New Model Army

Here comes Josie, right on time, skipping through the café in the lobby at McTavish Surfboards on the outskirts of Byron Bay, high fiving the barista and the hanger-ons. They all know her, of course. It’s a small town (still) and she’s a big star, but then she also knows them all right back, and if she doesn’t, she’s damn good at working the room. In fact, she’s just damn good at being Josie. 

Josie May Tokong Prendergast will be 20 years old when you read this—just out of her teens and starting the great march of life. So how come she’s already known as a veteran surfing supermodel? Maybe because since she was about 15, Josie has been coming at us from every conceivable media angle, this gorgeous force of nature, surfing in the rain as she pushes effortlessly into a Byron Pass ankle-snapper, casually cross-stepping to the nose, looking on-brand and effortless for her youth-driven sponsors and old-school stylish for McTavish, her shaper. Maybe because five years is a long time in the model world, a business where last month’s doe-eyed surfeur du jour can be this month’s Insta-tragedy.

The night before I drove down to Byron to meet her, I watched some of her videos online and across social media—an interesting introduction to a someone I’d seen surf a few times in person, but had never spoken with. The exercise was enlightening given that I’d never really grasped the size of her growing international profile until I actually started to count the views and likes on her various feeds.

Flipping around from Insta to Youtube and back, you can pick up the bare bones of a life story—or at least a life in pretty pictures—as she moves from grainy footage of a cute little girl surfing junk (but with nice light) on a very big board at Byron, to some incongruity as she models for Volcom, then presents as a “real” surfer for McTavish, followed by a trip back to her roots on the Philippine island of Siargao for Billabong, and, finally, as reluctant paparazzi fodder caught on a dinner date with a Filipino TV soap star by the insatiable Asian celeb media.

It all looks like good clean fun, but you can tell that the growing media profile places considerable pressure on a small-town teenager who just got out of high school. “I’m a really anxious person a lot of the time,” she says almost as soon as she sits down for our interview. Occasionally you can hear it in the timbre of her voice, but hell, why wouldn’t she be anxious, sitting down next to an old surf-dog ancient enough to be her grandfather—about as untrendy as it gets.

From Insta to Youtube, you can pick up the bare bones of a life story. It all looks like good clean fun, but the growing media profile places considerable pressure on her.

“So how did it all start?” I ask her. 

“Well, when I was four we moved to Byron Bay from the island in the Philippines where I was born,” she says. “I think I caught my first wave when I was seven or eight. I was more of a skater girl before that. I remember catching my first wave at Broken Head, and then I had a longboard that I had to share with my little brother Bernie and my big brother Mike. We took turns riding it. So we were longboarders from the start, but we only surfed Wategos. Dad didn’t like us going to The Pass because it was too crowded. My dad was one of my earliest influences. I always liked his style of surfing, just so easy. 

“Then one day we did surf The Pass, and that was pretty much it for Wategos, except that when I was about 11 or 12, I started doing the Sunday morning surf comps with the Byron Mal Club at Wategos. I think the guys at McTavish saw me and Bernie surf in one of those comps and invited us to join the team. We got free boards and clothes. It was quite unbelievable because when we moved to Australia from the Philippines we didn’t have enough money to buy new boards. Everything was from garage sales. Then suddenly we got to custom-order our own boards and it was just surreal for us.”

And just like magic, the legendary Bob McTavish appears at our table straight out of the shaping bay, foam dust coating his shoulders like dandruff. Almost seamlessly, he picks up the line of our conversation.

 “I first met Josie’s dad, Mike, in the early 1970s,” he says, “when I was shaping in my old shed on the edge of Lennox. We’d rented this really quaint farmhouse, and the locals knew that to get a custom board, you had to drive up the 200-meter grass driveway and hope to find me at home. So Mike hunted me down, and I remember him not being clear about what he wanted. It took a couple of hours to get the right design and dimensions in my head. But we settled on a sweet single-fin in the high sixes. Very successful at Lennox, The Pass, and the various beachbreaks around Suffolk Park, where Mike lived then and still does. We’ve chatted many times over the years, a very gracious and accommodating character. Josie has good bloodlines.”

There’s no doubt she’s well loved at the McTavish factory but it seems Josie had it wrong about being talent-spotted in the lineup. It was filmmaker Nathan Oldfield who first brought her to the attention of the McTavish crew. 

“When I first saw Josie I knew that she had something special,” says Oldfield. “It was obvious even though she was still ironing out a few creases in her technique, developing her approach, and creating her own lines. Despite the lack of maturity in her surfing and the fact that she wasn’t on the right board, her style and grace were already there. It’s almost like the kind of noble and beautiful and effortless elegance of good dancers. I recognized it in her straight away. Plus, she was just a sweet kid—smiley, grateful, polite, humble. The product of good parenting. I took a photo of her one day and posted it to Instagram with a caption, something along the lines of, This girl has the right stuff. Someone needs to put some good surfboards beneath her feet. Within a week, McTavish Surfboards had hooked her up and were building her boards. Over the years, Josie’s surfing has kept growing in leaps and bounds, but her humility has always stayed the same.”

“All of a sudden we were getting free boards and clothes. It was unbelievable because when we moved to Australia we didn’t have much money. Everything was from garage sales.”

