By PHIL JARRATT
NO offence to any old-timer readers I might have out there, but now that I’m seriously late-middle-aged myself, I sometimes find that after spending time with elderly folk I come away feeling exhausted and, well, just a little depressed.
Together with filmer Shaun Cairns and former pro surfer Mark Warren, I’ve just spent an entire week in the company of men ranging in age from 75 to 90, and guess what? I feel exhilarated and inspired by the experience! What amazing lives these old blokes have led, and what reserves of energy they still have left!
We’ve been filming a TV documentary about the pioneers of the Australian surfboard industry, the men who set up factories on an old market garden at Brookvale, behind Sydney’s northern beaches, in the postwar years and built a tiny cottage industry into a surfboard boom that changed our beach culture forever. The grand old men of the industry are Gordon Woods, 90, and our own Billy Wallace, 89. We’ll catch up with Bill on home turf in the coming days, but the remarkable Mr Woods seemed like a good place to start.
Gordon’s not as nimble as he once was since having a stroke, but after a three-hour interview in his penthouse apartment overlooking the Sydney Heads, he thought we needed to visit his man-cave where he keeps the first finned surfboard made in Australia, back in December 1956. Keeping up with Gordon as he flashed through the back streets in his sporty car with personalised plates was not easy, but we made it to the cave in one piece, and he unveiled the hollow ply “okanui”, still in immaculate condition.
As we filmed him with the board, I suddenly realised that Gordon was buggered.
“Do you need a breather, old mate?” I asked. “Perfectly fine,” he snapped, and continued posing with undisguised pride with his creation, the board that started it all nearly 60 years ago.
That board was a copy of a red balsa board that Gordon had seen ridden at Manly by American lifeguard Bob Burnside, in Australia for an international surf carnival held in conjunction with the Melbourne Olympics. He’d been amazed by the way Burnside had turned the shorter (only 10 feet) and lightweight board with a big D-shaped fin across the wave and ridden diagonally to shore as he walked up and down the deck. Gordon drove to the Games in Melbourne, then on to Torquay, where he extracted a promise from Burnside that he would sell him the board before leaving the country.
That board became the template for the entire Australian surfboard industry.
If Gordon Woods was the man who kick-started the industry, Barry Bennett was the engine that kept it running. When we caught up with Barry, now 84, at 7am on a warm morning that would reach 40-plus by lunch-time, he’d already been at work for two hours, supervising the first of the day’s two production shifts at Dion Chemicals, where about 200 foam blanks – the core of most surfboards – are popped out of ancient concrete moulds each day, supplying not only the Australian market but about a dozen export markets as well.
When foam began to replace balsa as the preferred surfboard core in the late 1950s, most of the Brookvale board builders “blew” their own, with their eyes stinging from the weird and wonderfully toxic plastic mixes they poured into home-made moulds. But by the time the surf boom kicked in around 1962, Barry Bennett was the king of blanks, supplying them all. He still is.
A quiet, reserved man, Barry rarely gives interviews, but he seemed to enjoy recalling the old days, when he would strap his 16-foot toothpick board to the side of a tram to ride from the family home at Waverley to Bondi Beach.
Surfing has been exceptionally good to Bennett, but the flip-side of that is that many board shops would have gone under, were it not for the generosity of the “bank of Barry”. He is an institution in Brookvale, but admits that there is a bit of family pressure on him to slow down now. “Maybe next year,” he grins, flicking some foam dust from his hair.
