They’re planning to build a statue of Pauline Menczer overlooking Bondi Beach, where her surfing career began in much the same style as it would continue for two decades – defiantly, loudly, hilariously.
They don’t have a design yet, but surely amongst the frontrunners would be Pauline in her late-nineties era, where she’d given up all pretence of accepting a sport that never fully accepted her and had publicly started mocking it. “It was liberating to be living out loud,” she says of the time, “and I decided to turn up the volume.”
Pauline turned up to the Diet Coke contest at Manly in 1998 with her hair cropped short (“a detail that made me conspicuously more gay”), dyed platinum blond (“a piss-take, sponsors always gravitate toward blondes”), the word…
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Surfing World (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 424