In Conversation with Dave Rastovich: Freesurfer and Activist
You’ve had a remarkable journey from competitive surfing to becoming a prominent environmental activist. What inspired you to transition into this role?
I was born in Aotearoa New Zealand and moved to the east coast of Australia as a young kid. Close to where my family came from is New Zealand’s first marine reserve at Goat Island. Once the reserve was established in 1975, this overfished area bounced back remarkably quickly and has continued to be a clear example of
how effective marine protection can be at healing an area we have damaged.
As a life-long water person, who has followed surf seasons around the world, I have gained a first-hand experiential education while surfing, diving, and sailing in waters plundered by industrial fishing fleets and poisoned by our industrial and domestic agricultural and aquaculture practices. I have felt the loneliness of waters without animals and shores without seabirds.
Can you tell us more about your family’s sustainable lifestyle in regional NSW? How has this lifestyle influenced your advocacy for the planet?
My early times in Aotearoa imprinted the stoke of growing food and a desire to be a part of a community that felt the same!
Our Northern Rivers region has such a great culture of home-grown goodness, we have a huge permaculture garden that sustains our family and a few other families. We have chooks and bees and feel that growing and planting out the land to heal it from misuse over the last hundred years all fits into and compliments a surfing life.
It feels important to us that wherever we can we try to be as kind as possible. Every basket of food we buy from supermarkets in OZ has at least 20,000 food kilometres attached to it, the fact that we can grow so much food locally means we can swiftly opt out of participating in that story of excess mileage.
As a Patagonia Global Sport Activist, what do you see as the most critical issues facing our oceans and marine ecosystems today?
In 2012 Australia was a leader in ocean conservation, with 3,000,000-square-kilometres of marine protected areas. In 2018, the Australian government reduced the protection of around 1,000,000-square-kilometres, opening huge areas to extractive industries.
We are largely a coastal culture here in Australia, beach people, who love the space we inhabit and run to go camp at a pristine beach as soon as work or school stops. We know protecting marine areas works for everyone. Fish communities flourish and reef systems thrive when spared from our harmful industrial reach. Subsequently, nearby fishing communities ensure they have a future of fishing to pass onto their
children and tourism obviously benefits from more marine life for tourists to observe
and appreciate.
Less than 3 percent of the world’s oceans are protected. As a surfer who has friends on every surfable coast in the world, it is easy to see that coastal waters are struggling with pollution and overfishing – therefore so are the people who live at the edge of those waters. The only thriving coastal areas and ocean regions on the
planet are those that have marine protected areas to ensure the ecology has some respite from our worst behaviors. Like approaching an illness in our own bodies, we have diagnosed the problem within our extractive relationship with the oceans, and we know healing and reparation comes in the form of marine protected areas.
The upcoming Patagonia events aim to bring ocean activists and coastal communities together to protect Australia’s oceans. What can attendees expect from these events, and why is it crucial for people to get involved?
Be you a fisher, diver, surfer, sailor, or any type of water person we all know that the next best thing to doing what we love, is talking about it! The fish tales, the surf-carpark talk and deep dives into what it means to be lit up by the aquatic world are always fun to share.
Gathering stories from all over the world about how people engage with their watery homes and, most importantly, how they protect them is a great way for us to skill share, be inspired and sustain the ocean as it does us. Doing this through story, art, music and a good laugh is the next best thing to getting in the water!
These upcoming free events that Patagonia has organised bring together a great mix of art, including from my partner Lauren L Hill, great friend Nathan Oldfield, and filmmakers from overseas. We have Elders and leaders from our First Nations communities speaking and finish up with a live music set from a local legend. So, I do feel that there is something for everyone on these nights. Essentially, we are getting together to share actions with each other that we can all take to care for Country in better ways and to have a healthy relationship with the ocean.
RSVP and find out more at www.patagonia.com.au/ocean.
You co-founded Surfers for Cetaceans, focusing on the protection of whales, dolphins and porpoises. What led to the establishment of this organisation?
I had a bottlenose dolphin push an aggressive tiger shark away from me many years ago, and really, I just wanted to return that kind act!
You’re a part of several surfing/environmental films such as Patagonia’s ‘Never Town’ and more recent projects like ‘In the Family of Things’ and ‘Kin’ which will be screened at these upcoming events. Before these, you featured in the documentary ‘The Cove’, which shed light on the issue of dolphin hunting in Japan. How did that experience shape your activism and your view of the power of media in raising awareness?
For ‘The Cove’, the issue at hand was the inhumane killing of cetaceans in Taiji Cove. We really just wanted our surfing friends and the coastal peoples of Japan to know what was happening there. Those drives/kills and captures of animals are not a 'traditional' practice and the meat from those animals was so toxic you certainly didn’t want to consume it. And the meat was being given to children in school lunches! It was strange that surfers from outside of Japan knew about this, but some of my friends in Japan had no idea. So, we wanted to break that code of silence; the media can be good at that.
Making a film was just one part of a strategy, 'raising awareness' alone is not activism. It is simply one tool in the activist’s kit to achieve a goal. We also need to be able to put down the phones or get off the screen so that we can look each other in the eye and communicate back-and-forth about important issues too.
Looking ahead, what are your hopes and goals for the future of ocean conservation, both in Australia and globally? How can locals in Byron Bay make a difference in this cause?
I hope that we only eat local fish, caught on a line or by diving. We grow our own food and trade with others in our amazing areas. We do not take our dogs to beaches that are meant to be a sanctuary for wildlife. We get together to clean up our rivers, which are severely ill. We replant their banks to stop acid sulphate running into streams and creeks. We stop industrial agriculture chemicals from bleeding into our waterways, respectfully shifting to organic regenerative agriculture practices. We fully support marine protected areas, and we back up all of our surrounding coastal towns that want to realise these forms of ecosystem protection.
Come along to the event on Sunday and visit www.patagonia.com.au/ocean to find out more, as well as sign an important petition that calls on the Australian government to fully protect 30 per cent of Australia’s ocean by 2030 and prioritise First Nations stewardship of Sea Country.
About Dave Rastovich
A renowned freesurfer and leader of campaigns against fish farms, offshore oil drilling, and other threats to our oceans, Dave Rastovich and his family lives near the water in regional New South Wales, growing their own food, keeping bees, surfing and advocating for the planet. “Being part of a community of coastal people who actively preserve the wild spaces and culture that make this place so beautiful,” he says, “is the highlight of my life.”
The Patagonia Global Sport Activist, won numerous titles in iron man, paddling, and surfing events, including a world junior surfing title, before leaving competitive surfing at the age of twenty. In 2004, outside an International Whaling Commission meeting he established the conservation group Surfers for Sanctuaries, which evolved into Surfers for Cetaceans, focusing on the protection of whales, dolphins, and porpoises. He appeared in the documentary on this topic, The Cove (2009). Other films projects include Minds in the Water (2012), El Mar, Mi Alma (2012), The Church of the Open Sky (2018), Patagonia’s Never Town (2018) alongside Wayne Lynch and more recently, Inside This Soft World (2020) and In The Family of Things (2023).