This Surfing Life, Midget Farrelly's first book coauthored with Craig McGregor, was published in Australia in 1965, and republished two years later in America, as The Surfing Life. The excerpt below has been slightly edited.

I suppose my first ride on a surfboard, if you could call it that, happened when I was about nine. I was living with my parents at North Bondi at the time. I had an uncle, Ray Hookam, who was quite a surfer on the long boards, and one day he took me out with him. He stuck me on the front of his board, paddled out through the soup, and then picked up a one-foot or two-foot wave and rode it in. As we zoomed in towards the shore I was petrified with fear, but by the end of the ride I was so happy that I was jumping up and down on the board.

For the next year or two I didn’t have much to do with boards. I went for a trip with my parents overseas, and as we passed through Waikiki, in Hawaii, I saw boards for hire there, but didn’t have a ride. When we came back we went to live at Manly, Sydney, and I saw the boys riding the long boards there. I still didn’t take much notice. I guess I was like any other kid of eleven or twelve and just did what everyone else did. I was keen on the water, because we had always lived near it, and I could bodysurf, but that was about all.

Then one day when I was down on the beach at Manly I came across a really huge, beat-up paddleboard sitting on the sand just a few feet from the water. It was a monster: about seventeen feet long, twenty-three inches wide, and six to eight inches thick through the center. It had no rocker and was shaped like a big cigar. There was no one around, so I took this thing and dragged it off the beach and pushed it out a tiny way into the surf and tried to catch a wave. I didn’t do very well the first couple of times, but then I managed to catch a wave standing up. I guess I must have been pretty stoked—I took that board home with me!

Next day, when I came down to the beach, I asked at the surf club who owned the board, and all I learned was the nickname of some fellow who didn’t care about it. It was the thing in those days if you had an old surfboard you didn’t want just to leave it there on the beach in case someone else wanted it. So I took the board home again, painted it, patched the holes, and since then I’ve been on a board just about every day of my life. I still go bodysurfing sometimes, and I like fooling around with skis and bellyboards and all that, but board riding is really what counts with me—it’s got something that nothing else in the world has.

I had that old cigar board for a couple of months, and I really learned to ride on it. I used to take it down to Manly every chance I got, push it out through the soup, and catch as many waves as I could. I can still remember flapping in towards the beach, stuck way up on the end of this huge board with all the older surfers laughing at me. It was a lot of fun.

I was pretty small in those days, even for my age—it was about this time that I picked up the nickname Midget—so after a while I began to leave the board at Manly to save the drag of having to lug it down to the beach every time I wanted to use it. Then one weekend it was smashed up in a storm, and I thought the end of the world had come. But my parents had realized how keen I was on surfing, and they helped me buy a racing-style board that was built specially for me. It was about fourteen feet long and twenty-one inches wide—a beautiful board with plywood decks, cedar rails, a shining stainless steel plug and a stainless-steel tail-hook. I kept this board for quite a while. I used to go surfing with it at the Bower, trying to improve my technique by watching other surfers, and learning how to turn it a bit on the wave.

Then one morning as I was walking down the Corso at Manly I noticed some surfers in the water who were slicing sideways across the waves instead of driving straight in towards the beach. I had not seen this done before, not at such an acute angle to the wave, and it really shook me. These fellows were starting somewhere near the point at Manly and coming way down into the center of the beach. It was really something different. I stayed to watch them, and when they came in I had a good look at their boards. They were short, and light, and looked as though they couldn’t even float. The year was 1956, and the surfers, though I did not know them then, were the visiting Olympic team of American surfers—Tommy Zahn, Greg Noll, Mike Bright, and others.

These boys really knocked out our local surfers, and a few of our boys began building boards modeled on what the Americans were riding. I didn’t get one at first, for I didn’t know enough about them to be “with it.” In fact, I didn’t have my first ride on a Malibu board until quite some time later, when I was surfing Fairy Bower with Bob Pike, now one of Australia’s best big-wave surfers. Bob was riding one of the new short boards, I was riding my old hollow job, and after a while we swapped boards. I took off kneeling on this little thing, wondering what was going to happen. Suddenly the board turned sideways on me, and I was traveling across the wave so fast that I was really startled. I was scared, and held on to both sides of the board as hard as I could. But it was enough to make me realize I could do things on a short, finned board that I’d have no hope at all of doing on my old paddleboard.

I decided to get one, and after scraping up money for some time I managed to buy one of the plywood boards the local manufacturers were turning out, based on the Malibu boards of the Americans. It was ten or eleven feet long, hollow with solid sides. I had it for quite a while, and learned to paddle it and even to ride reasonably well.

After this, balsa boards were introduced in Australia. They were a big improvement. I made myself one, shaped it and glassed it in the backyard at home and on the beach when no one was around. We were now living at South Curl Curl, and by this time my life had begun to revolve around surfboards. I was spending more and more time each day in the surf, mainly down at South Curl Curl or Freshwater, and occasionally over at the Bower when the swell was on.

