"The Story of Philly and Joey," Alicia King's feature on Phyllis O'Donell and Josette Lagardere, ran in Surfing World #425, published in 2025. This version has been slightly edited.

Phyllis O’Donell is standing on the sand at Huntington Beach after a surf, stark naked. Stripping off her bathing suit as the fog rolls in, she’s taking her sweet time, wandering her bare bum around before changing, much to the horror of Josette Lagardere who’s standing nearby. Speaking with Josette today, the Californian laughs as she recalls one of her first memories of Phyllis and her shock at the Australian’s total lack of self-consciousness. “She was so free—just a free spirit. And I was mortified!”

The two had met a few weeks earlier, at the 1966 World Titles in San Diego, where both had represented their respective countries. Josette, a warm and freckle-faced 19-year-old with sun-whitened hair and a huge smile, was introduced to “this bouncing little lady, smiling and dancing around.” The pair became friends almost immediately.

Phyllis, though 10 years Josette’s senior, was mischievous, a real larrikin out of the water. Her small stature, big doe eyes and brown pixie bob hairstyle belied her ferocity as a surfer. Josette recalls, “In the water she had a different spirit. Phyllis was a fast paddler and fought for poll position. Me and most of the other girls would share waves, even in competition. Not Phyllis. She was so competitive; she never gave a wave away.” What Josette didn't know at that point was that Phyllis pretty much had to be that way; there was no other way to thrive in an Australian surf scene that was non-stop aggressive and masculine.

You could say the Aussie contingent at the ’66 World Titles in California made waves. Josette and her fellow American surfers were taken aback by the combative approach the Aussies took, with Nat Young—who won the men’s World Title—leading the way. It was less about flowing with the wave, and more about dominating it. Power surfing had arrived.

Watching Phyllis surf, Josette marvelled at how different her own surfing style was compared to the Australian. Josette was a classicist, always allowing the wave to dictate her line rather than imposing her will upon it. This was the Californian way she’d grown up with, watching the minimalistic fluidity of local stylists like her idol, Joey Hamasaki. Hawaiian-born, Joey was virtually invisible in surf magazines, her dark cropped hair and Japanese ancestry counter to the celebrated and quintessential blonde surfer girl—women like Linda Benson and Joyce Hoffman. But Joey’s genius wasn’t lost on Josette. “She was magic to watch.”

Phyllis and Josette—or Philly and Joey, as they called each other—hit it off. Despite their many differences, the spark between them would grow and flourish, and their lives became inextricably tied until the very end, decades later.

1960 was the year they both began surfing, on opposite sides of the Pacific and in diametrically opposed surf scenes. Phyllis was 23 when she drove from her Drummoyne home on Sydney’s west side, with her sister Yvonne, to Freshwater Beach. “I don’t know why I began surfing, to tell you the truth,” said Phyllis. “I mean, my sister’s boyfriend had a board, and I borrowed it—but I don’t know what I liked about surfing, at least not at first."

Perhaps it was a social challenge as much as an athletic one. In the 1960s, Australian women were still not permitted to drink in many so-called "public" bars. Some pubs had a segregated "Ladies Lounge" area—a meager bit of space off to the side that only reinforced the idea that women didn’t have a place among men: not sipping a beer in the pub, not in the workplace—and certainly not riding a surfboard in the ocean.

Yvonne O’Donell never got the hang of surfing, but Phyllis kept at it, despite copping abuse from the blokes in the water. They shouted and yelled, bulldozed her off waves, even aimed their board directly at her. At 23 she was considered a dinosaur, though many of the men were her age or older. Except of course they measured her not against themselves, but the handful of females in the water who were mostly teenage girls. Phyllis was an adult woman, surfing. “It was different here to what it was like in the States,” she said later. “You had to be aggressive to get any good at it.” 

When asked if she was ever intimidated by men in the surf," Phyllis was blunt. “Nope! If they don’t like me, get out of my way!”

