Midget Farrelly's tribute to Bobby Brown ran in the August 27, 1967, edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. A week earlier, Brown had been killed in a bar fight not far from his home in Cronulla. This version has been slightly edited and shortened.

Australian surfing suffered a great loss this week with the death of Sydney’s 22-year-old Bobby Brown. His name will not be quickly forgotten by the people who knew him personally, nor those who had watched him surf. He did most of his surfing on the Sutherland Shire beaches and spent a lot of time on the South Coast.

When the Australian Surfriders Association began holding contests [in 1963], Bobby entered all of them and his dynamic style was seen on beaches throughout Australia. His first and greatest impression on the contest scene was at North Avalon in 1964 when Bobby and I ran a tie in the senior men’s division. There was a surf-off and Bobby won hands down with fantastic, aggressive surfing.

At that time I thought hee had won by using a simple maneuver, the spinner, but in later years I came to realize that his aggressive and progressive style was what had really done the trick.

Few people realize it but Bobby Brown made every senior final of state and national championships he entered and, but for the few points here and there, would have stolen the limelight as a surfing wonder.

One of his greatest showings was at the world championships at Manly in 1964. Bobby was in the final along with Joey Cabell, Mike Doyle, L. J. Richards and me. [He finished in 6th place], but when I look back, it was Bobby who pulled off all the radical board-on-edge turns.

One of the quirks in Bobby’s personality came out at the 1965 Australian Championships at Manly. He had qualified for the men’s final in 2ft surf but when came the time to compete Bobby was nowhere to be found. It was later learned that he bad left to surf 6ft waves at North Curl Curl in preference to the tiny Manly waves. While his action was officially frowned on, many of the competing surfers recognized he had put their own thoughts into action.

But this was typical of Bobby Brown. He was a man of action, not of words.

Bobby was a member of the Windansea surf club but left to form a club in the Cronulla area for the benefit of local surfers.

For many years Bobby built and designed surfboards. I remember seeing him recently at Soldier's Beach on the Central Coast. He was riding a new lightweight model of his own design with a radical concave section in the nose. While noseriding has become fairly standardized, Bobby Brown had given it a whole new meaning. He was actually maneuvering from the nose of the board, performing many things done only on the tail of a board.

Bobby's list of friends and admirers was a long one. In the surfing fraternity, he was known as Mr. Nice Guy.

He never tried to push his way into the limelight but his surfing ability made him one of Australia’s greats.

"BOBBY BROWN, THE SURFER TREND-SETTER," BY MIDGET FARRELLY (1967)

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