Introduction
The search for special waves was and is at the root of the surfing dream, the search for Nirvana: clean waves with long green walls and deep spitting barrels . . . these days the dream has been overtaken by a worldwide chase for dollars (Brown, 1997, p. 1)

In its formative years surfing tourism represented an alternative means of constructing identity for those disenchanted by mainstream conservative expectations of youth in Australia. Eventually however, as surfers looked for ways to finance their ongoing search for the perfect wave, surfing tourism became commodified. Normative imagery of an exoticised surfers’ nirvana has since become central to an ongoing marketing synergy between the multi-billion dollar global surfwear industry, surf media, and the surfing tourism industry. This paper incorporates constructivist notions of tourist space in tracing the lineage of nirvana and aims to lay foundations for further research exploring the implications of commodification, market-oriented reconstruction, and mass
consumption of surfing tourist space.

Adam Smith noted a commodity’s ‘natural’ price - that is labour, land and production costs and profit – and its market price, influenced by supply and demand. In establishing a measure of commodity value, Smith attributed little importance to the use-value of commodities (Keen, 1993). Alternatively Marx drew sharp distinctions between use-value and exchange-value and it is his ideas that inform most contemporary definitions of commodification. For example The Oxford Dictionary of Sociology refers to the production of commodities for exchange (via the market) as opposed to direct use by the producer. It signals the conversion of use-values into exchange-values and heralds a change in production relations . . . it can be described as the process whereby goods and services which were formerly used for subsistence purposes are bought and sold in the market (Marshall, 1998, p. 93).

It has been widely assumed that the commodification of tourism represents something inherently ‘bad’, inevitably leading to the cultural degradation of host communities (Crick, 1989). Shepherd (2002, p. 183) highlights the binary divisions between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ inherent in what he sees as an outmoded position: ‘once there was a pristine and natural place outside the west, then tourism arrived, now what was once pure and authentic has become spoiled and commodified’. This paper does not subscribe to the idea of binary relationships in the commodification of tourism - good in the beginning and bad as they become commodified.

Lanfant (1995) suggested that the commodification of heritage tourism leads to newly constructed realities, specifically designed for tourists and driven by market driven priorities. Wearing and MacDonald (in press) also point out that‘purchased leisure [is] governed by the market economy with the focus on profit. The leisure experience then becomes a commodity to be bought, sold and manipulated with this market fundamental in mind’. In this way commodification tends to standardise tourist attractions and the actions through which visitors experience the other (e.g. sightseeing, accommodation and formal tours). This process is referred to as homogenisation, ‘the levelling down of experience so that variety is replaced with uniformity’ (Rojek, 1995, p. 4). Many writers agree that the market driven production of leisure at some level controls and constrains personal expression (Clarke and Critcher, 1985).

Suvantola (2002, pp. 132-133) has argued that tourists’ subjective understandings of place are becoming displaced by tourism industry myth and imagery. Standardised marketing symbols are sought out to confirm and calibrate success in pursuing a particular tourist discourse - be it discourse associated with, for example, ecotourism, adventure tourism or five star resort enclaves. Krippendorf (1987, p. 22) found evidence that even tourists’ travel fantasies are not entirely their own creation in his observation that they are often articulated in the language of tourism marketing. Thus it may be argued that tourism advertising aims to firstly install standardised marketing symbols within the daydreams of potential tourists, and then to sell reconstructions of these daydreams, replete with pre-loaded symbolic markers, to consumers (Reimer, 1990, p. 503, Urry; 1990, p. 13). Britton articulated this position clearly.

. . . in order to transform travel and tourist experiences into commodities they must be standardised and rendered amenable to capitalist production techniques. A tourist industry has evolved which simultaneously enables tourist experiences to occur, encourages tourists to anticipate their experience and the expected social returns, and convinces tourists they have had the requisite experiences (Britton, 1991, pp. 454-455).

