Ocean & Earth Release First Full-Length Surf Film In 27 Years | ‘DUALITY’ Starring Dakoda and Harley Walters
A gene pool counting the latest Surf100 winner + a 2x Stab High finalist.
In partnership with Ocean + Earth.
A few hours after putting Parko’s pension in his back pocket, Dakoda Walters crammed his shit into an Ocean & Earth coffin, including a six-figure novelty check from Pacifico, and boarded a flight to Rio de Janeiro via Houston.
Leg one, domestic, pedestrian with Advil-assistance. Leg two, intercontinental, departing on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Already an ominous date to spend ten-odd hours inside the aluminium tube. All is going just fine for the first eight hours.
Two hours out from touchdown in Rio, pandemonium in the aisle.
“This drunk idiot started trying to open the exit door on the plane and was abusing crew and stuff,” Dakoda recalls. “And it was 9/11, so they just fucking turned the plane straight around.”
Air reverse. Six hours back in the direction they’d come. Another half-day marooned in Houston. Then the pleasure of flying the same route again.
“We were only like two hours from Brazil. I don’t know why we turned around.”
As for how the wicked sleep, Dakoda recalls the passenger being so blind he passed out immediately after the plane turned around and didn’t stir until they touched down in Houston. A restorative six-hour slumber, courtesy of several hundred profoundly inconvenienced strangers.
The real kicker came when Kodes finally reached Brazil, where his first competitive outing as a newly minted six-figure winner went about as well as the journey there.
“I went and lost the fucking first heat in Brazil,” he laughed. “That was from about as high of a high as you could go to the absolute pits.”
C’est la vie for a 25-year-old who, despite recently banking the equivalent of a down payment on a tin shed in Grafton, remains subject to the grinding arithmetic of pro surfing.
In between all the flights, injuries and contests, Dakoda and his younger brother Harley have also managed to cobble together a full-length surf film. DUALITY, directed and edited by Shane Fletcher of Pentacostal glory, marks Ocean & Earth’s first full-length surf film since 1999.
Last year, a VHS copy of its predecessor, The Ritual, was exhumed from a dusty box of miscellanea in a Sussex Inlet shed and digitised for the modern world. A glorious little artefact of late-’90s surfing, following a gaggle of young Australians, including Phil and Ant McDonald and Todd Prestage, through Australia, Indonesia and Hawaii. All pointy boards, three-quarter boardshorts and obligatory Hawaiian pilgrimages, scored to Grinspoon, Sprung Monkey, Thievery Corporation, Unleaded NZ, The Porkers and Wise Acre.
Twenty-seven years later, boardshorts have retreated several inches up the thigh, Phil Macca (Fun fact: in 2003, Phil had a perfect 3-0 record against the GOAT, temporarily denying Slater a much-anticipated 7th world crown. A low-key flex, IMO, second only to O&E inventing the hooded rashguard in 1991, back when the Florence brothers were still swimming in the metaphysical soup of their father’s imagination. A story for another week.) is O&E’s CEO, Kneecap is surf music, and another pair of brothers, Dakoda, 25, and Harley Walters, 20, have become the marquee faces of the Australian hardware and apparel company founded by Brian Cregan, Toby’s dad, in 1979.
The film’s musical choices are a fair indication of the generational handover. Kneecap accompanies Dakoda’s section, IDLES soundtracks Harley’s, and O&E has gone to the trouble of clearing the tracks for the online release, not merely the premieres. An increasingly expensive commitment to the endangered art of the properly soundtracked surf movie.
Touch wood, this will not go the way of Repeater, which got taken down on two million views thanks to an expired Beck license.
“Working with Shane’s been fucking really sick,” says Kodes, burning around the Gold Coast ahead of the sold-out opening premiere at Balter Taproom. “He’s so bloody onto it and good at what he does. He’s put more hours behind it than lots of people know.”
For the brothers, Fletcher was the first choice. Beyond his technical ability, he was willing to indulge their interests outside surfing rather than shoehorn them into some pre-existing notion of what a surf film ought to look and sound like.
The original plan was to shoot and ship DUALITY within a year. On the second day of filming, Dakoda’s ankle declared ‘not so fast’.
“I snapped the ligaments in my ankle clean in half and fractured my ankle,” he said. “I didn’t feel a wave for the next four months. So that year pretty much was out the window.”
Then Harley, unwilling to let his brother monopolise the medical attention, suffered his own setback.
