When Suzanne Storrie got her start in surf lifesaving, back in the early ’90s, it was “quite blokey” … to say the least. The men put on a Christmas show on the roof of her local surf club to which women weren’t invited. It felt like a breakthrough when they asked Suzanne to do their make-up.
“There were comments like, ‘You sheilas couldn’t organise a tea party.’ It could be quite confronting,” she tells The Weekly. “There were times when I had to say to myself, ‘I’m not going to let this get the better of me.’”
Bear in mind that women had only been admitted to surf lifesaving clubs as full members in 1980 – 78 years after Aussie women got the vote – so the organisation was hardly on the cutting edge of cultural change. But it was an organisation Suzanne loved and valued all the same, and she was determined to be meaningfully involved. So she jumped in at the deep end.
“I learnt how to race surf skis when there were no other women doing that,” she says, “so I raced in the men’s races. I learnt how to drive a rubber duckie – you know, the rescue boats – when there weren’t many women doing that.” Then,