In this way tourist space has become the epitome of contradictory space, initially creative and contested yet ultimately unable to resist the homogenising hand of commodification (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 385, Rojek, 1995). This argument raises concerns about the influence of commodification upon the construction of tourist space. Surfing tourism provides a case in point as nirvana - formerly uncharted, potentially dangerous, not serviced by established travel routes or tourist facilities – is reconstructed in line with business-class expectations of comfort and convenience and made available to anyone with the ability to pay. Moving on from binary notions of good/bad, authentic/inauthentic, precommodified/commodified this paper aims to provide a platform for a historical recasting of the construction and commodification of tourist space that is entwined, interacting and contested.

Conceptualising tourist space
New forms of spatial organisation and new forms of tourist space are of increasing concern to a range of disciplines. Space and place are increasingly conceptualised as complex socio-cultural constructions rather than in the simplistic terms of physical location (Meethan, 2001, p. 19). Notions of tourist space which incorporate the subjectivity of those interpreting place and the underlying influences upon that interpretation provide a context for examining the ways in which, according to Aithison and Reeves (1998, p. 51), ‘...power, identity, meaning and behaviour are constructed, negotiated and renegotiated according to socio-cultural dynamics’.

Social scientists have traditionally referred to space in terms of a physical location, and the meanings that people bring to spaces have been referred to as place. Relph’s (1976) work in phenomenology, underpinned by positivist notions of authenticity, argued that contemporary social conditions lead to a sense of placelessness. In a view with similar positivist underpinnings, Agnew (1987) - a geographer - argued that ‘meaningful’ places are produced through social relations and in specific social contexts, geographically located yet interrelated with social and physical environments. Massey (1994, 1995) moved beyond positivist notions of historically informed authenticity by introducing interaction with the outside world as an important component in constructing place. This position suggests that places represent the intersection of the local and the global
and are constantly constructed and reconstructed through dynamic interactions rather than consisting of static positivist essences (Massey, 1994; Eade, 1997; Pries, 1999). Similarly Gustafson (2001) suggests that different discourses construct individual meanings of place which are subject to constant reappraisal. French philosophers Michel De Certeau and Michael Foucault parallel these notions, though invert the traditionally held relationship between space and place.

De Certeau (1988) considers ‘space’ to be ‘place’ (an instantaneous configuration of positions, relatively static in space and time) which is context and time - it is place that resonates with experience and stories.

According to De Certeau, stories transform places into spaces by providing spatial organisation, opening a ‘legitimate theatre for practical actions’ and ‘authorising the establishment, displacement and transcendence of limits’. This position enables a variety of discourses associated with a geographic location to interact without one assuming absolute authority or legitimacy (De Certeau, 1988, p. 125). This notion of space holds potential utility in conceptualising the divergent, often competing realities of tourism stakeholders.

Citing Foucault (1978, 1988, 1977) and Sibley (1988), Tim Edensor (1998) describes a continuum between the poles of:
a) ‘heterogeneous’ spaces reminiscent of Foucault’s heterotopia which describes (in terms similar to de Certeau) ‘the juxtaposing in a single real place [of] several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (1986, p. 25):‘transitional identities may be sought, sensual and imaginative experimentation indulged, and the Western hegemonic power/knowledge axis bewildered and challenged’ (Edensor, 1998, p. 60); and

b) ‘enclavic’ tourist spaces, characterised by Cohen’s (1972) ‘tourist bubble’ - controlled spaces subject to centralized regulation and discursive surveillance which seeks to order and contextualise difference.

This view implies that tourist spaces undergo a transition from a pre- commodified state of heterogeneity (loosely defined and controlled, but one of many understandings of place eg a teeming market place) to rigidly controlled, commodified tourist enclaves (eg Club Med resorts, five star hotel lobbies, cruise ships). Certainly, symbols and images of tourism marketing communicated through the media represent a diffuse form of social control, however, the ways in which tourists perceive them is another question (Selwyn, 1993; Dann, 1996; Meethan, 2001). This paper, following De Certeau (1988), adopts the view that tourist spaces cannot be reduced to a single discourse with prescribed meanings, rather the value ascribed to space represents an individual’s dynamic dialogue between the past and the present in which meanings are fragile and impermanent
(Sahlins, 1985, p. 144). Having said this, commodified tourist spaces tend to encourage the discourse of the powerful, often seeking to control interpretations of destinations and locally derived spaces to within popular limits of understanding.

