Eye for an eye: Mark Morlock in hospital after he was attacked at Gold Coast's Greenmount. A breach of surf etiquette, but nothing unusual. In crowded conditions, "drop-ins" occur all the time. So do "verbal sprays" like the one the offended surfer fired at Morlock as he paddled back out. "I apologised," says Morlock, "but when he kept abusing me I gave him a bit back. Nothing serious, though, because it's not in my nature." At that point, the other surfer turned his longboard and paddled right over the top of Morlock, who had to dive for cover. "After that," he says, "I just laughed at him for being a dickhead, and paddled off thinking, 'What a dangerous bloke.' " Morlock, 42, a professional abalone diver from Tweed Heads on the NSW-Queensland border, soon forgot the incident. But The Zealot didn't. Five months later, on February 4 this year, Morlock was sitting on his board at the famous Snapper Rocks break (just around the corner from Greenmount), talking to a female surfer, when someone behind them shouted, "Oi!" Morlock turned to see The Zealot sitting a couple of metres away, glaring at him. "He's a largish bloke, about 50, with dark skin and a big gap in the middle of his front teeth. And he yelled, 'Do you remember me?' I said, 'Yeah, I remember you, mate. What do you want?' And that's when he's unloaded his board - bang! - straight into my right eye socket." ("Unloading" a board, the most dangerous move in a surfer's arsenal, means forcing it backwards under water then releasing it between the legs like a torpedo.)

Morlock was momentarily knocked out. He remembers a flash of intense pain, and the girl he was with screaming, and his assailant calmly saying, "You're not laughing now, are you mate?" "I yelled, 'You bloody idiot, you've taken my eye out!' It was the most brutal, cowardly thing I've ever seen." Other surfers, stunned by the unprovoked attack, had to guide the temporarily blinded victim to the beach, where a lifeguard gave first aid. As Morlock waited in the car park for a lift to Tweed Hospital, The Zealot hurried to his side. But not to apologise. "He came running up and asked if I wanted another go," Morlock tells me at his home. "My other eye had some vision back, but the smashed one was still blind and almost hanging out of my head. I said, 'Are you out of your mind? Get away from me!' He mouthed off some more, then left. And I went off for a nice day of needles into my eye and operations." Morlock underwent 12 hours of microsurgery at Gold Coast University Hospital, then spent two weeks in constant pain before learning whether his eye could be saved. Its vision has gradually returned, but damage to tissue and nerves around the socket has affected Morlock's balance and permanently numbed the left side of his scalp. Because of the pressures involved, there's a possibility his career as a diver may be over.

Amazingly, given all this (and claims that his still-unnamed assailant has physically attacked other surfers in the area), the easy-going Morlock hasn't reported the assault to police. "The main thing is that this bloke needs to do something about his anger," he says. "He needs to fix whatever is broken inside him before he kills someone." Ah, surfing. Beautiful one day, violently insane the next. While Morlock spent his recuperation teaching his twin dachshunds to skateboard, The Zealot - condemned on various net posts as a "lunatic", "thug" and "f...wit" who "should be reamed with a cactus" - continues to enjoy the waves at Snapper Rocks, now regarded as perhaps the most dangerously crowded and lawless surf break in the world. "I wouldn't go out there in a fit," says author and surf historian Phil Jarratt. "Not just because it's too crowded, but because it has a different kind of crowd. At Snapper the vast majority are exceptionally good surfers. And in most cases the better they are, the harder they're going to make it for you to catch a wave. If you're just an average surfer, or a geriatric like myself, forget it." What Jarratt describes is an intimidation process known as "localism", whereby local hotshots take over a break and use verbal and sometimes physical abuse to scare off outsiders and lesser talents. It happens all over the world, but as the sport's popularity expands like never before (globally, there are an estimated 23 million surfers) the problem of overcrowding, especially at fabled breaks like Snapper, is out of control. Only weeks after the attack on Morlock, competitors in the Quiksilver Pro at Snapper had to contend with hundreds of wannabes cluttering the break during practice sessions. "The crowds here are like nothing I've ever seen in the world when you're surfing," complained 11-time world champion Kelly Slater. "We're all getting in each other's way."

