The epithet supermodel gets thrown around a little too much, but Gemma Ward, the Perth kid who was thrown into the modelling stratosphere when she was fourteen is one of ‘em.
Gemma is thirty-seven now but at the turn of the century she became the go-to gal for the fashion mags, with her fragile alien-sorta look, wide-set eyes, porcelain skin, and a floating, otherworldly presence, insp for gals like Lily Cole and Vlada Roslyakova etc.
In 2004, she became the youngest model ever to be stuck on the cover of American Vogue. By the time she was nineteen she was making three million bucks a year and 25k a show.
Etc etc.
As it turns out Gemma Ward likes to surf. And like it so much she busted her back doin’ what used to be called the sport of kings but is now the sport of mammies and men in ponchos and surf hats.
“A lot has happened since I last posted. I broke 3 vertebrae’s in my spine from a surfing accident, flew to paris to shoot for Lancôme again which was a complete honour but in the wake of my accident I forgot to renew my passport so I had to get an emergency one and nearly missed the whole shoot,” Gemma told her 225k fans, “finished a Faber novel writing course which was phenomenal, read some great books, reflected on my life and the current state of the world.”
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One of the books Gemma finished was Billy Finnegan’s epic Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Babs Days, famously described by one alt-right website as as anti-egalitarian, territorialist, and exclusionary.
Although Finnegan devotes a few paragraphs to how surfers were, vaguely, part of 1960s leftism, the reality is that surfing is, by its nature, anti-egalitarian, territorialist, and exclusionary. The immigration issue never comes up in Barbarian Days, but it’s clear that the best surfers’ instincts toward what they care about most, waves, are fiercely restrictionist. Surfers tend to be localists, who are like nationalist nativists, only more tribal.
You?
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