Straight across the road from where I lived in bayside suburb of Melbourne was a large brick electrical sub-station. Once every week or so, shadowy figures would appear in the dead of night and plaster its sides in posters for nearby dances and discotheques, and a few nights later, me and one of my mates would sneak over and peel them off again. We'd take them home and stick them on the walls of our bedrooms.
A few years later I was showing 16mm surfing movies in the bayside suburbs for two Torquay-via-Brighton surfers who had just started a new surfing enterprise called Rip Curl Surfboards. I hired halls around Frankston and showed only two movies- Paul Witzig's surf movie Evolution and Associated Screen Arts psychedelic surf/pop flick, A Fluid Journey.
A Fluid Journey is a forgotten movie nowadays, but Evolution has documented a seminal period in Australian surfing. The two Brighton surfers used the takings from their fledgling surf movie enterprise to buy rolls of neoprene rubber. They had decided to try their hand at making wetsuits.
I had a ball and never tired of watching those two movies. And I never tired of peeling posters off sub-way walls. In the end I was left with a pile of unused Evolution posters and over the years I lugged them around with me and at the same time started stockpiling other surf and pop movie posters. That Evolution pile is considerably smaller now, and I've only got the one Fluid Journey poster, but the Wild on the Beach archive has grown and grown. And grown.
A large part of this archive was the main part of our Lorne beach-themed gift shop- Wild on the Beach, but we've retired that business now. So now it's time to share our poster and ephemera collection with those who love poster art.
Keep checking back-we've only just launched this website, and there's so much more to add. Please excuse the fuzzy images...we've rushed some posters onto this site and they're in the process of being re-shot, but if you want to check any of our titles more closely...let us know...we will get cleaner images to you!