“He fell off the rocks at Iluka shooting for it one day,” Dakoda explained. “He went to jump off the rocks and fell down the rocks and ended up with bone bruising in his knees and ankles, so he didn’t shoot for another month after that.”
As a result of being sidelined, Dakoda missed ‘Magic May’ and the rest of East Coast winter. By the time both brothers recovered, there was the small issue of keeping their competitive careers alive.
“We worked out last night, Harles has done about 20 events while we’ve shot for this, and I’ve done 10,” Dakoda said.
Quite the number of extracurriculars for a pair of surfers making a feature-length movie. Dakoda reckons only three or four waves from his entire section were shot last year.
Most freesurfers have the luxury of organising their lives around promising weather charts. The Walters brothers do not, and have spent the better part of two years organising theirs around heat draws, physiotherapy appointments and whatever scraps of swell they could intercept in between.
Not that you would gather that from the production.
If Dakoda’s SURF100 finale, where he effectively assembled a movie part at Periscopes while Joel Parkinson barked at him to go left, hadn’t already made his strike rate obvious, the King Island, Lakey Peak and Angourie sessions in DUALITY drive the point home with a sledgehammer.
We’ve said it before, but Dakoda’s greatest asset might be his versatility.
Shitty beachbreaks, freezing-cold OBX, wavepools, slabs, dreamy reef points, manta ray-inspired Webbers, stand-up boogs at the Superbank. The equipment and conditions change, but his ability to extract something interesting from them seldom does.
If you subscribe to the idea that a genuinely great surfer should be able to surf anything, Kodes is a straight A-student.
Harley is equally freakish.
Already a two-time Stab High finalist, in Sydney and Virginia Beach, Harley possesses one of the deadliest backhands on Australia’s East Coast. At 20, he’s has the kind of repertoire that’d make anyone sharing a heat with him deeply uncomfortable. Which, funnily enough, has been his older brother quite a lot lately.
Their first clash came at a QS event in Taiwan two years ago. Dakoda was attempting to rebuild after falling off the Challenger Series. Harley, acutely aware of his brother’s predicament, apparently couldn’t bring himself to deliver the coup de grâce.
“Harles was fucking smoking me halfway through that heat,” Dakoda said. “And halfway through that heat, he just fucking gave up. And I ended up beating him at the end.”
Kodes didn’t appreciate the competitive charity.
“I’d always told him that if he ever fucking gave up surfing a heat against me ever again, I was gonna burn someone else in the same heat. I was like, ‘I’ll get an interference and just fucking go in, you watch.'”
They wouldn’t meet again until Portugal this year, where Dakoda had received a last-minute Challenger Series call-up. This time Harley was enduring a frustrating run of results and had considerably more at stake.
In their first clash, they brained it, both advancing from the four-man heat.
“Winning a heat like that and getting through with your brother feels like so much more than just getting through the first round of one of those things,” Dakoda said.
Two heats later, the draw reunited them. But this time, there was only room for one.
Harley produced one of his best heats of the year, but Dakoda scraped through ahead of him. A victory that felt, in nearly every meaningful respect, pyrrhic.
“‘It’s the first time I’ve ever got through a heat and felt like I lost,” said Kodes.
“You just feel shit, but at the same time, Harles is off it for however long, and then he’s just as stoked for you, and he’s there cheering you on.”
“It’s definitely not as fun as some people make out that it would be.”
Angourie has an unreasonable record of producing extraordinary surfers: Bryce Young, Laurie Towner, Dan Ross, Baddy Treloar, Morgan Cibilic, Chris Zaffis, Oscar Berry and Nav Fox, to name a few. The Walters brothers are two more products of a place where exceptionally good surfing is not all that uncommon.
Both have ostensibly relocated to the Gold Coast, although Dakoda considers Angourie home and regards Harley’s northern residency as a case of creative accounting.
“He reckons he lives on the Gold Coast, but he doesn’t spend a night up here,” Dakoda laughed.
As a brand, Ocean & Earth has historically rested less on marketing mythology than on the surfers actually using its equipment.
Russell Bierke has subjected its products to some of the most violent surf Australia can produce. Ryan Callinan, Lennix Smith, Kanoa Igarashi, Coco Cairns, Lucy Darragh and Bronson Meydi cover a broad spectrum of high-performance surfing. Surfers’ surfers, with good heads on their shoulders, and little obvious interest in manufacturing mystique.
The Walters brothers fit comfortably into that lineage.