The construction of nirvana
In the period following World War II, surfing provided an opportunity for Australian youth to move away from the competitive pursuits offered by mainstream culture through sport. Pearson (1977) noted the ascendancy of values of an increasingly liberal nature amongst young people in the early 1950s.

Young surfboard riders were seen to be rejecting conservative middle-class patterns of behaviour represented by military style Surf Life Saving Associations (SLSA). The introduction of the lighter, more manoeuvrable malibu surfboard in 1956, combined with the rapid growth in car ownership, severed the dependency of surfers upon SLSA storage facilities. American surf movies and magazines reached Australia in 1957 and 1962 respectively, and were quickly followed by a teen fashion craze based on the ‘surfie’ image ( Mercer, 1977; Cronley, 1983; Carroll, 2000; Booth, 1994, 1995).

In 1964 Bruce Brown’s groundbreaking surf film The Endless Summer was released and according to Towery and Pruett ...[opened] the floodgates to global surf exploration...all eyes turned to the horizon as exotic locales and world-class waves were splashed across the big screen...Inspired by The Endless Summer, surfers set out around the earth to find their own versions of the ‘perfect wave’ (Towery and Pruett, 2002, p. 14).

Preston-Whyte’s (2001, p. 309) research supports this claim by highlighting the importance of surf media in constructing and maintaining normative imagery of the perfect wave and generating surf related travel.

Normative images of the wave environment are provided by surfing magazines that contain colour photographs of surfers demonstrating their skill on formidable waves . . . For surfers the ‘perfect wave’ represents this ideal and perhaps unattainable vision. It is assumed to exist, is difficult to describe, and is the source of a quest that leads surfers in search of spaces where this wave can be found (Preston-Whyte, 2001, p. 309)

More generally, Urry (1990, p. 3) has argued that the anticipation of pleasure from travel ‘is constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices such as film, TV, literature, magazines, records, and videos which construct and reinforce the gaze’. The Endless Summer screened along Australia’s east coast and aided in the construction of surfing tourist space by establishing a sense amongst its audience that surfing represented ‘more than a sport – it was also an attitude to life...[it was] the adventure implicit in riding waves where no- one had surfed before, and the sense of freedom to be found away from civilisation’s complexities’ (Thomas, 1975, p. 85).

The ‘surfie’ fad impacted heavily upon surfers in Australia in the mid 1960s.‘Tentative characteristics were pushed to extremes, separating ‘real’ surfers from the fad...The numbers attracted to the beaches by the wave of advertising ‘stoking teenagers up on the sport’, led to crowded conditions and aggressive localism’ (Cronley, 1983, p. 67). Young surfers began to see cracks in the rhetoric of freedom implicit in the liberal ideology of the times as their very identity was challenged both by the capitalist appropriation, reconstruction and dissemination of their culture, and the compromise of their personal freedom by heavy handed SLSA driven anti-surfer legislation. Surfers responded by replacing needs and aspirations of capitalist imperatives with an obsessive search for the perfect wave (Cronly, 1983, p. 105).

In the mid 1960s, cultural disaffiliation among educated middle class youth became widespread; surfers recoiled from corporate sponsorship and looming surf consumerism (Booth, 1994, p. 275). Many, including world champion surfers Bernard ‘Midget’ Farrelly and Nat Young turned to non-competitive soul-surfing in order to “support the revolution” (Young, 1970, p 7). Through the 1960s a philosophy of surfing developed in opposition to the conservative philosophy of the SLSA.

