THE COLLECTOR
My fascination with surfboards had an inauspicious start. It was the early 1970s, I was 15 years old, and the shortboard revolution had been storming the coast for the past few years. Dad helped me fashion my own prototype by cutting down an old Malibu in our backyard shed. It wasn’t pretty, but it was mine.
We lived in a suburb of Perth, just south of the river, and like most grommets in the area I grew up surfing the Perth metropolitan breaks. But as soon as I had my driver’s license, I was off on the long drive south nearly every weekend, exploring the Yallingup to Margaret River coast. This would become the testing ground for all my experimentation with surfboards in the years that followed.
The late ’60s and early ’70s were a dynamic period for surfboard design and it was an exciting time to start a career as a shaper. Radical changes in surfboard shapes defined the era and experimentation was the norm. Like many other shapers,
