Author: James Booth
A sometimes spectacular pointbreak on Australia’s coal coast made the Mainstream Media this week after a Local’s Only (“blow ins not welcome”) sign was erected, like morning wood, on the grassy knoll overlooking the wave.
The image was posted to local social meeds with remarks like “Ok, which dumb c**t put this up?” Eventually national mastheads did what they do best: Reporting On Reddit and the image went viral. Top comments included: “I mean if you actually wanted a crowd next weekend great marketing.”
“Fark I hope it’s packed.”
“And yet they’ll go on surfing trips to lombok, Maldives and Sri Lanka.”
“Likely some white cunt who would lose their shit if First Nations people’s held this sign up to captain cool and he turned and went back to England.”
“From WB FB page to news.com.au. Via Illawarra mercury… Journalists are lazy Kents.”
Etc.
Another Redditor added the following claim: “Im a bodyboarder from Sydney who hates the city beaches and come down to sandon point every weekend. I’ve got an Arab background and looks Arab so I feel really outta place there. Anyways, it was a tubing day at [redacted], and as I’m paddling out there 3 grumpy kooks come up and tell me get back to Sydney mate. Everytime I catch something they’ll drop in. Told em to stop doing it and basically was told to get the fuck off outta here or there’ll be problems. That’s the last I surfed the point, now I just go to bulli beach or [redacted] beach for a sesh. Fuck localism you don’t own the beach.”
Yet another said: “Growing up in a coastal town, I was always amazed at how locals could profess to be anti-authoritarian, casual, carefree, yet racist, sexist, and hyper conservative at the same time.”
Things have gotten so crazy that recent images of torched cars have been joked about as collateral from this blow up and people have started joining the r/Wollongong sub Reddit just “to follow the beach wars,” in which, per Reddit, “Talks of a weekend truce organised by Tracey Grimshaw and Billy Slater are ongoing as we speak.”
(Also per Reddit: “The talks seem to be going sideways as both sides struggle to define how many years you need to live somewhere before you can call yourself a local”)
Now though, it appears blow ins have hit back, with an image also recently uploaded to Reddit showing graffiti reading: “Local surfers are cunts” alongside the caption “cop that local surfers.”
Image via Reddit
Are you team “2003 called it wants its cringe back” or are you all here for the show?
Also: who do you think wrote the anti locals sign? One imagines a castigated van life kook scrabbling about in the middle of the night with spray paint, but who knows…
As for the OG locals only signs, what are we thinking, silly teens or grumpy old carpenter?
Cone Hunting 
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