It certainly wasn’t the phone call I was expecting on a lazy Tuesday morning.

Equinor were out of the Great Australian Bight and were presently kicking a can back to Norway. There’d be no oil rigs. The Bight and everything that swims around in it would live to fight another day. The news came like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. It was completely unexpected. I got the news at 10:30 yesterday morning. I looked at the fridge. I looked away. I looked at the fridge again. It was 10.31… and maybe just half an hour too early for a beer to celebrate.

I’ll be honest. Even at the very start of the Fight for the Bight campaign a couple of years back I was working on the assumption that someday they’d eventually just drill the well. Given Australia’s current love for digging and drilling holes in the countryside and in the ocean floor, I presumed it wouldn’t matter how many people paddled out or wrote submissions or politely told Equinor to fuck off on Instagram, they’d eventually drill the well anyway. That’s just modern, Stone Age Australia.

But I’d also reasoned to myself that I wouldn’t consider this a total loss. A shitty outcome? Sure, but the fact that tens of thousands of people paddled out in protest right around the country was a win in itself. There was clearly a huge slice of the Australian coastal population who gave a shit, and getting them down the beach and screaming at a Norwegian oil company was a huge win. Equinor might drill the well and we lose the short game, but the long game was a big, engaged and mobilized group of surfers and coast lovers who were ready to make some noise. The next Equinor would get both barrels.