When conditions at Snapper Rocks are small or sloppy it becomes a free-for-all, with learners drawn by surfing's fashionable image crashing into one another (and others), and incurring serious injuries from uncontrolled boards or the sharp volcanic rocks for which the point break was named. But when the swell increases and the waves shape up, the local surf mafia uses the "inside rule" (the surfer taking off closest to the break always has right of way) to ensure that only those capable of taking off in the most critical and dangerous position - namely them - ever get to catch a wave. And because Snapper's hierarchy includes world champion surfer Mick Fanning, the previous champ, Joel Parkinson, and a host of younger stars high on competitive testosterone, only suicidal fools risk offending the pecking order. But with ever more fools (known sneeringly as "kooks"), paddling out, the potential for conflict is frightening. "The guy who [attacked Morlock] was clearly a lunatic whose issues extend north of the high-tide line," ventures surf writer Sean Doherty. "But I doubt anyone would be worried about what that incident might do to Snapper's image, because there is no image. It's basically lawless, and has been for a long time." Doherty, Joel Parkinson's media manager and a board member of Surfing Australia, was out riding the point's smallish waves between heats at the last Quiksilver contest. "I saw about 50 drop-ins in the hour I was out there," he tells me. "I did it four times myself! When the heats finished, 24 of the male competitors all went out at once, along with a bunch of locals and about a hundred kooks who shouldn't even have been in the water." He laughs, shaking his head. "It turned into the most colossal shitfight. People were getting run over, guys were coming in all cut up. Mick [Fanning] got dropped in on, and so did Kelly [Slater], by beginners and tourists who probably didn't even know who those guys were."

But when the surf is at its best, Snapper becomes the most fiercely competitive break in Australia. "That's when you see the real hierarchy out there," says Doherty. "It's like a strange little religion ... and up at the top are a few older guys who even the stars like Joel and Mick will almost always pull back and give a wave to." High on this pedestal is a chunky labourer called Bruce Lee, a regular at the break since 1970, who tells me in Greenmount Surf Club that reports of violence at Snapper are exaggerated. "At the same time," he adds, "if you get novice surfers - or people you don't know - going to the inside of the break, and showing a lack of respect, they will get verbally tuned." Verbally tuned? "Yeah," says Lee, nursing his beer. "It can turn into swearing." What about the attack on Mark Morlock? "That was retribution," explains the local legend. "It happens in life. There was a previous incident, and that particular guy [The Zealot], he's just one of those people in life who doesn't forget things. I don't think he meant to do that guy as much damage as he did." This doesn't gel with Morlock's account of his attacker following him to the car park for another "go", but Lee has already moved on to a glowing description of how "fun and enjoyable" it is to ride Snapper's perfect waves.

As a fisherman and diver working seasonally off the perilous coastline of Tasmania, Morlock has faced more than his share of danger (including an attack by a sex-crazed bull seal), and has difficulty accepting that his most serious injury so far was inflicted by "an angry man whose weapon of choice is a surfboard". A lot of surfing's followers don't see it as a sport or hobby, but as an "art", or a "spiritual" calling, demanding "respect" and adherence to a set of rules drawn from counter-culture ramblings in early surfing magazines. Bizarrely, given such conceits, surfing has a history of bloody violence celebrated in a sort of hall of fame for bashers. Type "surf violence" into a search engine and up come defining moments of beach biffo through the decades: There's two-times world champ Nat "The Animal" Young's punch-up with an American surfer at the 1966 world championships in San Diego ("I ... did what most other Australians would have done," Young wrote later. "I hit him and knocked him flat.") Young didn't fare so well against fellow local Michael Hutchinson at Angourie, NSW, in 2000, when he was flogged mercilessly on the beach after backhanding Hutchinson's teenage son in the surf. Much humbled, and with titanium plates in his mangled face, Big Nat later moved to the US and compiled a book called Surf Rage. There are Wayne "Rabbit" Bartholomew's multiple beatings on Oahu's North Shore in 1977 after Hawaiian surfers took exception to the hot young Queenslander's cocky ways. (Years later, Bartholomew said the experience "cut me in half as a man".) There's TV news coverage of American Sunny Garcia and Frenchman Jeremy Flores, both pro surfers, punching a local who got into a dispute with Garcia's 16-year-old son during an international competition at Burleigh Heads in Queensland in 2011. Garcia, a serial brawler, then ran down and injured an onlooker who had filmed the altercation.

