So writes Phil Jarratt in the introduction to his recent title ‘The Immortals of Australian Surfing’. Jarratt admits he was vexed by the question of who to include in the book after the publishers insisted he narrow it down to 12 names, but ultimately he went with the following luminaries: Midget Farrelly, Nat Young, Wayne Lynch, Michael Peterson, Simon Anderson, Mark Richards, Tom Carroll, Mick Fanning, Pam Burridge, Layne Beachley, Steph Gilmore, and Tyler Wright.
Jarratt calls on personal experiences, in-depth research and anecdotes to produce an engaging and comprehensive anthology. It helps that he knew many of his subjects well and there was certainly no author better placed to write this book.
Pam Burridge
In 1999, after she’d retired from the women’s world professional surfing tour for the second and final time, Pam Burridge was described by Surfer magazine in the US as ‘the Mother Superior of women’s surfing’.
Did they mean Mother Teresa? Pam had certainly mentored and nurtured other competitors over her long time at or near the top. Or were they being ironic, because whatever she may have been over the highs and lows of her roller-coaster 15-season career – tomboy, puffy-cheeked punk rocker, failed pop singer, alcoholic, anorexic, glamour queen and country gal – the 1990 world champion had never been a head nun.
Sweetheart Pam Burridge caused a sensation when she burst onto the women’s pro scene in 1980 aged just 15, but she soon showed she was no airhead surf chick. In fact, the Manly teenager was poised, self-assured, articulate and naturally talented on a surfboard. A promoter’s dream, she was jumped on by the Australian media, which had been starved of an Aussie surf queen since Mooloolaba ‘shark sheila’ Kim McKenzie – a good part-time pro who attracted international attention in the early 1970s for her other job as a shark catcher – had retreated to her fishing boat.
Reflecting on how much surfing had changed over the years in the 200th issue of Tracks magazine in 1987, writer and former national
