The Chosen One

Lungi Slabb doesn’t need to be reminded how lucky he is. 

“I’ve had so many relatives who’ve passed away and been to jail,” he says.

“I just didn’t wanna end up in that position,” he says. 

We’re parked up overlooking the Tweed River, a few minutes drive from his family home in Fingal Head, just downriver from one of several ancient Indigenous burial sites in the area. Part Bundjalung through his father and part Ngemba through his mother, the 17-year-old pro surfer hails from one of the most marginalised races on earth, Australia’s First Nation people.

At 58,000 years old, they are the oldest living culture on earth though also among the most recent to grapple with the horrors of genocide and contradictions of colonialism. The consequences of which continue to cycle through the generations, leading Australia’s Indigenous population to top a host of ominous health and wellbeing metrics. Despite making up just 2% of the Australian population, they make up 27% of the prison population (incarceration rates increased 41% between 2006 and 2016, and the gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous imprisonment rates over that decade widened); the Indigenous infant mortality rate is almost twice that of the non-indigenous population; the Indigenous suicide rate is 5.5% versus 1.9% for non-Indigenous; 71% of Indigenous people aged 15 and were overweight or obese in 2018-19 (an increase of 5% since 2012-13), and on it goes.

“I’d meet all my relatives who’d been through it and seeing how they ended up scared me,” says Lungi. 

His family home in Fingal is on the old Aboriginal Mission. Missions were set up by Christian colonisers to contain and separate Indigenous people forcibly removed from their land. Their language, culture and traditions were banned on the missions and those who refused to comply were locked up, including thousands of young children who were stolen from their families and placed in the care of white Christian boarding schools as part of the Australian government’s ‘cultural assimilation’ policies, spanning 1910 through to the 1970s — what has become known as the Stolen Generation.

Many missions are still active today and almost all are located several kilometres from the main urban or regional centre, allowing them to be heavily policed, over-policed even, and depriving Aboriginals of many of the opportunities and infrastructure ordinary Australians take for granted.  

In the face of increasing incarceration rates, intergenerational trauma and the cold, crushing demands of late-stage capitalism, countless Indigenous figures and communities have stood up and been counted for, to borrow a lyric from the iconic Indigenous outfit the Warmupi Band. None more so than the Slabb family whose shining light, at least when it comes to surfing, is young Lungi.  

The road into Fingal is a trip back in time to an Australia made famous by postcards and pub rock film clips. The road is lined by cane fields, sub-tropical foliage and deteriorating, sometimes derelict, fibro homes threatening to come apart in the monsoonal conditions. It won’t be like this much longer.

After decades of ambivalence, the rich have finally discovered this forgotten slice of paradise and the signs of gentrification are popping up like poisonous toadstools. Property prices are on the rise and a smattering of mansions can be seen dwarfing the humble, traditional cottage homes preferred by Australians of previous eras. 

Lungi’s local store was recently bought by a bourgeois cafe conglomerate whose six-months-and-counting redevelopment has forced locals to drive all the way to the next town for bread, milk, and eggs. 

Lungi’s house sits in a dead-end street, on a narrow strip of land that separates the river from the ocean, just across the way from Coolangatta and the Superbank. He tells me his great grandfather lived in a tin humpy (shack) in the dunes alongside the mission’s other original inhabitants not 50 metres from where his family home is today. 

It’s the kind of location that would give a real estate agent a conniption — even more so when he or she realises everyone in the street is Indigenous and owns the land. 

This is an anomaly in Australia, where most Aboriginal people have been left wallowing on the bottom floor of capitalism in an overcrowded, underfunded public housing program following decades of trauma, incarceration, and deprivation.

Lungi is related to most of the people in the street and there are no fences between the homes, creating a giant backyard for the mob of kids to play in as well as an organic permaculture farm they take turns tending to. Lungi’s house, like most of the original houses in Fingal, straddles the line between rustic and rundown. Its fibro exterior is discoloured in parts and the front yard is full of cars and machinery in various states of repair and disrepair. He shares the home with his parents, his grandparents, and his auntie, who is visiting from Western Australia, and living in the caravan out the back that Lungi had for a bit. “I’d invite you in but my grandparents are worried about all the COVID stuff,” he says. 

