Surf City, Sydney

Cool advert for Keyo’s summer of love “Plastic Machine” in Witzig’s April ’68 Surf International.

Its designer Bob McTavish must have been listening to heaps of Jefferson Airplane around this time.

Here’s a 1968 Surfing World advert for Gordon Woods Surfboards, at 208 Harbord Road Brookvale. Gordon is on the right, probably keen to move his old stock before the new vee-bottom craze takes off.

mid 6os Manly photo by Herman Kalkreuter in Manly: South Pacific Playground 1967 Manly Council publication

According to this great council publication… the growing popularity of surfboard riding is clearly indicated by the numbers of young Australians, seen in the picture, with their surfboards waiting to carry them at breakneck speed on the crests of Manly’s ocean rollers… The lasses in the picture are typical ‘down under’ fresh air addicts. They spend hour after lazy hour on the warn sands letting the sun tan their bodies to the soft golden brown so much envied by their less fortuntate mates living in more distant suburbs.

John Tanner’s 1960 Tamarama Beach photo sourced from National Library of Australia nla.pic-vn4587550

Tanner’s unnerving photo of surfers in the boiling shorebreak at Tamarama, Sydney, has a surreal, almost studio-lit quality. The camera is too close, the boards seem unweildy, there’s too much momentum and the thrilling scene is set for disaster.

photo Jack Eden, sourced in Margan and Finney’s A Pictorial History of Surfing 1970, p 269

Big waves were what every surfer wanted to ride and read about in the the early 1960s, especially after Sydney-siders Nipper Williams, Bob Pike, Mick McMahon and Dave Jackman showed they could handle huge Hawaiian surf and Dave Jackman hit front pages across Australia as the first surfer to ride the fearsome Queenscliff bombora in 1961.

Scott Dillon surfed the fabled Bare Island bombie at the entrance to Botany Bay in 1962. The reef hasn’t been surfed since, lending this well-known photo by Jack Eden an almost el dorado aura. [info Murray Walding Blue Heaven 2003]

photo by Dick Graham from Midget Farrelly Surfboards web site

Midget Farrelly’s mid 1967 stringerless ‘v-bottom’ square tail ridden in Sydney at the Windansea meet in November 1967. According to Midget’s website, the board was designed and in the water long before McTavish and Nat Young ‘went vertical’ at Honolua Bay at the end of that year.

both photos from Feb 67 Surfing World magazine

I wonder what made this curious stuff work or, more precisely, stick? I’m told by waxheads slightly older than me that slipcheck panels and chequerboard designs were applied with stencils to the forward areas of the board to aid in pulling off nose rides and assist judges watching from the beach. It was the oil companies in the mid 60s that first sensed the commerical potential of wax sold in cakes, although surfers had long known the advantages of household parrifin, mixed with a little olive or machine oil, to reduce deck slippage. Earlier on, brave surfers added a nipple chafing sprinkle of sand to their plywood deck varnish. Don’t recall seeing aerosol wax around the traps in the early 70s.

‘sent in’ photo to Surfing World Feb 67, sure shapin up for a big year Nat…

Way down the Californian coast, past San Clemente, Oceanside and Leucadia, on the northern outskirts of San Diego, is the lovely beachside town of La Jolla, overlooking several miles of craggy, weatherbeaten bays and sandy coves that generally enjoy chunky, powerful and temperamental swells. The gnarly Windansea reef break, at the end of Nautilus Street, is a must visit for any roving surfnut, if only to light a candle for the inventive board-builder Bob Simmons, who drowned here whilst surfing in 1954.

photo Gary Crockett

A rustic 4 posted shelter, or ‘shack’, covered in palm tree fronds, has clung to the rocky ledge at Windansea Beach since at least 1946. This cultural icon of surfing was the symbolic heart of the infamous Windansea Surf Club, with its members including many of California’s hottest and most celebrated surfers of the 1950s and 60s. After nailing most of the competitions from Baja to Malibu, the rowdy Windansea team arrived in Sydney in November 1967, for a contest meet, to be outclassed and defeated by Australian surfers riding revolutionary shortboards. The good old days were over and the swaggering club never regained its former notoriety.

Couldn’t help thinking of Bob McTavish paddling out here in late ’67 on his newly hawaiinised pintail, gleefully announcing the arrival of short boards amidst bewildered yanks, or George Greenough gliding down that pacey, tea coloured line nearby, amidst oil tankers, rigs and derelict pylons in the early minutes of Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer a few years earlier.

Rincon video Gary Crockett 2010

George Greenough at Sandspit near Santa Barbara, screen grab from Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer 1964