Phyllis took no shit. “I was surfing Long Reef one day and this young guy came up and asked, ‘What’s an old hag like you doing surfing?’ So I slapped him across the face. Another guy paddled over and asked, ‘What’s happening?’ So I told him. And that’s how I met Nat Young. It was his brother I’d slapped across.

Nat said his brother deserved it, and we've been friends ever since.”

The Sunn sisters from Hawaii—Anela and Martha—both visited Australia in 1970, during that year's world titles event in Victoria, and Phyllis recounts surfing with them at Duranbah. “This bloke came up and said, ‘They’re not allowed here.’ I said, ‘Why not?”’ Phyllis was enraged when he told her they objected to their skin color. “I slapped him across the face, and said, ‘Apologize!’” 

Phyllis inherited her fieriness from her father, Sid, a hot-headed businessman who owned a gas station and rubber manufacturing company. They clashed mightily when she was a teen, with one glaring source of friction. “Father was a womanizer.” Sid’s extramarital affairs rocked the family unit and led to her mother, Enid, having a nervous breakdown. Phyllis left school at 15 to cook, clean and nurse Enid back to health.

Infuriated with her father and fiercely protective of her mother, Phyllis recalled reaching a boiling point. “He owned a .22 rifle, and I threatened to shoot the woman he was going with." Despite her rage, Phyllis nonetheless yearned for Sid’s approval, which was hard to come by.

While Phyllis honed her craft on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, 13-year-old Josette had become smitten with surfing, having found her feet at Doheny, a slow-breaking righthander near California’s Dana Point.

Born in Florida, Josette’s parents had split when she and her twin brother, John were babies. Josette Sr—who had been born in Paris—packed up and headed for Los Angeles. Josette Jr never saw her father again, which cut deeply. “My mother never talked about him, no matter how much I asked. I later heard he had more children who he surfed with. He was a surfer. It was difficult not knowing anything about him.” 

Josette longed for time with her mother—a vivacious woman who loved to joke—but she was a single mom working two jobs. Their babysitter, Rose, took the young twins every day either to Hermosa or Redondo Beach. Josette learned to fish, bodysurf, ride surf mats and skimboards. She was 13 when her mom married Andre Lagardere, and while they took off on their honeymoon, Josette’s neighbors took her to Doheny to surf. “I dragged down this 10-foot Hobie, paddled out, and actually stood up. My brother too. And that was that. It was over for both of us. We were hooked on surfing.”

Babysitting and house cleaning, Josette saved to buy her dream board, a 9’6” Hobie model that Linda Benson rode. While her mom and stepfather didn’t prohibit surfing, they didn’t encourage it either. “Surfers had a bad reputation for cruising round in hearse-like station wagons, out of their mind on LSD and dope.”

But the surf culture Josette experienced was nothing like that. “Most of the people I surfed with loved the sport and wanted to be healthy and fit. It was family oriented. The whole family would go down and you’d see everyone surfing.” The ethos was all about encouraging each other and sharing waves. “It was easy-going. We didn’t have this aggressiveness. I can’t even remember seeing anybody in the surf fighting or yelling at each other.”

A large female presence in the water tempered the expression of machismo. “There were a lot of women who surfed,” recalls Josette. There were even women’s surf clubs. Josette became a member—then president—of the California Coast Girls Surf Club which ran competitions, taught women to surf, and did community work like cleaning up wax that young grommets had scribbled on the paved walkways adjacent to the beach. “It looked horrible, and we didn’t want people to think surfers were a bad bunch of people.”

One man saw Josette’s potential and sponsored her. Dewey Weber was a short, muscular blond surfer and boardmaker, known as “the little man on wheels” due to his fast, hotdogging movements on a wave and the fact he was in general always busy zipping around. Josette was chuffed about wearing the coveted red and white Dewey Weber Surf Team jacket and matching bathing suit, but more so buoyed by Dewey’s belief in her surfing abilities. His faith motivated her to improve and in 1966 she won the prestigious Laguna Masters, beating reigning world champion Joyce Hoffman.

