The Temple of Surf interviewed Richard Harvey for a January 2022 podcast, when Harvey was 73. This version has been shortened and edited.

I was a country boy; my family lived in the backwards of New South Wales and we'd go to the beach for Christmas holidays. I was seven or eight the first time we went; I was a little bit intimidated by the surf, didn't like all that frothy stuff—I liked swimming in the pool that was next to the beach. Then when we moved to the coast [at Avalon], I ended up riding a surf-o-plane, which were those rubber blow-up surf mats. This was around 1955. Some of the boys in the area started riding balsa boards, and that's how I started, too, on a balsa. But those didn't last too long, because foam board came in and I ended up buying second-hand boards off the local hotshots. I lived near the beach, walking distance, probably just a couple of hundred meters from the sand, so after school, me and all my mates would hang out all afternoon down there, running amok. 

No, nothing. Collecting boards is not for me, you've gotta store them somewhere and you've gotta carry them around when you move, they get damaged, they just get old. No, I rather have surfing as a memory, the waves I rode, the people I met, rather than the boards themselves. 

At the time, if you look back at all the good surfers coming out of California, or even Australia in the early sixties, they were mostly all shapers as well. Which just made sense; the better the board, the better the surfing, and who better to make you a board than yourself? 

I was very one of the very early professional surfers here in Australia, along with Nat Young and Midget Farrelly. I used to get paid—not very much, about $15 a week. I got a car with my sponsor's name written all down the sides. Anyway, when there was no surf, I'd go into the factory and say “I wanna do something, teach me something”. For six months, all I did was cut plan shapes and then for another six months, all I did was use this big electric planner and thin down the blanks.

Do you remember your first actual board; something that you rode?

No really. My first surfboards, to tell you the truth, weren't very good. At first I don't know if I was taking it that seriously. I was always more interested in surfing than shaping. But like everybody else, I found that by building good surfboards, my surfing improved; that plus I eventually became kind of fascinating about  the dynamics of how our boards actually work, just all the intricacies. 

Any memorable early shaping experiences? 

Bob Kennerson, Kenno, one of the great ones from '60s, he came into my shaping bay one afternoon when I thought I'd shaped a really good board and just starting marking it up with a pencil, “that's a hollow, that's not right, that's wrong.” That humbled me a bit! 

What was the defining moment of your surfing life?

I surfed competitively through the sixties, and by the end of the decade I'd sort of had enough. Then in the early seventies they went, "Oh, we're going hold a competition back in Margaret River”, this big left-hander, sort of like Sunset in reverse. I'd always done well there, so I entered and was really successful 

[Harvey won the '73 Australian National Titles in 10-foot surf at Margaret River, defeating Peter Townend and Michael Peterson in the finals],

 and because of that I got invitations to the Pipe Masters and the Duke contest in Hawaii. So, contest-wise, that was a highlight for sure. But after that, again, I sort of went “I'm not really into it that much, all I want to do is go surfing.” And about six months later, filmmaker Dick Hoole came up and asked, "Do you want to come to Bali?” We'd just seen 

, so Bali sounded like a great idea, and I flew over there with Dick and Rabbit [Wayne Bartholomew], and after surfing on my backhand all  those years in Queensland, well, here I was surfing forehand in really big, long hollow waves and it just changed my whole approach surfing.

Was that the trip where you discovered Padang? 

Yes, but it didn't happen right away. We were surfing big waves at Uluwatu one afternoon, really good-sized, probably 15 feet, Rabbit and I were the only two guys out there. We didn't really know how we were going to get back to the beach! So Rabbit finally caught one and managed to get back into the cave there. I caught a big long wave after that and ended up way down the point, towards the next little beach. When I got out of the water, I noticed a little corner where the waves were wrapping around, and I made a note to myself. Later that month went back down there and discovered Padang. So that was another high point, for sure. 

And you went back a few times after that.

Well, that brings us back to the shaping part. I didn't want to do the contests, like I said, so I've gotta figure out a way to fund it somehow, and the best I best thing I could think of was shaping boards. And that's how it went from then on; these two things just fit together so well, surfing and shaping. 

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