On and on it goes. And that's just the high-profile clashes. Countless other surf punch-ups go unrecorded, typically fuelled by righteous anger over drop-ins, or perceived intrusions by "outsiders" into areas of public coastline that local clans have come to regard as their property. Paul Scott, a veteran surfer and long-time organiser of Newcastle's annual Surfest competition, says because surfing is unregulated, pretty much anything goes outside flagged areas. "In that sense it's survival of the fittest, biggest and strongest. Localism is alive and well ... and I can't think of any regulatory measure that's ever going to improve things." Jarratt, who is a director of the Noosa Festival of Surfing and a former editor of surf magazine Tracks, defines Australia's "heaviest" spots for localism as Snapper Rocks and Burleigh Heads in Queensland, Bells Beach in Victoria, the remote Cactus Beach in South Australia, and Margaret River in Western Australia. "I've surfed all around Australia," he says, "and I don't want to go to any of those places any more." The most violent place he's surfed is the break at Huntington Beach Pier in California: "You can go 200 metres down Huntington Beach and everything's fine, but at the Pier itself I've been chased out of the water and up the beach by guys threatening to kill me. It's a very unpleasant place." Has Jarratt heard of anyone being killed in a surf rage incident? "No. But Nat Young came pretty close."

Jarratt's latest book, That Summer at Boomerang, explores the first visit to Australia by revered Hawaiian renaissance man Duke Kahanamoku, credited with spreading the sport of board surfing to the world in the early part of last century - "when fun was young". The Duke's visit sparked the national obsession now pursued by about 2.6 million Australians. But the fun is no longer young, and dedicated surfers are venturing to ever more remote parts of the globe in search of waves they don't have to fight for. Even once exotic locations, such as the Maldives and Papua New Guinea, have introduced permit systems to control friction by limiting surfer numbers at popular breaks. Across the US, artificial "pay to play" wave pools are proliferating, and although the technology has yet to be perfected, surf industry insiders see man-made breaks as the future of recreational surfing. One insider backing it to happen is the man recognised as the best surfer ever, Kelly Slater, founder of the Kelly Slater Wave Company. Until last year, when an associated development company hit financial trouble and had to call in administrators, the KSWC had signalled it was about to build a surfable artificial wave pool as the centrepiece for an over-55s housing development at Pimpama on the northern Gold Coast. "It was to be aimed at boomers like me," laughs Jarratt. "Instead of fighting with the kids at Snapper, you'd just saunter down to the pool for a wave." Other Queensland wave pool projects are in the pipeline, as it were, including one designed by Greg Webber, a surfboard manufacturer from Avalon in Sydney whose company plans to charge surfers $35 for "10 beautiful waves where no one hassles you". Back in the real world, surfers on the southern Gold Coast are still talking about the extraordinary attack that almost cost Mark Morlock an eye. "One girl who witnessed it reckons she can't get the image of what happened out of her head," Morlock says. Unable to surf himself, Morlock had to settle for being an onlooker at the annual Quiksilver Pro: "The crowds were a pain, but I do love the spectacle of the competition. It's just unfortunate that I couldn't actually see as much of it this year as I'd have liked."