The board rider is flexible, untrammelled, moving from beach to beach in search of waves; the surf lifesaver joins a single club, gives allegiance to a single beach and stays there while on duty . . . The surf clubs are the last citadels of unrepentant Australian masculinity. The one is cool, modern, uncommitted, the other traditional, hidebound, loyalist. One is self-involved, even selfish, one is aimed at service; one is free-wheeling, one is disciplined, one is with it, one is square (McGregor, 1968, p. 298)

The development of crowds at many urban surf beaches and disenchantment with mainstream society led soul surfers to rural areas in search of less crowded surfing conditions. Nirvana was being constructed in the form of an alternative surfing lifestyle in domestic rural settings.

Surfing Byron for the first time was fantastic, surfing Angourie for the first time was fantastic, every first that we ever had up there was fantastic we felt like Armstrong felt going to the moon. We were on the same thing. You know we’d excommunicated from the city in our old Fords and panel vans and we cut all our ties and people were freaked out that we’d come rolling through their towns. You know with our lifestyle, our hair, our clothes, the way we lived – we didn’t care, we were free (Farrelly Interview in Tracks, 1971)

In past tense Farrelly described rural Australian surfing spaces in 1971; media exposure had already attracted crowds and resulted in degradation of the surfing amenity. Farrelly lamented that “There’s already too many people in the water” and when questioned about unpublicised surfing tourist spaces around Australia responded “Oh well if there are I’m not going to say anything about it. I don’t feel obliged to see what’s left spoiled.” Disillusioned by the crowding of domestic surfing spaces on the one hand and inspired by The Endless Summer on the other, surfers began a new search for the perfect wave amongst Australia’s regional neighbours (Carroll, 2000).

Verrender (2000) observed that as the hippies blazed a trail across Asia to Europe, surfers began taking sidetracks just in case there were waves. In the absence of established travel routes, tourist infrastructure and crowds, surf exploration in this period embodied, in Fitzgerald’s (1996, p. 41) terms,’‘Surfing for surf’s sake”. The spirit of adventure underlining and adding an extra element of risk, even danger, to the search. The stories of early surf exploration inspired the following generation of surfing tourists.

When I was a kid growing up innocently middle-class [in the 1960s] on Sydney’s northern beaches, I loved the idea of these surfers who struck out into the unknown, suffered torments, and finally arrived at their own visions of Heaven . . . They would up and vanish one day, then stumble back into town six months later, sunburned, malarial, missing teeth, a stone lighter, but with a light in their eyes that spoke of waves beyond my dreams (Carroll, 2000, p. 59).

Constructing nirvana in Indonesia
Tracks co-editor David Elfick (1971) described the ‘discovery’ of the surf break at Uluwatu, Bali, by Australian surf cinematographer Albert Falzon. Falzon’s 1972 surf movie, Morning of the Earth: A fantasy of surfers in three untouched lands, playing in nature’s oceans (produced by Elfick) depicted Uluwatu as ‘untouched’ surfing nirvana. Locally derived experiences and understandings of place do not feature, instead the focus is upon imagery of wave riding, specific surfing conditions and the travelling surfer’s lifestyle. Barilotti observed that

Morning of the Earth did little to dispel the sentimental notion of an isolated South Seas utopia that had somehow survived intact after 400 years of Dutch colonial rule, two world wars and a recent military coup...Morning depicted a naive surfer’s paradise of perfect green barrels, flower bedenzined festivals and sultry Balinese maidens porting water on their heads down the trail to Uluwatu (Barilotti, 2002, p. 33).

Taking advantage of foreign funded post-coup infrastructure and a weakened Indonesian rupiah, ‘Falzon and his crew, like most tourists and surfers, simply drifted effortlessly in the slipstream of geopolitics and trade routes forged through centuries of bloody colonialism’ (Barilotti, 2002. p. 33). The construction of an apolitical surfing tourist space proceeded on the following terms- ‘Bali has known juice surf. Combine this with cheap living, ganga and a lush tropical climate, and in theory you have the ideal place to surf it out’ (Elfick, 1971b).

