Surf City, Sydney

Newcastle surfer Ross Bailey at the Cowrie Hole, Newcastle 1966, photo John Nute, courtesy Ross Bailey

Had the absolute pleasure today to meet veteran big wave dare-devil Ross Bailey, who travelled south from Newcastle to fill me in on his early years surfing around Merewether, Bar Beach and the Cowrie Hole and the various near-death experiences he and his friends like Ted Harvey, Robbie Wood and Norm Stamn notched up when the surf got nasty and the lifesavers said “you’re all bloody idiots”. Tales of furious storm surfs, impossible drops, concussions, smashed teeth, bikies, hodads, Ford Customlines, chicks, surf movies, jazz, dolphins and Dewey Weber. Ross started surfing as a kid in 1957, on a balsa ‘teardrop’, and kept it up through his adult years as a milko, surfing daily after knocking off at 8am – earlier if he could manage it. He even worked as Mel Gibson’s surfer double in the 1977 production Summer City.

Luckily his good friend John Nute took plenty of photos throughout the 1960s.

Ross Bailey at the Cowrie Hole Newcastle, photo by  John Nute 1966

Ross Bailey off the rocks at Merewether, photo by  John Nute 1966

Ross Bailey ‘Classic Soul Arch’ Merewether storm surf, photo John Nute 1962

All photos and info courtesy Ross Bailey

The craze and menace of skateboarding in American Life magazine May 1965 is aptly described as the latest epidemic…the fever that’s eventually left California, where it started about four years ago amongst a bunch of surfing enthusiasts, and swept east, scooping up everyone from matrons to moppets in its tooth-rattling wake.

find the article here… Read the rest of this entry »

Bondi lifesaver, John Falkner in his white trunks, surfing north bondi around 1947, photo courtesy of Lorraine Coan

Just received this great photo from Lorraine Coan, along with info on her dad John Falkner, who is pictured here heading for shore on his trusty hollow ‘toothpick’ around 1947.  That’s him in the white trunks with the Bondi Icebergs in the background. According to Lorraine, John was 10 when his family moved to Brighton Boulevard in 1939 and not long afterwards he fell in with the North Bondi lifesavers. By the late 1940s, in his late teens, he was a keen surfer. His hollow board had an image of a blonde haired women painted on the deck. Marriage and other things in his mid 20s put an end to his surfing days and the old board hung on the family’s back fence in Panania for years to come. Lorraine recalls how it took at least 2 people to pick it up and shift it when it was eventually retired to a central coast relative who lived beside a lake. Thanks to Lorraine Coan for the image and the information.

John Falkner ‘going down the mine’ at Bondi late 1940s, photo courtesy Lorraine Coan

John Falkner sliding at Bondi late 1940s, photo courtesy Lorraine Coan

Prototype Keyo stubbie ‘The Virgin’ by Neal Purchase, private collection, photo Gary Crockett

According to Derek Hynd and Andrew Kidman*, ‘The Virgin’ shaped by Neal Purchase (senior) at Keyos in 1966 kicked the so-called shortboard revolution into gear, inspiring Bob McTavish, Ted Spencer, Kevin Platt and others to explore similar ideas on width, length, v-shaped bottoms, along with Greenough-styled raking fins, that altered surfing and surfers throughout 1967 and beyond. Thanks to David Bell for documentary research.

* Derek Hynd, Surfers in History: David Treloar Tracks December 1988 p29 and Andrew Kidman, The Legacy of the Virgin Surfing World June 2009 p62

Read more about ‘The Virgin’ at surfresearch

Bondi surfer John Knobel changing a tyre on Pittwater Road in the early 1960s, photo courtesy John Knobel

If you joined John Knobel on a surfing expedition, in his gleaming 58 FC Holden, the only condition was that you helped him wash and clean it out afterwards. Here’s a photo of John and his friends, far from their Bondi homes, sorting out a puncture on the northern beaches in the early 1960s. Cars were pretty special in those days.

Bondi screengrab from The Queen In Australia, produced by Stanley Hawes in 1954 for the Commonwealth Department of Information, courtesy of National Film And Sound Archive and Simon Drake.

Hit the National Film and Sound Archive today with Cathy Mulhall on the hunt for film footage and viewed some amazing stuff. Needed a shower after all that sand, salt and suntan lotion and logged up a great list of movie material for our three ‘decade’ screens, swag of slideshows and of course the ‘Surf City’ documentary underway. Among the stand out cinematic treasures were water-level tracking shots in Stanley Hawes’ 1954 coverage of the Queen in Australia (as grabbed above), board rego and sun-baked bodies along with kids ripping on surfoplanes in John Martin-Jones’ Surf Beach 1965, those pivotal green left handers in 1956 with Californians Tad Devine, Mike Bright and Greg Noll on their spacey malibus in Service in The Sun and of course the wry in-the-wild anthropology of Richard Neville in David Price’s Surfing Roundabout of 1965.

Neat little story by Henry Budd and pic by Nic Gibson in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, with Peter and Lachlan Francis at Bondi, including a call out for photos and material. Response has been overwhelming with great offers of boards, mags, family snaps and plenty of salty treasures.

Tony Edwards’ Captain Goodvibes, the dope crazed mutant pig, gears up for a bracing surf somewhere in Sydney in 1973. Taken from Tracks Magazine October 1973, held in a private collection.

Queenscliff youngster Tyler Bell reminds us that the best surf movie makers are surfers…great stuff eh…!

Photo of unknown dropper by Mark Trevithick in The Surfing World April/May 1967, private collection

From at least the 1960s, when onshore winds, hangovers or miserable slop meant surfing was out, kids in the area would head down to south Warriewood and leap bravely over the ragged cliff, falling a good 50 feet (or more…?) into a dark swirling soup of foam and semi-submerged cunjevoi, before swimming through a long curving tunnel that snaked back under the cliff, ending in a heaving rock pool on the other side of the headland, that swelled upwards as each wave pumped through and spat them, hangovers forgotten, onto the surrounding rock shelf.