By Phil Jarratt
When Peppie Simpson paddled out into raging seas near Port Macquarie for her final at the Australian Surfing Championships last month, a large dolphin jumped right in front of her and she knew everything was going to be OK.
“No, no, I didn’t think it was an omen that I was going to win the title,” she laughs, back home in Noosa.
“I just knew I would be safe, that my board wouldn’t snap and I’d make it back to shore in one piece.”
But of course she won – Peppie usually does – and added the Over 60s Australian Women’s Longboard trophy to the Over 50s one she picked up in 2019, not to mention the dozens of senior women’s titles she’s won up and down the coast over the past couple of decades.
As her fellow competitors will tell you, when Peppie pulls on the contest jersey she’s a force to be reckoned with.
But it’s more a love of the ocean than of competing that drives this 62-year-old grandmother.
“I’m not really competitive by nature but I have the ability to focus when I’m in a comp and that helps,” she says.
“What really inspires me is just being in the ocean, getting my saltwater therapy.”
And it’s this passion that guides her regular group tours with partner Albie Curtis to the Big Island of Hawaii to swim with dolphins.
Albie skippers the yacht and Peppie and the guests divide their days between communing with the dolphins and surfing remote reefs. Just another facet of Peppie’s remarkable life.
Born in Sydney in 1960 and named Peppie by her red-haired mother after the red peppercorn tree, she got her first taste of the ocean at Manly Beach.
But when she was eight the family moved to England to be close to her dying grandmother, who tenaciously held on for five years, meaning Peppie was 13 before she felt sand between her toes again.
And then the family moved to Melbourne.
“I missed the beach so much,” she recalls, “but one of my schoolfriends had a brother who surfed and we begged him to take us to the beach, not realising it was two hours away.”
Soon she and another friend, Pru, bought rubber surf mats and started hitch-hiking to the east coast beaches every weekend, telling their parents they were staying at the other’s house, in the time-honoured teenage fashion.
They’d ride their mats all day and sleep overnight in the toilet block at Gunnamatta.
“We were so innocent and naïve, all we wanted to do was surf,” Peppie says.
A local male surfer saw that keenness and gave her a kneeboard to try.
“I stood up on it first wave and I was hooked,” she recalls.
She started entering small contests around the Point Leo area but noticed that the few girls who competed were largely ignored and sent out to surf at the end of the day or in the worst conditions.
At the Bells Beach Easter Classic one year she met Hawaiian surfing legends Rell Sunn and Margo Oberg and was amazed to hear that in Hawaii the girls who surfed were shown great respect and encouraged by the men.
“Something snapped in me when I heard that,” says Peppie.
“The next week I put an ad in the local paper asking girls to come to a meeting about forming our own club. Fifty girls turned up and we started the Victorian Women’s Surfing Association, running our own comps with divisions for mats and kneeboards.”
As Peppie Angliss, she had just won the state championships, and finished fifth at the nationals at Burleigh Heads, but that would be the last time she competed under the male-dominated governing body for some years.
She went on to win the first VWSA championships at Point Leo and made the pages of Tracks, the male-dominated “surfer’s bible”.
Unbeknown to Peppie and her friends, Queensland surfer Gail Austin had started a powerful women’s association at around the same time, and a group was also forming in Sydney led by future world champion Pam Burridge.
Soon the girls got together and formed the Australian Women’s Surfing Association, which pushed so hard for women’s rights that when they finally reunited with the men, there was an entirely new and welcome mindset.
After finishing school, Peppie had travelled to Noosa for the first time in 1979.
She fell in love with the lifestyle, walking through the park from her digs at Sunshine Beach to surf at uncrowded Tea Tree, and wanted to stay, but a new career beckoned back home in Melbourne.
Always keen on drama, at 17 she had applied for a place in NIDA, but was knocked back as too young, so she found a private tutor and was soon auditioning for all kinds of roles.
Over the next decade, surfing would have to take a backseat while under the stage name Peppie D’Or she made a name for herself working on soapies like Neighbours, The Sullivans, Cop Shop and a two-year gig on Prisoner as Roxy the biker chick who sold her baby for $10,000. Peppie also appeared in a few long-forgotten films, like Snow, Houseboat Horror and Melvin, Son of Alvin.
“Soapies weren’t my choice,” she says.
“Theatre was my passion, but you had to take what you could get.”
Still, many a jobbing actor would be more than pleased with the CV above.
As a career backup, Peppie and her then-partner ran a swimming school in Beaumaris, but when kids came along – daughter Koby in 1985, son Rohan in 1988 – she knew she wanted to bring them up in her place of the heart, Noosa, then fast becoming the longboard capital of Australia.
The family moved in 1990, setting up a new swim school at their Cooroibah home.
Peppie recalls: “Someone had given me a longboard in the late ‘80s but I thought they were for old people! I didn’t grow up with them, and even today if the surf’s pumping I want my shortboard.
“Walking the board and nose-riding is still something I have to make myself think about. It’s not natural for me but it’s been a great learning curve. I wanted to encourage other mums to get back into surfing after having children because it had meant so much to me, so I started doing comps on a longboard and doing quite well.”
She also found new ways to satisfy her artistic side, particularly after meeting another new Noosa resident, renowned ballet teacher Sue Altmann.
“Sue inspired me to take up ballet at 35 and I went right through to university entrance level,” Peppie says.
“I loved it but I was never going to be a ballerina, however, it’s given me a basis to learn so many other forms of dance.
“Now my passion is flamenco which I’ve been doing for eight years. I perform solo or in a group. I’ve got no connection with Spain and I often asked myself why I was so passionate about it, then I found out that flamenco was brought to Spain by the gypsies of northern Europe in the 15th century. That’s who I relate to. I have the gypsy spirit.”
And, of course, she had to act, appearing in a couple of Noosa Arts productions before starting a breakaway theatre group called the Independent Theatre with John Burls.
She says: “That was great fun, but now that it’s been over for a while I’d love to get back into acting again, but it’s fitting it all in. My grandkids keep me so busy! I have four, all of them here, and I love being part of their lives and encouraging them to surf and dance.”
Peppie got together with Albie Curtis about 15 years ago. She says: “He surfed and he had a boat, so why not!”
They’ve shared an idyllic surfing lifestyle ever since.
Interview over, time for a surf.
While we’ve been talking on the beach the rising tide has created a windswept lefthander right in front of us. We grab our boards and paddle out. Peppie takes the first set wave to come through and as I paddle over it, I watch her gracefully slide to the bottom and lean into a backside turn, her smile getting wider as the board follows her command.
She’s back in her happy place.