Phyllis had also garnered an avid supporter when she met Manly surfing icon Charles "Snowy" McAlister at Freshwater. “I would say Snowy was my mentor,” offered Phyllis. “Because I didn’t know a great deal about the sport, he took me under his wing and showed me where to surf if it was a southerly or northerly. He used to be able to stand on his head on a board. He was a great guy.”

While Sydney's wave-rich Northern Beaches were perfect for her burgeoning career, a trip north to Queensland in 1963 with her mother saw Phyllis irresistibly lured to a little-known utopia named Rainbow Bay. Modest houses and bungalows dotted the coastline right up to the point where grass turned to sand. Rainbow was charmingly simple, without a multi-storeyed house in sight. Even Surfers Paradise in the distance was home to just a handful of high rises. Phyllis and her mom convinced Sid to move north, and they bought a place in Banora Point, just a quick jaunt to Snapper Rocks.

There was little company in the water. “There were only two of us at Snapper,” recalls Phyllis. “Two! Dell Perriot and myself.” She rarely bothered walking over Point Danger to surf the peaky beachbreak A-frames at Duranbah. “Nobody ever surfed D-bah. Everyone wanted to surf a pointbreak, especially if you’re a Sydneyite.” She loved waltzing on the dancefloor of a pointbreak wall, in comparison to the fitful jives on Sydney’s short, punchy beachbreaks. The growth of Phyllis's wave-riding skills was reflected in her competition results, and in May 1964 she won the Australian Titles, which earned her a berth at the inaugural World Surfing Championships, to be held soon after at Manly Beach.

There was an undercurrent in society at large in 1964; a hunger for all things new and exciting, for freedom and adventure—an escape from the conservatism of daily life. And so it was that a 60,000-strong crowd blanketed the sand and lined the promenade at Manly to watch a surfing contest. The place was fizzing with life.

The Yanks had no idea who Phyllis was. The talk on the beach was all about Linda Benson and Joey Cabell—the American favorites. Phyllis recalled, “Nobody thought Midget and I would win. And we proved them wrong, didn’t we?”

Linda Benson—a diminutive, blonde goofyfoot from California—was the face of women’s surfing. Living near Orange County, which by that time had become the epicenter of the fledgling US surf media, Benson was a star. She was light-footed, gutsy in big Hawaiian surf, and a stunt double in some of the 

 movies. Yet here was Phyllis in her yellow competition singlet and black "stubbies"-style shorts, just four years after first finding her feet at Freshie, keeping up with the best.

Early in the competition, Phyllis rode a board shaped by good friend Midget Farrelly. “But I didn’t feel comfortable with it, so I got on my Joe Larkin board, and they started playing jazzy music over the loudspeakers, and I just totally relaxed and jazzed along. That’s how I won.”

She cross-stepped on a righthand wall and planted herself on the nose, feet turned slightly outwards and hips slung forward with her left hand raised casually in the air. She flaunted her signature spinner move—a 360-degree dance-style twirl—and basically out-surfed the field, Benson included. Phyllis became surfing's first world champion, man or woman (Midget would win the men’s title an hour or so later). Not realizing the presentation would be held straight away, Phyllis and Linda were already “downing a couple of grogs” at the Manly Pacific Hotel and had to race back to the beach.

Phyllis’s motivations were uncomplicated: she loved surfing and she loved winning. She wasn’t driven to impress others. She didn’t seek attention and she sure as hell didn’t set out to be a trailblazer. If there was ever someone who couldn’t give two fucks about what others thought of her, it was Phyllis O’Donell.

Yet living this surfing life was an act of defiance, whether she was conscious of it or not. Phyllis and her female surfing comrades were establishing a place for themselves in the water, while women at large were creating a place for themselves in the world.

And the world was a place Phyllis wanted to see.

In 1966 she rolled out what was meant to be a three-week trip to the States for the World Titles in San Diego into a one-year stay. It cost her job as assistant manager at the Tweed Heads bowling alley, but bugger it, she was having fun.

