Attempts to mass market beach and surfing culture have led to the re-writing of surfing history, in particular sidelining Hawaiians' true role as the short-board pioneers, writes Scott Levi.

There has been a movement to commodify surfing and surf culture since the first wave of sun-seeking tourists travelled to Waikiki at the turn of the 20th century.

As with most indigenous cultural practices, the invaders failed to understand the cultural complexity and technical advancement of Hawaiian surfing, despite the evidence before their own eyes.

And when the first mass market surf films hit the cinema in the early 1960s this Hawaiian surfing culture was largely ignored by the movie camera's lens as well.

In much the same way that Fiona Jordan argues that the "beach or bikini body" in women's magazines establishes a cultural agenda by determining what the acceptable feminine form should be, so to does The Endless Summer writer and director Bruce Brown portray a surf culture in Hawaii, arguably the birthplace of surfing, as dominated by rebellious young American males.

There is an under-representation of native Hawaiians seen surfing in the film, and none are filmed surfing the handmade short "alaia" boards that were still in use at the time.

Sunshine Coast shaper of traditional Hawaiian boards, Tom Wegener, offers his take on Greg Noll - the 1960's most famous big wave surfer and one of the American team that introduced the Malibu board to Australia in the 1950s.

When Greg Noll and these guys would paddle out on their big boards, their big elephant guns, there was always a handful of Hawaiians on the shorter alaia boards out on those giant waves, and the westerners didn't even see them. They didn't even acknowledge them, just ignored them. They just asked them to get out of the way, they didn't want them to be in the movie. They didn't see what the Hawaiians had been doing forever.

The big wave footage of Waimea Bay in Endless Summer was used over and over again in the mass market Hollywood films of the '60s when depicting big wave surfing. This film footage created the Hawaiian surfing mise-en-scene for the era.

This idea of the beach as a place dominated by a predominantly white male surfing culture was also played out during the Cronulla riots in Australia.

The violence revolved around racial control of the sand, and similarly to the situation in Hawaii, the surfers were blind to the beach culture that they displaced.

The Cronulla surfers were emblazoned with their "we grew here you flew here" body paint slogan, which was designed to exclude people of Middle Eastern cultural background, and did not see the shell midden evidence on the sand dunes pointing to thousands of years of traditional indigenous ownership of the beach before them.

Any Australian surfer will tell you that shaper Bob McTavish, Californian knee boarder George Greenough and long board champion Nat Young were among the first to start cutting back the old logs to smaller and smaller shapes, thus inventing the short board. And I'm sure they thought they had. Wegener and most surfers and shapers used to believe this. It was a commonly held belief that the Hawaiians only surfed long boards on slow fat waves.

But as Wegener dug deeper into the history he found radical barrelling surf breaks with ancient ruins overlooking them - places the Hawaiians said were traditional surfing places. The highly manoeuvrable alaia that Wegener shaped from the original, ancient templates could handle these fast-breaking waves and make the sections that were impossible on the long boards.

So, while Hawaiian royalty rode the giant 16-foot olo board, many others were ripping on the short boards, possibly 1000 years before the so-called short board revolution.

In The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies Chris Baker writes that "cultural imperialism is said to involve the domination of one culture over another", in part through consumer capitalism. He argues that Herbert Schiller, "one of the leading proponents of the cultural imperialism thesis", believed that the US-controlled mass media played an important role in this process.

More than any other, the Hawaiian culture has been swamped by this giant wave of US cultural imperialism. The people have been almost wiped out by infectious and lifestyle diseases, and since the time of the missionaries the religious and social importance of surfing has been repressed, replaced by Hollywood's shallow portrayal of Hawaiians as happy people in leis playing ukuleles.

Attempts to own the beach and mass market beach and surfing culture has led to the re-writing of surfing history. However, in some small way, the work of Wegener, as told by surf-film maker Nathan Oldfield, is slowly setting the record straight and elevating the Hawaiians as the true innovators of short and long board surfing.

Tom Wegener will be participating in the Duke's Day event at Freshwater Beach on January 9 and 10.

Scott Levi is a presenter on ABC Central Coast radio. View his full profile here.