In De Certeau’s (1988) terms, such stories established the nature and boundaries of a new surfing tourist space. The role of the local population in Elfick’s article seems related to Pratt’s (1992, p. 204) ‘monarch of all I survey’ and Selwyn’s (1993) “view from the throne” style of travel writing in which locals appear to be brought into the story largely to witness and confirm the achievements of the observers. Elfick (1971) presents locals as somewhat mysterious (not described as individuals) - they remain other and inferior to the surfer/reader.

The natives who were lining the cliff tops freaked at this man walking on the water. They are frightened of the ocean only venturing near it at low tide to set their lines, and here were these men walking at great speed on the water...smiling and ripping across the surface with excitement...they were sunshine supermen (Elfick, 1971, pp. 16-17)

In this way locally derived spaces are interpreted from the space of the surfing tourist, passing through western cultural filters. However, real understanding is rarely produced in tourist/host interactions (Krippendorf, 1987). Crick (1991) argued that touristic encounters with host communities are often the product of misunderstandings with ‘fragile inter-subjective origins in the fumbling dialogues between two people’. The level of communication between Elfick and Uluwatu locals is demonstrated by the following passage.

Rusty pulled out his harmonica and sucked out a tune. We made drums out of bamboo and driftwood logs...we smoked the communal chillum and made music and looked at the stars. We spoke no common words, but our communication was there in laughter and song as we shared our common canopy of the night. (Elfick, 1971, p. 17)

As with The Endless Summer eight years previously, the overlapping of surf fantasy and ‘place’ (following De Certeau, 1998) in Morning of the Earth, represented a quantum step in the construction and global dissemination of an apolitical nirvana that captured the imagination of surfers and inspired thousands to follow (King, 1996, p. 46). Similarly, Lagundri Bay on the island Nias off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia was ‘discovered’ two years after Uluwatu by three Australian surfers who were directly inspired by the surf film The Forgotten Island of Santosha (Lueras and Lueras, 1997, p. 174). Barilotti claims that ‘Every surfer carries a naive secret hope of finding the Forgotten Island of Santosha – a utopian warm water idyll where the waves are perfectly shaped and most of all blessedly uncrowded’ (Barilotti, 2002, p. 35). In turn Lagundri featured in the 1980 surf film Storm Riders, inspiring the next wave of surf explorers. Ridgeway (1995) articulates the nature of early surfing tourist space at Lagundri Bay below.

It started as a whisper, one of those great rumours that surfers around the world love to believe in: on a remote unknown island in Indonesia – a place of malaria-infested jungles and head hunters – huge, perfectly formed waves rolled into an idyllic bay. According to the tales, these were no ordinary waves: they were giant crystalline tubes, so hollow you could stand up inside them, stretch your arms above your head and still not touch the top of the barrel. If you could find the location of the island, survive the arduous trip to get there and tolerate the wild environment, a surfing paradise was yours for the taking (Ridgeway, 1995 in Lueras & Lueras, 1997, p. 167).

On the basis of such stories, surfing tourism flourished. Elfick’s experiences and those of other surf explorers in the early seventies established a theatre of activity for surfing tourism in Indonesia based upon adventure, relentlessly perfect surf, an absence of uninvited surfing peers, and interactions with friendly, even awestruck fourth world host communities. These initial stories form the benchmark by which subsequent surfing tourists calibrate the legitimacy, and relative cultural value of their own experiences (Mondy, 2001).

The commodification and consumption of nirvana
In the early 1970s commodification of the ‘alternative’ surfing subculture, which grew from rejection of mainstream values and the shallow consumerism of the 1964 surf fad, began from within. The global surfwear giants of today formed as surfers attempted to sustain their alternative lifestyles, ironically, by selling products rooted in the rejection of mainstream values, to the mainstream (Bartholomew & Baker, 1996; Baker, 2002). Those with insights into structures of power and capital recognised the commercial value of a marginalised surfing culture. The tourism industry became interested in surfing tourism in the mid 1970s offering specifically tailored package deals to Hawaii and Indonesia. Mainstream corporate interest in the sport returned and an professional international touring contest series began in 1977 (Bartholomew & Baker, 1996). By this time the Australian backyard surfwear manufacturers were forging new markets in the U.S, Europe, South America and Africa (Billabong, 2000). Cronly suggests that ‘there was a collusion of sorts between the magazines and manufacturers...The magazines and movies stimulated the desire and need, and the industries provided the materials to satisfy it’ (1983, p. 100).

