The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  In 1963, a devoutly peripatetic Australian surfer named Peter Troy began a four-year journey that took him from Great Britain, where he introduced stand-up surfing to the English Channel Islands, to the Continent, across the Atlantic to the United States, and down to South America. Broke in Peru, Troy shaved his head and sold his long blond surfer locks to a wigmaker for $200. In Argentina, after giving the local lifeguards a talk on the latest Aussie surf club rescue techniques, he was awarded a private audience with the president.

  While in Brazil, strolling down the Copacabana boardwalk in Rio, Troy looked across the sand to see a gangly teenager holding a board. “I’d just spent three months in the jungle traveling down the Amazon,” he later said. “I had no idea anyone on this side of the country had even seen a surfboard before. But here’s this boy, the son of the French ambassador to Brazil, who’d just had the board shipped over for the kid’s fifteenth birthday. He’s standing on the beach looking kind of lost, so I told him I’d take the board out and show him how to ride it—there was a nice little left-hander peeling off just down the beach. Off I go. After a few waves, I figured it was time to head in and give the kid his board back. I looked up and there were 2,000 people on the beach, watching me. That little surf session made all the papers. I was a ‘god walking on water.’ I was feted, wined, and dined; they took me to see Pele play football. It was the most amazing experience of my life.”

  Visiting surfers were happy to proselytize, and a few set out for that express purpose. More often than not, the pioneering surfer on a foreign coast rode without anyone on the beach watching or asking for a lesson. Peace Corps volunteers in El Salvador packed their boards and surfed alone after their long humid shifts in the fields. Rusty Miller, a California college student and surfing champion, rode waves in Portugal and Sri Lanka during a New York-to-Los Angeles semester-at-sea program.

  Surfing occasionally planted itself with no outside help at all. A copy of Popular Mechanics with boardmaking blueprints would fall into the right hands. Or—as would be the case in Viareggio, Italy, a few years later—a subtitled Hollywood surf movie would play in the local theater. The sport’s strangest migration story took place on Easter Island. One hot afternoon in the mid-1960s, lobster fisherman Kio Pakarati watched as a board floated mysteriously in on the tide. Pakarati, in the tradition of Rapa Nui fisherman, knew how to ride waves on a tusk-shaped pora fishing boat made of bundled reeds (similar to the Peruvian caballito), and even at a distance he could tell that the plastic craft now drifting perilously close to the rocky shore was someone else’s version of the pora. Recognizing the invisible hand of sea god Nanaku, Pakarati didn’t hesitate. “I jumped from the cliffs,” he said, “grabbed the board and brought it home.” Pakarati tried the board himself, then passed it around to his children, brothers, nephews, cousins, and neighbors, who kept it in service until it was too waterlogged to ride.

  Surfing growth could also be the result of nothing more exotic than a local alderman getting the town council to sign off on beachfront lifeguard expansion. For decades, bourgeois British “surf bathers” had flocked to the beaches of Cornwall during summer and rented flip-nosed plywood bellyboards. But stand-up surfing didn’t take root until 1959, when Newquay officials posted summer guards along the district’s resort beaches, at which point local wave-riders began cycling through plywood paddleboards, surf skies, balsa chips, and imported “foamies.” By 1963 Newquay surfers were riding first-rate custom equipment from local boardmakers.

  The military unwittingly did its part to export surfing around the world. Wave-riding U.S. servicemen bargained with cargo pilots to have boards shipped from home—as one vet later recalled, six cases of Chivas got a Weber Performer and two Jacobs noseriders flown from California to a beachfront depot in southeast Asia. Servicemen posted in Morocco humped their boards down to Mehdia Plage, seventy-five miles northeast of Casablanca. Sailors in the Philippines found waves near their Subic Bay station in 1962, the same year a Pacific Fleet serviceman first took on the hairy coral-spiked reef passes on Guam’s west coast.

  Whenever possible, a jug-eared navy sailor from Pensacola named Larry Martin, wearing combat boots and surf trunks, would hitch a ride on a tank from Da Nang, South Vietnam, to a little slice of in-country tropical paradise called China Beach, where the navy had a beachfront rec center. With a go-ahead from the local U.S. Marine command post, Martin organized the China Beach Surf Club, which had its own plywood-walled clubhouse, membership cards, and an official cloth-patch logo made by a Vietnamese seamstress. By the time the war ended, the club had nearly two hundred members. Most of the time, Martin recalled, China Beach was a godsend—beers and barbeque, movies, USO shows, and eight-track rock-and-roll playing over the PA. “Whole platoons at a time would fly in,” he said. “They’d get down to the beach, cut off their fatigues with a knife and run right into the water.” But the war was always right over the hill. Martin and a friend once paddled out at dusk to catch a few and had to sprint frantically offshore as Vietcong soldiers began machine-gunning the lineup. After three hours floating in the warm darkness, the two surfers finally got an all-clear from friends on the beach and paddled in.

  CHINA BEACH SURF CLUB, VIETNAM, 1967.

  Wherever surfing took hold, it was fashioned, as much as local conditions would allow, on the Southern California model. New Zealand Surf magazine looked a lot like Surfer. The Nippon Surfing Association translated and adopted the entire USSA rulebook. Safari Surfboards in Durban looked and smelled like the Hobie shop in Dana Point. In Newquay, just as in Newport Beach, it was skateboards and competition stripes, club T-shirts, junker hand-painted station wagons and panel vans, surf music, imported Bud Browne surf movies, Stomp parties, and hassles from the squares.

