Gidget the All-Powerful

The Rebel Next Door

Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS

Better Surfing Through Chemistry

Summer on the Inside

Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted

Surfing the Newsstand

Process of Elimination

Oil City Showdown

The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards

Technicolor Surf Boom

Heroes and Villains

Blackball Blues

Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps

Surfing in Five-Part Harmony

Tokyo to Tel Aviv

Flight of the Larrikin

Bob Evans Means Business

Midget Wins It All

But Will it Play in New York?

Houses of the Holy

We Own the Sidewalks

Beautiful from any Angle

Duke's Big Contest

Can You Handle the Penetrator?

Girls, Don't Panic!

David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water

An Invincible Summer

Ten-Year Boom

During the second half of the boom, Australia put surfing on a developmental fast track that made the rest of the world look slow and pokey by comparison. It was a remarkable turnaround. As late as 1960, Aussie boardriders were still well off the pace being set in California and Hawaii. Four short years later, Sydney hosted the first World Surfing Championships, and local surfers were very much on equal footing against a small but talent-loaded international field. Better than equal, in fact.

The sport boomed Down Under, just as it did in America and elsewhere, but with its own particular set of harmonics. The well-muscled “boardman,” for example, outfitted in a tight lifeguard club swimming costume and gliding arrow-like for shore, was a national icon. But the sport here had largely been shaped and reshaped by visitors—first Duke Kahanamoku, during World War I, and then the 1956 California lifeguard team. The Aussie surf boom itself was an import: 

 was as popular in Brisbane as it was in San Clemente, 

 replica, and domestic boardmakers stole logos from Jacobs and Hobie. Younger surfers here gleefully bleached their hair white-blond like American champ Mike Doyle, and many of the battered Holden surf wagons ripping up and down the coast were painted with Murphy-like cartoon figures. Aussie surfers and their girlfriends went wild for the Stomp; barefoot teens by the hundreds gathered at weekend club hall parties and shook the floorboards to regional hits like “Bondi Stomp,” and “Stompin’ at Maroubra.” In 1964, “He’s My Blond-Headed Stompie Wompie Real Gone Surfer Boy,” a novelty record by fourteen-year-old Little Pattie, was heading straight for number one—but got chart-blocked hard by the Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand."

Just before the middle of the decade, however, outside influences on Australia began winding down. In the lead-up to the 1964 Championships, Australia already seemed to be drafting along behind California more by habit then necessity. Two or three years later it broke free to become a fully independent and pacesetting surf nation.

In fact, what was true for surfing was true for Australia at large. The same 1956 Melbourne-hosted Olympic Games that had brought forth that sport-altering gang of American surfers had gone a long way toward lifting Australia out of its abiding “cultural cringe”—a mild but pervasive national inferiority complex about it's place in the world—and things only improved in the eight years between the Olympics and the World Surfing Championships. The nation’s cultural epicenter had shifted from Melbourne to the far more cosmopolitan Sydney, where, near the south end of the Harbour Bridge, the fanned-out girders and beams of the Sydney Opera House were being installed. Jobs were plentiful, credit lines were extended on a handshake, and fully 70 percent of families held title to their homes—the vast majority built on newly surveyed quarter-acre suburban lots with a nice little English garden out in back. 

 were still banned nationwide, but the bikinis at Coogee Beach and Curl Curl were just as pruriently small as those at Malibu, and the Pill was available as well. Half of Australia was under thirty in 1964. The country was virtually drug-free and its creeping involvement in the Vietnam war wasn’t yet an issue—it was a fine time and place to be young. (Although it was a bad time to be a critic. Sydney journalist Donald Horne titled his new book 

 and described Australia as “a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people.” But before the book was published, the question mark was struck from the title, and the phrase was soon adopted by boosters of every kind—surfer’s included—as the unofficial national slogan.)

Meanwhile, good weather and a raft of well-funded youth recreation programs, along with a galvanizing sense of being the world’s underdog, had made Australia the most sports-obsessed country in the English-speaking world. Life for the Aussie sports nut was never sweeter than from the mid-'50s to the mid-'60s: as Summer Olympic medals began to stack up like poker chips, Davis Cup victories were all but assured, golfer Pete Thomson won the British Open more or less at will, and everybody’s favorite ginger, Rod Laver, pulled off a 1962 tennis Grand Slam as an amateur. Even when the Aussie's messed up they were great. During the 1964 Tokyo Games, repeat gold medalist Dawn Fraser, the first female swimmer to break the one-minute mark in the 100 meters, made headlines for a semi-drunken Friday night raid on the Imperial Palace with the men’s field hockey team, where she climbed a flagpole to help steal an Olympic flag—a celebrated moment in Aussie larrikin history.

This was the environment into which Australian surfing came of age, and it boded well for the sport. What happened on the playing field here mattered a great deal, and the nation honored its champions. If a surfer could bring home an international title, he or she might earn a lot of respect and attention—not just for themselves, but Australian surfing in general.

It wasn’t just the new Malibu-style boards that grabbed the Aussies attention in 1956. Just as important were all those rambunctious California-born ideas of what it meant to be a surfer: the added hours spent in the pursuit of wave-riding (rather than lifeguarding), plenty of travel up and down the coast in search of new breaks, and a good measure of strutting around and declaring yourself against anything too organized or disciplined—like the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia, which had ruled the sport here for decades.

