Having only arrived here at the beginning of 1990, I feel just a little bit fraudulent to find myself sitting on a local surfing history panel with some real pioneers next week.
On the other hand, I did first surf the fabled Noosa points as a teenager in the late ‘60s, scored my first cyclone swell in 1972 and made the Munna Point campground a family holiday spot through the ‘80s. And in the 35 years we’ve lived here I have been closely involved with the Noosa Malibu Classic as a sponsor, the Noosa Festival of Surfing as a co-founder and the Noosa World Surfing Reserve as founding president, so I’ll take my panelist’s seat at next Tuesday’s Noosa Surfing History – In Conversation event at The J, alongside true local surf identities Garth Madill, David ‘Harpo’ Hutchison, Stuart Campbell and Paul Bevear, with more pride than embarrassment.
The night is a celebration of a great project, initiated by former Heritage Librarian Jane Harding in 2022, driven by local surfer Michael Court, with considerable help at the beginning from the late surf historian Stuart Scott, and now being led by new Heritage Librarian Lisa Spence.
Over the past three years the Heritage team has completed dozens of interviews with people who have played an active role in the development of Noosa as one of the world’s best surf destinations. This has been a fantastic start in documenting Noosa’s complete surfing history, but the work is only beginning, with the Heritage team about to tackle the more contemporary scene, including the rise of women’s surfing and the problems of our surf breaks being “loved to death”.
I’ve written fairly extensively about Noosa’s surfing history in three books and numerous magazine articles (even, from time to time, in this august organ of record) but it wasn’t until the aforementioned and much-lamented Stu Scott brought to my attention a fading old photo print that I realised that our surfboard riding history began not with the great Hayden Kenny in the late 1950s, but more than a decade earlier with a bloke known as The Sheik.
As I wrote in Place of Shadows in 2021:
“The generation of adventure seekers who started bringing their families to Noosa in the 1950s from as far afield as Sydney and Melbourne, as well as nearby rural centres like Gympie and Maryborough, included many keen body surfers and surf ski riders who embraced the activities of the surf club and often became members. But their main focus was on the beach breaks of Main Beach, paying scant attention to the perfect surfboard riding waves rolling in along the point breaks every time an east swell combined with a south east wind. In fact, the only person to have ridden the point waves in the 1940s may have been boatman and photographer Kevin “The Sheik” Freeman. In the process of researching this book in 2020, Stuart Scott made me aware of Kevin having ridden a strange surfcraft called ‘The Dolphin’ in the late 1940s.
“Although she only met and fell in love with Kevin in 1950, [iconic artist and author] Emma Freeman recalled hearing stories of Kevin repairing and using his mother Olive’s red cedar rescue surf ski as early as 1945, but the photo that Stu found buried in the Picture Noosa archive shows Kevin knee-paddling a very long surfboard seaward, and the caption on the back says, ‘Kevin Freeman and Dolphin surfboard, Noosa 1948’. But it wasn’t until Maryborough-based lifesaver Hayden Kenny (later to become surfing’s first ironman champion in 1966) came down to visit in the summer of 1957-58 with his hollow Gordon Woods ‘okanui’ that the full surfing potential of the Noosa points was realised.”
By the early 1960s Noosa’s point breaks were a secret which was spreading faster than the pioneers liked, but of course by today’s standards crowds were unknown. Still, the locals weren’t thrilled. I wrote in Place of Shadows:
“Stuart Scott opened up a can of worms when he tried to establish who these pioneer ‘local’ surfboard riders were. His first problem was the definition of local in a shire of only 6000 people at the start of the ’60s. Noosa Heads itself had only 100 dwellings in 1961, so very few people were locals in the truest sense, but Tewantin teenagers Bill Griffiths and Ian Rogers were pretty close to the real thing, as were George Berry, Jim Tyrie, Greg Walker and Joan, Sue and Bob Davis, and youngsters Robert and Derek Male, whose families had homes close to Main Beach.
“Among the earliest ‘Brissos’ to haunt Noosa’s points were Brian Cooney, Merv Magee and Ray Kingston, along with a few Gold Coast surfers, including Mal Sutherland, who made his first trip in 1961. From Gympie, the Madill brothers, Garth and John, were regular visitors. Whenever these surfers were on hand for a good swell, the legend of Noosa grew, but it was not until the surf magazines started to take notice that crowded waves became an issue.
“Ironically, it was Hayden Kenny, the man who had enjoyed four years surfing Noosa by himself, who was responsible for the first surf magazine coverage in a 1963 issue of Surfing World. Under the heading, The Mysterious North, Hayden claimed Noosa’s waves as ‘the best in the Commonwealth’, and made his point over three pages with photos of perfect Tea Tree Bay going unridden. According to Stu Scott, Noosa surf club captain and keen body surfer Ron Lane walked into the bar of the new Reef Hotel, threw the magazine onto the counter and said, ‘Now we’re stuffed!’”
Noosa Libraries will be presenting Noosa Surfing History – In Conversation at The J on Tuesday 11 March at 5pm. Tickets available at www.thej.com.au/noosas-surfing-history/ or at the door.
FOOTNOTE: I’m writing this last weekend, and the modelling for TC Alfred’s strike mission is ever-changing, but there’s no denying what we have already, which is the wind in the right quarter and the points firing. It’s been crowded for a week and getting worse, but if an old bloke can score a couple, so can you. Be mellow and be safe. Full Alfie report next week.