  “The authorities took a rather dim view of the sport,” an early-generation British surfer recalled, “connecting it with drugs and noise. Then the reporters came down, looking for ‘sex on the sand’ type of stories. It all got slightly out of hand. But we were certainly out of the drag old fifties.”

  Australia: A Surfing Giant Comes to Life

  During the boom, Australia put surfing on a developmental fast track that made the rest of the world look slow and pokey by comparison. As late as 1960, Aussie boardriders were still well off the pace being set in California and Hawaii. Just four 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.

  The sport boomed Down Under, just as it did in America and elsewhere, but with its own particular set of harmonics. Measured in decades, Australian surf history almost matched that of America, and the well-muscled “boardman,” outfitted in a tight lifeguard club swimming costume and gliding arrowlike for shore, was a national icon. But the sport here had largely been shaped and reshaped by visitors—especially Duke Kahanamoku and the 1956 California lifeguard team—and the surf boom was an import, too: Gidget was as popular in Brisbane as it was in San Clemente, The Australian Surfer was a Surfer replica, and domestic boardmakers stole their logos from Jacobs and Hobie. Everyone 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—before it ran into the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and had to settle for number two.

  But outside influence here had nearly run its course. In the lead-up to the 1964 Championships, Australia already seemed to be drafting along behind California more by habit then necessity. Soon it would become a pacesetting, fully independent surfing nation.

&nb
sp; In fact, what was true for surfing was true for Australia at large. The same 1956 Melbourne-hosted Olympic Games that had brought over the American surfers had gone a long way toward lifting the country out of its abiding “cultural cringe”—a mild but pervasive national inferiority complex about Australia’s place in the world—and things only improved in the eight years between the Olympics and the World Surfing Championships. By 1964, 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. 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 girders and beams of the Sydney Opera House were being installed. Though Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were still banned nationwide, 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 hadn’t yet become 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 The Lucky Country?, 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—surfers included—as the unofficial national slogan.)

  Meanwhile, good weather and a lot 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 fan was never sweeter than from the midfifties to the midsixties: the Summer Olympic medals stacked up like poker chips, Davis Cup victories were all but assured, golfer Pete Thomson regularly won the British Open, and everybody’s favorite ginger, Rod Laver, pulled off a 1962 tennis Grand Slam as an amateur. During the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, gold medalist Dawn Fraser, the first female swimmer to break the one-minute mark in the 100 meters, made headlines for a semidrunken 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-bred ideas of what it meant to be a surfer: the added hours spent in the water, plenty of travel up and down the coast in search of new breaks, and lots 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 to be kept on premises. There were plenty of surfers, meanwhile, who no longer wanted to devote any beach time to club duties. SLSA enrollment actually increased in the late fifties and early sixties (thanks to a flood of adolescent baby 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 fifty boards, all belonging to surfers caught on the wrong side of the swim-zone flags.

  SURFER-ROCKER FIGHT, SYDNEY, 1963.

  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.

  Presented in the newspapers and on TV as a leather-jacketed menace to upstanding Aussie suburbanites everywhere, the rocker was a local variant of the American greaser. Surfers themselves had done their bit to prove they were a group that needed watching—a veterans hall memorial mural was damaged by a rowdy crowd at a 1961 surf movie premiere, 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 the default bad guy. The first surfer-rocker fights took place at Manly Beach in the summer of 1962; these produced just a few scrapes and bruises, but were enough to catch the media’s attention. Things peaked a year later with a Sunday afternoon biffo pitting a good-sized detachment of rockers against a combined force of surfies and clubbies. As described by the Sydney Morning Herald, 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 Morning Herald reporter noted with just 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.”

  AUSSIE SURFERS GET THE HANG OF THE NEW “MALIBU” BOARDS, LATE 1950s.

  Sure, these new boardriders, as the Australian public viewed things, had wandered a bit off the straight and narrow. But not that far. And when it came time to chose sides in a beach dustup, look what happened: the boardmen got back quick as a cricket with their old mates from the clubhouse. 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, or the respect of his nonsurfing countrymen, was a good locally made board. Even before 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 knew how to work with resin and fiberglass.

  For a year, local manufacturers cranked out hollow-body knockoffs called the “okinuee.” These 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 W
oods, Dillon, Wallace, Bennett, McDonagh, and Keyo. The shops and factories were smaller than those in the United States, 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 Yankmade surf movies; some of the Brookvale shapers were in touch directly with Hobie, Bing, and the rest. With each 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.

  Ready For the World: Bob Evans and Midget Farrelly

  There were moments during the boom when it appeared as if Australian surfing in its entirety was hitched to the shoulders of Bob Evans, a rangy middle-aged impresario from Queenscliff, Sydney. He was smart and well-dressed, knew his way around a wine list, and could order with aplomb off a French menu. In 1963, he was married with three children—and a well-practiced womanizer, despite the fact that bowel surgery as a young adult left him wearing a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. A champion club-era surfer, he used special high-waisted trunks that kept everything strapped in place.

  CRESCENT HEAD, NEW SOUTH WALES.

  BONDI BEACH.

  In 1956, Evans had followed the American lifeguard team around from beach to beach and made arrangements to buy Greg Noll’s board upon the team’s departure. Evans moved just as quickly the following year, inviting California moviemaker Bud Browne over to screen his latest surf film, The Big Surf—the first movie of its kind to play in Australia—and then contracting to be Browne’s national distributor. By 1960, Evans himself was filming top Sydney riders like Mick Dooley, John “Nipper” Williams, and schoolboy sensation Bernard “Midget” Farrelly, and screening the results in club halls.