Stuart Rintoul | February 05, 2009
IT is early morning at Jan Juc, on Victoria's surf coast, and the drone of a didgeridoo rises above the crash of the waves as Aboriginal surfer Rangi Pito talks about his childhood and how surfing has helped him to survive.
"It's kept me out of bad trouble," Pito says. "I would have had nothing. I've gone from a place of nothing to become something out of nothing ... I've been lucky."
When he was 15, Pito's sister died of a drug overdose. "I think it was over love," he says.
He lived in housing commission flats in Melbourne's Richmond. "My mum was never home and me and my brother used to sit out in the laundry because it was nice and warm in winter and wait for her ... There was nothing, there was no hope."
When Max Wells, a surfer and teacher, met him a decade ago, he thought Pito looked "cowed and broken" and set about helping him to find something in the waves that he loved. Pito, 24, says his first time on a board was the biggest feeling he had ever had.
"Surfing saved my life," he says. Now he is a mentor for young Aborigines. Around us, sporting heroes are dragging boards into the waves, children scampering around them: Olympic idol Cathy Freeman, former Test captain Steve Waugh, Layne Beachley, the greatest female surfer of all time, Britain's Olympic superstar Daley Thompson and US windsurfer Robby Naish.
They have been brought here by the London-based Laureus Sport for Good Foundation and the Australian Sports Commission to support an Aboriginal surfing program begun by Surfing Victoria and the Wathaurong people. Each speaks of a belief in the power of sport to bring about social change.
Nine years ago, Nelson Mandela gave Laureus its creed. "Sport has the power to change the world," Mandela said. "It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. Sport can awaken hope where there was previously only despair."
Beachley, who joined the others as a Laureus ambassador yesterday, said she was "stoked". Asked what she hoped to achieve, she said: "I want to bring kids to the surf ... to see their eyes light up when they jump in the water."