A split was coming. SLSA officials were justifiably wary of the “new” surfing, and some clubs wouldn’t allow Malibus (regular surfboards, as compared to hollow rescue boards) to be kept on premises. There were plenty of surfers, meanwhile, who no longer wanted to devote any of their precious beach time to club duties. SLSA enrollment actually increased in the late fifties and early sixties (thanks to a flood of adolescent boomers joining up), but hundreds of clubbies—younger ones in particular—simply walked away from their hard-earned SLSA membership. In the early 1960s, tension between the two groups shot up when club officials, in partnership with town councils, got into the business of surfing regulation and enforcement. The ten-shilling “Surf Craft Permit” board stickers required at many Sydney beaches had to be purchased at the local clubhouse, and no-surf rules were enforced ruthlessly—on a crowded summer morning at Bondi Beach in 1964, a group of patrolling club members swept down and confiscated nearly 50 boards, all belonging to surfers caught out on the wrong side of the swim-zone flags.

Still, there was much in common between the two groups, and in later years their rift would be made to seem bigger than it was. They shared a basic sensibility—having defected from the SLSA, the surfers’ first action was to form boardriders clubs—and the gap between them was never so large that it couldn’t be bridged when necessary. Club halls were usually made available for Stomp parties or surf movie screenings. Surfers often assisted in making rescues. Most memorably, the two sides joined forces in what the Aussie tabloids called the Surfie-Rocker Wars.

The leather-jacketed rocker, a local variant of the American greaser, was presented in newspapers and on TV as an outstanding menace to Aussie suburbanites everywhere. Surfers themselves had meanwhile done their bit to prove they too were a group that needed watching—a veterans hall was damaged by a rowdy crowd at a 1961 surf movie premier, just a few weeks before a pair of teenage Aussie surfers in Hawaii were chased down, arrested and jailed as stowaways, and deported back to New South Wales. But rockers were working class, had pompadoured hair, and didn’t live on the coast. They were always going to be the default bad guy.

The first surfer-rocker fights took place at Manly Beach in the summer of 1962. A few scrapes and bruises resulted, nothing more, but it was enough to catch the media’s attention. Things peaked a year later with a Sunday afternoon biffo pitting a full detachment of rockers against a combined force of surfies and clubbies. As described by the 

, about a hundred rockers arrived at Cronulla Beach “dressed mainly in jeans and leather jackets . . . many of them wore knuckledusters and carried sticks.” Fighting commenced, and after the local surf club captain had a tooth knocked out, lifeguards and surfers joined together to chase the rockers across the beach. Penned in by the ocean, the overwhelmed rockers, as the 

 reporter noted with more than a hint of sadistic pleasure, were “thrown in the surf fully clothed, rounded up and herded to the clubhouse [where] they were made to sit in a large group while one of the lifesavers stood over them with a baseball bat.”

And thus the rockers brought some order back to the beaches. Sure, these new boardriders, as the Australian public viewed things, had wandered a bit off the straight and narrow. But not 

 far. And when it came time to chose sides in a dustup, look what happened: the boardmen stood bare shoulder to bare shoulder with their old mates from the clubhouse. Yes, surfer-lifesaver problems continued in the years to come. But détente would be the rule.

What the Aussie surfer really needed, more than a pact with the town surf club, more than the respect of his non-surfing countrymen, was a good locally-made board. Before the plane carrying the California lifeguard team flew out of Sydney in 1956, the rush was on to produce a domestic version of what everyone was now calling the Malibu board. The only problem was that the balsa shortage here was even worse than it was in America, and nobody in the Australian surf industry really knew how to work with resin and fiberglass.

For a year or so, local manufacturers cranked out hollow-body knockoffs called the “okinuee.” These boards had Malibu-like specs, but were built like a racing sixteen, with a strutted timber frame, solid wood rails and endpieces, plywood skin, and a shellac finish. By late 1957, balsa shipments began to arrive, everybody had figured out the fiberglassing process, and things developed more rapidly. Just two years later, Australian board manufacturers—not about to caught behind yet again—quickly switched over from balsa to polyurethane foam.

Most racing sixteens, and probably half of the okinuees, were do-it-yourself jobs built in garages, backyard sheds, and surf clubs. With balsa and foam, Australian boardmaking became a professional craft, and by the early 1960s a manufacturing center was taking shape in a landlocked north Sydney industrial area called Brookvale. Just as American surfers lined up behind Hobie, Jacobs, Weber, Bing, and Noll, the Aussies did the same for Woods, Dillon, Wallace, Bennett, McDonagh, and Keyo. The Aussie shops and factories were smaller than those in the United States, the materials generally weren’t as good, and finished boards were more expensive. But nobody minded. The Australian manufacturers all subscribed to the American surf magazines, and carefully watched all the touring Yank-made surf movies; some of the Brookvale shapers were in touch directly with Hobie, Bing, and the rest. Each and every new overseas design advance, the Aussies were on it. By the summer of 1963, four hundred boards a week were being sold nationwide, and the domestic models were nearly indistinguishable from those sold in America.

Things peaked with a Sunday afternoon biffo pitting a detachment of rockers against a combined force of surfies and clubbies. Fighting commenced, and after the local surf club captain had a tooth knocked out, lifeguards and surfers joined together to chase the rockers across the beach. Problem solved.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Flight of the Larrikin

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