Surf City, Sydney

image sourced from The Surfing World Vol 5 No 4 December 1964 page 14

Just had a great conversation with Bruen Finey, a fibreglass sculptor and manufacturer in Brookvale in the late 1950s and 60s who made surfboards for Dunlop along with his own business ‘Crest Surfboards’ out of a factory in Roger Street. Dunlop distributed his boards far and wide across the state – wherever they had a sports store.

Bruen left the army after 1945 and studied sculpture, funded by an ex-war service grant, and took up working with fibreglass and foam in the 1950s, building chemical vats and shop displays, based in Brookvale where land was cheap and other fibreglass companies were located. Read the rest of this entry »

Fantastic poster rescued from Narrabeen Boys High, clipped into a scrapbook around 1964 by Marilyn Birmingham, courtesy Marilyn Birmingham

Here’s a special treat…colour surf movies at 12.30 and 15.20 in the Geography Room at Narrabeen Boys High arranged, as the poster says, by ‘Nat’ Young who, according to those who were there, was a peerless president of the school surfing team in the early 1960s.

Ron Perrott photo of Sydney Bells surf contest 1965-66 courtesy of Ron and Kath Saggers

Petroleum giant Ampol was a keen supporter of Sydney’s lifesaving and fledgling surf contest scene from the early 1960s, getting behind the first ‘Invitational’ championships at Bondi in 1963 and the so called ‘world’ contest at Manly the next year. Someone should be able to identify the beach above, where some kind of a contest is underway, around 64 and 65 going by the boards, proudly brought to you by…

Craig Baird from Surfworld Torquay thankfully sets the record straight…Sorry folks but that is a contest at Bells. Ampol had a long association with contests at Bells and sponsored the Vic Open titles for a number of years. They also sponsored the Aussie titles there in 1967.

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 »

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.

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.

Surfboard with Windansea club livery in movie grab from Bill Moseley’s 1960s Bondi footage, courtesy Marilyn Moseley

The Sydney ‘branch’ of the famous Californian ‘Windansea’ board riding club was originally stacked with Bondi surfers, although its membership (by invitation only) of around 60 top riders, at the time this image was taken, included rising stars from all over the place. Like in California, the Sydney Windansea club was set up to win competitions, by handpicking its members and instilling club loyalty. The challenge of keeping this kind of club afloat, according to vice president Robert Conneely in a Surfing World interview (Nov 1965), is getting the mix right and setting common goals… ‘All of these radical guys are moulded together to form one strong body and they do make a lot of sacrifices for the club, but we don’t try to regiment them – they always remain individuals’.

The Surfing World, November 1965, courtesy Steve Abbott collection