It’s almost impossible to go anywhere in Fingal without running into one of Lungi’s relatives, either living or dead. With the council elections a few days away, his aunty, one of the candidates, has her face plastered to every second fence and light post. Within seconds of arriving at the local back beach, Dreamtime, we watch his brother, Banahm, scoop into a left wedge on his bodyboard and neatly thread a tube. On the way to Lungi’s house, we pass his uncle Josh, a junior rival of the likes of Joel Parkinson and Dave Rastavich (described to me by one elite surf coach as surfing like “Sunny Garcia with a better style”), fishing for mud crabs in the mangroves. “He knows all the best spots. The Elders showed him,” says Lungi. 

On our left, buried beneath a concrete monument on land now owned by the caravan park, is Lungi’s great-great-grandma. And on the right, a conventional cemetery where several Indigenous elders have been laid to rest in the sitting position aimed at the sacred site, Mt Warning, in the Tweed hinterland, as per local custom. Among the elders is the great Juraki, an iconic Indigenous folk hero whose blueprint for preserving Indigenous culture in the face of colonialism has become the foundation for Lungi and his family’s incredible success. 

Rumoured to be seven feet tall, Juraki was a skilled hunter and waterman, who served as the first ever Indigenous lifesaver, working the beaches of Coolangatta where he would save mostly white people from the rips and currents. Today, Lungi’s uncle and aunty run an outreach program in his honour targeting at-risk Indigenous youth and bringing them back to the bosom of purpose and prosperity provided by their traditional land, water, and culture. 

“It’s who we are. It’s a part of ya,” explains Lungi. 

“We live by it every day, all different protocols and laws and stuff. It definitely makes you feel like you got a whole lot more knowledge and you can use all the different things you’re learning,” he says. 

In conjunction with Lungi’s father’s program, Banaam (meaning: second brother), Fingal’s Indigenous community is paving the way for Aboriginals all over the country to reconnect with their culture. Daily language classes, fresh fish cook-ups over the fire with local elders, traditional storytelling, traditional dance, body painting, didgeridoo making and playing workshops, are a few of the things they offer. 

The effects have been immediate and significant both in Lungi’s family and the Indigenous kids they’ve brought out to Fingal. The day before I arrived, his cousin, 19-year-old singer-songwriter, Budjerah, had won an ARIA Award — Australia’s version of a Grammy. 

“It all happened pretty quick. We didn’t really see how well he was doing until the start of this year. We always knew he had the talent to get there but obviously surrounding yourself with the right people and getting the right connections will get you there,” says Lungi.  

His other cousin, Jalaan, is a female surfer-shaper on the rise with a mean backhand snap, who has made boards for women’s World Champion, Tyler Wright. His brother, Bijang, is a successful male model. While his other brother, Barnaam, is a revered fisherman famous for colossal catches that have been known to feed the entire extended family. “I don’t think I’ve ever bought a fish in my life,” says Lungi. 

Lungi also tells me the story of one of the kids his family’s programs have helped. Like many young Indigenous boys, he was born into a troubled, broken home, had gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd, began doing drugs and alcohol, and looked certain to fall into the ever-churning meat grinder of intergenerational trauma and poverty. The Juraki program brought him out to Fingal, gave him a bodyboard, fed him, breathed life into the proud, wise culture he’d only ever heard of, and watched him take flight.

“He’s like, ‘This is good, I wanna keep doing this.’ He’s staying away from all the bad things and he’s just frothing now,” says Lungi.  

The greater Tweed area, of which Fingal is just one part, is home to a significant slice of the State’s public housing stock, home to a large Indigenous community. Putting society’s most vulnerable and traumatised people — regardless of their colour — in the same block of units or houses, has tended to create terrible outcomes here and other countries with similar programs (USA, England, France, etc). 

“We’re trying to get a couple kids into it but there’s so many different distractions. They’re getting into all the drinking and drugs but it’s good to find a way to keep yourself away from it. Surrounding yourself with the right people matters. Surfing is so good for me. It’s a whole different place,” says Lungi.  

His family’s proximity to the ocean and their dedication to it is one of their most powerful tools for healing themselves and others.

Nearly everyone in the family surfs, bodysurfs, bodyboards or fishes. They hold the Juraki Indigenous Invitational surfing event each year at Fingal, attended by everyone from pro surfer and Gumbayngirr man, Otis Carey, former Pipe Master and Dunghutti man, Robbie Paige, and National Indigenous surf champ, Russ Moloney. 

“They get all young kids from other Indigenous communities and show them the connections you can have with the ocean and what it can bring to ya,” explains Lungi. 

“In communities it can be hard with what’s going on. Some communities have a lot of drugs and relatives going to jail and all different stuff going down. You can start surfing and use it as a getaway. The ocean has so many things about it that can bring you happiness. And to get young kids away from all the bad things that are happening,” he says. 