The first purpose built ‘surf-camp’ in Indonesia opened in 1977 and by the early 1980s tour operators and specialist surf travel agents offered package deals to surf camps and live-aboard yacht charters (Carroll, 1988, 1989, 2000; Sparkes, 1996; Lueras & Lueras, 1997). Nirvana had developed a market value. By the end of the 1980s vertically integrated surf tourism organisations reflected and further facilitated changes in the socio-economic makeup of the surfing tourist market; a wider consumer base was prepared to pay handsomely for the safety, comfort and convenience of a packaged trip to remote world-class surfing destinations previously accessible only to the most hardy surf explorers (Ian Lyon, 2000, pers. comm.; Paul King, 2000, pers. comm.; Verrender, 2000). The marketing potential of the adventure implicit in surf exploration was harnessed by Coca-Cola who simulated the surf discovery of Lagundri Bay to sell their product in television, film, and print advertising. The wholesale commodification of the soul surfing ethos and lifestyle of early surf explorers followed.

Engaging with nature on the spiritual level, and surfing in the wild, regardless of money and contests. The grassroots have this ethic at heart, and over the years have been resentful of the new commercial vision. So now the companies are playing to the soul surfing ideal, and it’s the latest marketing trend (Brown, 1997)

Beginning in the early 1990s, the Rip Curl ‘Search’ marketing campaign involved continuous global surf exploration and video production, a print media advertising campaign featuring images of empty, undisclosed surf breaks, and slogans urging consumers to ‘travel a little further, search a little longer’ (Carroll, 2000). More recently rival surfwear multinational Quiksilver launched the‘Quiksilver Crossing’ involving an eight-year boat charter and product/professional surfer promotion shoot. Through the images created and
carefully constructed slogans, marketers have created a sense of nostalgia for the‘pristine’ surfing space constructed by early surf explorers.

As yesterday’s surf discovery became crowded as a result of media exposure and corporate advertising, contemporary surf explorers searched increasingly remote island groups which according to Baker (1997, p. 177) ‘literally dare us to leave home and visit their shores, tempting us to endure travel hardships and possibly tropical diseases in the hope that we will discover the next ‘best wave in the world’ . In the early 1990s the process of ongoing surf exploration led by Australians with access to yachts and motor cruisers revealed the Mentawai islands, approximately 130km off the central west Sumatran coast. The islands embodied the essence of retrospective soul marketing and rapidly became the flavour of the 90s, featuring in thousands of advertisements and surf media articles and movies. Within six years the Mentawais supported a fleet of over
thirty live-aboard charter boats and were subject to a rush for land, even entire islands suitable for luxury resort development (Ponting, 2001).

The market value of surfing tourist space has further increased with media coverage of professional surfing contests at spectacular surf breaks in exotic locations (including the Indonesian islands of the Mentawai, Nias, Java, Bali and Sumbawa) broadcast to a potential audience of millions via television and the Internet. By the year 2000 surfwear corporation Billabong which began as a backyard operation in 1973, was listed on the Australian stock exchange and valued at 600 million Australian dollars. In 2001 a luxury resort was built overlooking the surf break on the cliff top at Uluwatu and Tracks surfing magazine described the Mentawai archipelago as containing the world’s most photographed waves (Blakey, 2001).

