved, I suspect, to still have all my teeth.
More than half a century later, however, it is not the confrontation I remember most clearly. It is that moment when the mood changed and the swagger seemed to fall away. Behind the leather, the noise and the tough exterior were men capable of imagining the pain of a young girl they had never met and caring enough to do something about it.
Over the years I have often thought about that afternoon, particularly during my work with boys and men. We can challenge people head-on, tell them they are wrong and watch the shutters come down, or sometimes we can find another way in.
That day at Jan Juc, a young girl’s story found the way in.
And the bottles went into the bin.