History

When surfers discovered Nirvana

The generation of ex-servicemen who started bringing their families to Noosa in the 1950s included many keen body surfers and surf ski riders, but they mainly focused on the beach breaks of Main Beach, paying scant attention to the perfect waves rolling in along the point breaks every time an east swell combined with a south east wind. It wasn’t until a Maryborough-based lifesaver named Hayden Kenny (later to become surfing’s first ironman champion in 1966) saw balsawood Malibu surfboards in action when an American lifeguard team toured Australia in 1956 that the potential of the points was realised.

Kenny, then 20, ordered a replica of the American Malibu from Sydney surfboard builder Gordon Woods – a 10 feet six inch hollow wood veneer “okinui” weighing more than 30 pounds – and brought it down from the family farm to Noosa to try it out in late 1957. He told surf historian Stuart Scott: “I’d been to Noosa for a surf carnival, so I knew what was there, the layout of the land and the points, and how the wind affected the surf conditions, so I went there with the board. I remember that first time, walking over the sand dunes right beside the surf club, and there was First Point just going off. After that I kept going back. You only needed a two to three-feet peeling wave, and I had it absolutely to myself from 1957 to 1961.”

Hayden concedes that “there might have been others sneaking onto the points at different times” during those years, and surf club history certainly seems to point that way. Max Krogh from Gympie joined the Noosa club in the early 1950s and regularly rode a 16-foot hollow paddle board at First Point, and on small days he would paddle to the outer bays in search of waves. In 1958 Merv Cummings, also from Gympie, started leaving a huge balsa board, made by a Brisbane boatbuilder, under the clubhouse and riding it on the points. Merv later bought a cast-off Gordon Woods board from Hayden Kenny, but when he left it on the beach overnight, a storm blew it up and over the sand dune and across Hastings Street into Thatcher’s Flats. Boards were made of sterner stuff in those days, and it survived with only a few ding repairs needed.

While Noosa may have been less of a secret by the early 1960s than Hayden Kenny contends, there were never more than a few surfers in the water at any time, and they usually all knew each other…until the arrival of strange, loud man with an eye-patch and an American accent, his surfing wife and a diminutive teenager with a rascal’s grin. There is some confusion about when young Bob McTavish arrived in Noosa for the first time with Pa and Ma Bendall, the legendary Caloundra Canadians, but it was most likely early 1961, when McTavish, a Brisbane radio station panel operator, was a semi-permanent fixture in the first aid room at Caloundra Surf Club. Most mornings Pa Bendall would stop by the first aid room where the young surfer slept on a thin mattress and take him surfing. One cool morning with a strong southerly whipping up the coast, Pa announced that they were going to Noosa. Bob knew that this was a village a long way up the coast, but that was about it.

They threw Bob’s board on the roof of Pa’s Ford Ranchwagon, stopped by Harmony Court apartments to pick up Ma, and took off through the rolling hills and sugar fields to Nambour, then on to Noosa, where a steep hill dropped down to the beach to reveal a perfect point break with no one out. According to McTavish, “Ma had a shocker and Pa found it peeled a bit too fast for him, so I had these perfect little waves to myself. This was something special!”

Later in the day, McTavish persuaded Pa to tie the boards back on the car and drive further out on the point, over a couple of hills and around a few bends into a National Park where more perfect waves peeled down the rocky shore. Soon he was catching long rides from the Park through the beautiful little inside bay, and even onto First Point. McTavish was immediately hooked on Noosa.