Lungi’s ascent into an ultra-stylish, still-improving pointbreak specialist has earned commendations from the likes of Mick Fanning and Steph Gilmore. “I’ve seen some of the most naturally talented surfers and they’re young Indigenous surfers — they’re Dale Richards, Lungi Slabb. They have a really unique connection with the ocean,” says seven-time World Champion, Steph Gilmore.

It’s been a meteoric rise for Lungi, who only committed to surfing five or so years ago following a memorable winter at the Superbank. 

“We went in there for two months straight, maybe longer, every morning on dark. There were the craziest banks for the whole winter. Monday to Friday there would be no one and then the weekends there would be people then back to Monday there would be no one,” he recalls.

Lungi might have grown up across the river from hi-performance Mecca of Coolangatta but the first pro surfer he ever met was Asher Pacey after he came to Fingal as part of a Juraki program teaching Indigenous kids how to make Alaias from native trees. He’s since become one of Lungi’s good friends and greatest influences. “He was a big influence on me, his style, doing all these crazy turns and getting the craziest barrels right in front of me, on a little twinny as well!” he says. 

If you squint, you might mistake Lungi and Asher when they execute their signature move — the frontside layback in the tube. 

“It just popped up out of nowhere. Seeing Asher do it, and Torren Martyn, it just sorta clicked,” he says. 

In one year of surfing the Superbank’s endless walls, Lungi’s level skyrocketed. Soon he was earning the attention of cameras and elite surf coaches alike. One of his first waves ever captured on film at the Superbank was a five barrel synapse-melter, which ended up being re-shared by the Mad Huey’s on Instagram feed and getting praise from the likes of Taj Burrow. 

“I was like, ‘Woah, this is crazy,” he says.  

Stace Galbraith, the coach behind former World Tour surfer Mitch Crews and current Hawaiian World Tour talent, Malia Manuel, gave him the opportunity to train with his team not long after.

It was the beginning of a long line of influential surfers taking Lungi under their wing. After signing with Quiksilver, he was dispatched to the South Coast of NSW with Mikey Wright (who is married to Gumbayngirr woman, Shanae Carey), staying in the Wright’s family home, and getting a grand tour of the region’s reef breaks from Mikey (not to mention a cut-price deal on Mikey’s old Toyota Hilux).  

Lungi has also been welcomed into the inner sanctum of Dave Rastavich, Andrew Kidman, and George Greenough. He recently made the trip out to Greenough’s famous pyramid house deep in the rainforest for his 80th birthday.  

“I just sat there for three hours and listened to all his crazy stories in his nuts Pyramid house,” says Lungi. He also walked away with one of Greenough’s patented edge-bottom designs, handmade by the great man, which, whether you agree with the merits of the design or not, would fetch a small fortune on eBay. 

Back in Fingal, the tide has come up so we head back down to Dreamtime for a surf. It’s wedging, ultra-fast, short period, and breaking in a few inches of water. A glorified closeout basically. 

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Lungi is the type of surfer who can make closeouts look fun, and any air look stylish.

Lungi finds a ramp within seconds and sticks a neat little backside punt. That might not sound impressive until you realise it was the only move I saw completed by the 20 or so punters flapping around in the marginal conditions. “It’s pretty much a tube or a ramp out here,” surmises Lungi, before we call it a day and head for lunch. 

A familiar song comes on the radio on the way to the cafe. “That’s Budj!” he says, before not-so-subtly turning the volume down. “I’ve heard a lot of Budj the last few days,” he justifies.

We have lunch over a nearby waterway, which Lungi tells me does a good impression of Kirra when the conditions align. He also fills me in on an experience he had recently traversing the Metaverse in a pair of Virtual Reality goggles. “I didn’t wanna take ’em off,” he says. 

For a 17-year-old, he has a maturity and stoicism far beyond his years but I can’t help wondering if it’s overwhelming at times. Being a role model and a touchpoint for one of the most marginalised and downtrodden people on earth can’t be easy.  

“It’s not too much pressure on me but it’d be so good to see heaps of young kids connected to the ocean. I’m trying my best to make sure kids [are connected],” he says. 

What shape his surf career will take is unclear. Lungi has ambitions of competing on the Junior Series and travelling the world with his heroes but it all pales in significance to leaving a positive imprint on his people. 

“I’ve got so many mates I’ve already got in the water and people telling me I inspire them and stuff. I’m just happy with that,” he says. 

“I’m just frothing someone is actually taking my word. It means heaps.”