Surfing is a curious sport. Unlike jogging, footy, cricket, or lawn bowls—where even if you are not very good, you’re at least DOING the thing that you set out to do—very little time is actually spent surfing, that is, being upright on a board.

Most of the time you’re doing something else entirely: driving from beach to beach shouting at campervans to use the slow-vehicle turnouts because you’re a slack bastard and have already missed the tidal window; extracting crab pincers from your bloody toe while the Anglesea birdwatching society looks on; hopping up and down the shoulder of the Great Ocean Road with your bum out trying in vain to prise your wetsuit off your ankles with your cold numb hands, while busloads of Chinese tourists wonder why they wasted all that time going to see the Kennett River koalas when the Australia they came for is in fact directly outside their luxury coach window.

Now here’s the thing: the Urquharts Bluff public toilet is not going to solve all of your problems. But with an outdoor change area featuring ocean-view exterior bench seating with concrete underfoot and dunnies just around back, we’ll be buggered if we can find a better place to get out of a wetsuit and into some tracky dacks.

Inside there is an odd scene: a single urinal taking up a whole lot of empty space. If we had to put a plaque up explaining the situation we’d call it a microcosm of Australia, but we’d never have a reason to go in there to mount the plaque seeing as one of the most important parts of any surf session is pissing in your wetsuit.


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