Conclusion
This paper has attempted to articulate where the edges of a framework for a constructivist understanding of surfing tourist space might lie. By tracing its origins, a picture has developed of a surfing tourist space constructed from media supported notions of a normative, pre-commodified nirvana based upon adventure, relentlessly perfect surf, an absence of uninvited surfing peers, and interactions with fourth world host communities. The commodification, reconstruction and mainstream consumption of nirvana carries a range of implications for stakeholders. Drawing upon Edensor’s (1998) continuum, surfing tourist space in Indonesia has moved from a state of heterogeneity towards homogenised enclavic tourist space as tour operators removed the ‘rough edges’ to provide western tourists with a standardised and controlled experience with all the comforts of home. Fitzgerald, a surf explorer of the 1970s, observed that ‘Now it’s comfy yachts and concrete to the high tide mark, with the true test of escape further away and harder to attain. Adventure, escapism, call it what you like’ (1996. p. 41).

Through surfing tourism, areas previously ignored by tourists and somewhat marginalised from Indonesia’s development efforts have quite abruptly found themselves within a new, unfamiliar space in which they are considered Other in their own place by escalating flows of visitors who contributed little or nothing to the local economy. At Uluwatu, locals suggested that visiting surfers employ them to carry equipment across their land and ‘protect’ their belongings, implying that refusal to agree to these terms would almost certainly result in the disappearance of a surfer’s belongings (Fitzgerald, 1976). In western terms something of a protection racket, but for locals an important first step in re-establishing a presence in nirvana.

The lives of many local families on Nias have been completely reconstructed from subsistence agriculturalists to service providers for travelling surfers. Whilst economic benefits have flowed to some local families, some surf commentators have questioned the social cost of these benefits.

Surfing has certainly boosted the Lagundri economy but I feel it’s come at a huge price...The alcoholism, gambling, crime, and on my last trip here, the small kid I taught to surf in 1981 is now a pimp for working girls on the point. I wonder if the simple life of harvesting coconuts and rice would have been a better destiny for these people? (Peter Reeves quoted in Barilotti, 2002, p. 34).

The indigenous Mentawai have had less opportunity to factor themselves into the surfing tourism equation given the industry’s tendency to deal with other, more economically and politically powerful ethnic groups, and almost exclusive use of live-aboard charter yachts. Most surfing tourists do not make landfall in the islands let alone interact directly with indigenous communities in their own space. Reeves (2001) suggests that locals are now taking to canoes to re-establish their presence in a tourist space in which in they had all but been written out (c.f. Dann, 1999).

Nirvana, at the expense of locally constructed understandings of space, remains a powerful marketing image. Mentawai tour operator Rick Cameron recently commented, ‘the surf industry would rather the area stayed exactly the way it was when they first arrived 7-8 years ago – remote, mysterious, exotic and uncrowded and undeveloped. That is the essence of the place that sells magazines, surf wear and surf vacations’ (Surfer's Path, 2002, p. 73). However a non-government organisation has developed with the intention of shattering the comfortable industry reconstruction of nirvana with bold advertising campaigns in surf media with slogans such as ‘No wonder the Mentawai Islands are uncrowded, three out five children there will die’ (Tracks, 2001, p. 96).

The analysis of tourist space represents a new and developing strand of tourism research which warrants further investigation particularly in foreign controlled tourism systems in developing countries. It has been argued here that commodification of tourism does not automatically equate with its degradation.

Rather the historical recasting of surfing tourism in light of tourist space undertaken here suggests that the hegemony of nirvana at the expense of understanding and care for the implications of commodification for less powerful stakeholders has resulted in undesirable outcomes for those groups. Barilotti (2002, p.34) has argued that once surfing tourist space becomes commodified ‘trash, roads, erosion, water pollution, development, environmental degradation, resource depletion – inevitably follow’. He adds that “the list of soiled Third-World surf paradises . . . is long and growing” (Barilotti, 2002, p 34).

An alternative approach to tourism which credits tour operators with the ability to move beyond inappropriate adherence to modernisation paradigms of tourism development and simultaneously empowers host communities, governments and interest groups with agency and resistance, suggests that such bleak outcomes are not inevitable. In a climate of growing resistance from those stakeholders dissatisfied with the performance of surfing tourism, understanding the implications of commodifying and consuming nirvana may also provide a basis for overcoming the current impasse between the promise and practice of a sustainable surfing tourism industry in Indonesia.

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