“That was when she was a 14 year old, back in 2014,” McTavish CEO Ben Wallace confirms. “It’s been a lot of fun working with her over the past five years, watching her grow up and seeing her surfing develop alongside her successful career. From a brand perspective, she’s a brilliant ambassador for McTavish. A great surfer first and foremost, she’s as gracious on land as she is in the sea. We’re proud to have her on our boards.”

“But does that translate to sales?” I ask. Despite his gushing, I know Ben is a hard-ass in business.

“Well, the Mark Morgan shot [an image of Josie on the nose at The Pass] got 8,700 likes on the McTavish Instagram at a time when we had about 40,000 followers. That’s engagement.” 

More about that later.

*

The island of Siargao, a teardrop-shaped dot in the Philippine Sea, 500 miles from Manila, is chiefly famous for its premier surf break, Cloud 9, which sits about three miles from the once sleepy fishing village and now burgeoning tourist resort of General Luna, where Josie was born in 1999, the second child of wandering Scottish-Australian surfer Michael Prendergast and local student Ella Tokong.

Ella was one of 11 children in a long-established dynasty of fishermen and coconut farmers, so her own children, first Michael Jr., then Josie, then Bernie, were born into a loving and nurturing environment that remains a large part of Josie’s life. In Billabong’s Home Series, there’s a lovely scene in which she introduces each of her mom’s siblings to the camera. Her extended Siargao family is a subject to which she returns often in our conversation.

“When I was little in General Luna,” she says, “there wasn’t much money, but I don’t remember seeing an unhappy face. Now it’s probably one of the wealthier islands in the Philippines because of the tourism income. I’ve kind of watched it develop from nothing to the next Bali. But my mom always tells me stories from her past, like when she was young a really special treat would be a can of sardines for dinner. Even when we moved to Australia, we didn’t have money. We didn’t even have a car. We’d get the bus to the supermarket, and mom had never seen milk in a carton before.

“Since I was very young I’ve had this dream of starting an orphanage, but as time has gone on I’ve come to realize that there’s not so much need for one now on Siargao. But outside of General Luna and Cloud 9, there are still so many villages that lack proper schooling, so I’d like to start my own NGO and create a supply chain through my sponsors to improve their opportunities at school. Around Siargao, so many kids are pulled out of school as early as eight or nine to work on tourist or fishing boats. I’d like to help open them up to other opportunities.”

We shift back to her career. She runs a finger around the rim of her empty coffee mug and opens up about the anxieties of leading a life that seems, from the outside, perfect. With a move to overall presentation as a way to make a living out of surfing comes the typical, albeit still unfair, pressures of working in front of a camera, and sharing that work with hundreds of thousands of strangers. “When I was 15,” she says, “a big management company wanted to represent me. I was told subtly that I’d need to lose weight if it was going to work. I was fit and surfing every day, so it really upset me, and had an emotional and physical effect on me for quite a while. Then Billabong came along and told me I was just fine the way I was. They said to just keep surfing.”

Roll on a few years and her global profile has caused other anxieties, like being stalked by late-night visitors wanting selfies (“How do they find out where I live?”) and the death threats she’s received from the Filipino soapy’s fans as a result of her casual friendship with their biggest star. “Filipinos are very into the celebrity culture, and I guess they were being protective of him,” she says.

As if anxious now to get back to her happy place, Josie brightly changes the subject. “Did I tell you I’ve just built a little house in General Luna? Right next to my family. I can’t wait to get back there, see my little nephew, hang out with the people I love.”

I ask what it’s like to change the buying patterns of her surf peers around the world and Josie cringes at the term “influencer.” She doesn’t like “model” much either. She’s a surfer who models. And she has a point. But if Steph Gilmore deleted her Instragram account tomorrow, it’s likely—with her seven world titles—she would still remain a pro surfer. If someone whose career depends on social media did the same thing, would they still have a platform?

Among her digital peers, the top woman surfer on social media in 2018, according to the influencer marketing firm Neoreach, was Anastasia Ashley, who chiefly generated a lot of attention a few years ago for her Sports Illustrated swimsuit pictures. Down the list a bit you’ll find Ellie Jean Coffey and Holly Daze Coffey with nearly two million Instagram followers between them, and who seem to be following the Kardashian exposure template, but with surfboards. 

Josie, with her 160,000 Instagram followers, doesn’t make the top ten, but Klear.com, “the new standard in influencer marketing,” rates her influencing ability as 82 out of 100 and her engagement “outstanding.” Basically, that means everyone in her peer group around the world looks at her image and says, “I want what she’s having.” 

Of course, the best way to see what makes any surfer tick, especially beyond the curated visage of social media, is to go surfing with them. So late in the afternoon we paddle out at The Pass, where the banks have been carved up somewhat by a recent cyclone. There are still some neat little reforms running down towards Clarkes as Josie knee-paddles into the lineup on her McTavish, smiling and chatting with friends and strangers alike, eventually spotting her brother. 

The crowd is thick and it’s a circus but she picks off waves quietly and confidently, quickly kicking out if there’s another taker. Critics of her surfing, and there are a few, say she doesn’t try hard enough. But that’s the beauty of it. Everything Josie Prendergast does on a surfboard is effortless elegance, to borrow Nathan Oldfield’s apt description, and that’s an influence we could all take note of.

[Feature image: Photo by Nathan Oldfield]