Then Coolite surfboards came out. They had a styrofoam core and were very light. I had a go at making one myself, but styrofoam did not prove too successful as a board material so I went back to balsa—this time a pig board that I bought second-hand. I really like this one—it performed extremely well. I now worked in several board shops, and along the way I got mixed up with different people and different beaches. A big event in my life was my first “surfari” up to Queensland with Joe Larkin.

In fact, that Queensland trip bit me with the travel bug, and in 1961 I decided to try to get to Hawaii for the Makaha International Championships. I thought I would enter the Junior Men’s division and see how I went.

I had saved a bit of money, but not enough for the airfare, so my boss, boardmaker Barry Bennett, lent me the rest, and off I went to Hawaii. There was quite a team from Australia that year—including Gordon Simpson, Mick McMahon, Dave Jackman, Bob Pike, and Bob Evans. But the weather and the surf were against us. The championships were delayed for weeks while the organizers waited for a reasonable surf to build up at Makaha, and we stayed on hand waiting and waiting and spending what little money we had. And in the end, I just had nothing to live on anymore, so I flew back to Sydney with nothing much to show for the trip but a bit of experience of Hawaiian surfing styles and a whacking great feeling of disappointment.

One thing I did learn, though, was that the Hawaiians did not go much for the modern style of riding—hot-dogging and moving around on the board.

I had spent years at home learning how to use every part of the board, moving up towards the nose to trim, and then back to the tail for radical turns, and it came as quite a surprise to find that the Hawaiians still surfed in the old traditional style—you know, stand straight up on your board, if possible against the setting sun, and look like a man! The Californians I met on the trip really went for modem riding, but not the Hawaiians.

Well, the next year, 1962, I scraped up the airfare again and went back to Hawaii. I was seeded in the Makaha contest as the accredited Australian champion, Senior Men’s—I had just turned eighteen, which meant I qualified as a senior. I remember arriving at Makaha on the day of the semifinals.

It was a beautiful sunny day with about an eight-foot surf running, a little choppy but not too bad. Bob Evans, Dave Jackman, and I competed in the semifinals, and I rode reasonably well, nothing spectacular. When the results were published several days later I found I had gained a place and qualified for the final.

By now, unfortunately, the surf had become very small, just like the year before; too small for the finals to be held. This dragged on for weeks and did not look like improving, while the contestants sat around waiting, and I wondered whether it would be the same for me as the previous year, and I'd be forced to return home. At last, a bit of a swell came up, and the judges asked the contestants to check it out and say what they thought. I was in the judges’ stand with Buffalo Keaulana, Rabbit Kekai, and several others, and after a bit of deliberation, we said we would ride it.

It was about four o’clock when the final started—the surf a bit sloppy, a very light on-shore wind blowing from the south, a fair sort of a crowd on the beach, and pretty grey and overcast. The judges gave us a long time-limit, and we had a choice of two surfs: there were sets breaking out near the point, and sets inside on the shorebreak. At Makaha, you have three marker buoys—one for Point Surf, one for Blowhole surf, and one for the inside surf, marking the end of the ride. We started off taking a few long rides, but as the consistency of the surf deteriorated we were left with smaller waves and less frequent sets; so I started riding inside. I felt my biggest opposition would come from Johnny Peck and Chuck Linnen, the only two Californians in the contest. The Hawaiians were good surfers, but this was my kind of surf.

Well, the same thing happened there as was to happen in the finals of the 1964 World Championships at Manly: I got sick of the whole thing halfway through. This seems to be the common thing with me—I got sick of the New South Wales State finals at Avalon, I got sick of the one at Manly, and I got sick of this one at Makaha. I just couldn’t surf seriously, I wasn’t enjoying it, and the waves would not allow me to do what I wanted to do to be at my best. I started fiddling around, taking short rides, paddling back out again, and clowning around. I had a little bit of fun with the waves by doing turns—I put a lot of emphasis on them—riding under the soup, performing noserides. I did a couple of head dips; I think I even stood backwards once. That was really about all there was to do. I just felt as though I could not surf the Hawaiian way in that sort of surf. I had started off wanting to surf the Hawaiian way, and to beat them at their own game, but it just couldn’t be done that day. That’s why I rode the inside; instead of sitting around to ride a Hawaiian wave I went inside and rode some hot-dog waves close in on the shorebreak. As a result, I built up a pretty fair sort of a point score.

When we came in, I think we were all pretty disgruntled. There was a long pause on the beach as the judges were counting scores. I was in the changing sheds, dressing, and was about to go back to my house, when I heard I had won. Everyone gave me a pretty good sort of a cheer. I went up, picked up the trophy, and that was that.

"HOW I BEGAN," EXCERPT FROM MIDGET FARRELLY'S "THIS SURFING LIFE" (1965)

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