Huntington Beach, 1966. Phyllis wanders naked on the sand, shrouded in fog as Josette is caught between cringing and laughing. The two have had a hell of a time together, and their friendship has in fact deepened into something more intimate. It isn’t the first time either of them has been with a woman, but both are in the process of navigating their sexual orientation and identity.

Phyllis had a couple of long-term boyfriends before she began a relationship with a woman back home in Australia. When she told her parents they couldn’t understand or reconcile what this meant. They believed her sexuality was a problem to fix and sought treatment for her, as if she was enduring some type of illness.

As a young teen, Josette had a boyfriend prior to being with a woman, another surfer from San Diego. She didn’t dare tell anyone. “I couldn’t understand my feelings. Why do I like a woman? I felt something I hadn’t felt before. It was exciting and upsetting.” She didn’t know any other gay people.

“When Philly and I first got together it was hard,” concedes Josette. “There was still a stigma.” But over time, Phyllis and Josette both relaxed, allowing the reality of who they were to surface. It felt natural. They didn’t hide it, but nor did they flaunt it. They were simply together, and nobody around them questioned it, least of all Sid and Enid.

After a year in California, surfing up and down the coast and working for Dewey Weber, Phyllis was keen to return home. Josette was up for the move. They flew to Hawaii where they surfed and hung out with the Sunn sisters at Makaha, then piled their boards onto a P&O liner headed for Sydney Harbour.

Josette moved straight in with the O’Donnell’s. “They were like my foster family,” she recalls. “They treated me like another family member.” The fact Phyllis and Josette were in a relationship was never discussed, but the intimacy between the two was both understood and accepted. Josette laughs as she remembers, “Philly was a little surf rat and her mum would say ‘Josette, can you please get Phyllis to cut her hair? Can you please make her stop wearing surf T-shirts?’ Well, no way! I couldn’t do that. Nobody could!” Phyllis was stubborn as all get out.

Meanwhile, there had been a shift in the relationship between Phyllis and Sid. Since winning the World Title in 1964, she felt she’d at last earned his respect. “I had to win a championship first before I got along with my father,” recalled Phyllis. But it wasn’t just that. Since the move to Banora, Sid had retired and mellowed. “He was a different person,” offered Phyllis. But he still spoke up if it was called for. Having grown to love Josette like a daughter, Sid felt protective of her, which led him to call out Phyllis when he thought she was acting out of turn.

Sid had become a surf contest official, and at the Queensland Championships, after Josette beat her, Phyllis gave Sid an earful, complaining that Josette had become a “judge’s pet.” Sid became angry, chastising Phyllis. Josette recalls, “He said, ‘It’s not right to speak like that. She’s your best friend.’ Phil was not always a great sport.”

Josette became an Australia citizen and won the Australian Title in 1969, over in Western Australia. The two women continued to surf and compete—enough so that they were given a nudge to move out by Sid and Enid, who were tired of being woken at the crack of dawn by the rattling garage door as the women went for an early.

The two soon found themselves in a Rainbow Bay flat. Life was simple. As Phyllis said, “All I had to do was walk out the door and hit the surf.” Phyllis and Josette tore up and down the Gold Coast in a white Mini Morris van, filled with boards. They did farm work picking peas and planting tomatoes, which wasn’t Phyllis’s forte. Josette would crack up laughing at the crooked lines she planted. They also shared a job working for a film developer, taking turns dropping off and picking up film from chemists so they could both surf. They didn’t need much. “We were able to make enough money to pay for rent and food, and that was about all we needed or wanted, ” recalls Josette. “It was a good surfing life. I had my board and a bar of wax—what more could you want?”

Phyllis and Josette’s flat was one half of a duplex, and if you’d drilled a hole in the wall and peered through, you would have spied a young Mr Kirra himself— Michael Peterson—occupying the adjacent flat. They surfed alongside a gaggle of young boys around 14 or 15 years old, Phyllis referred to as the "little kids"— namely, MP, Rabbit Bartholomew, and Peter Townend. They responded in suit by calling her the "old girl."

“I got a lot of respect from them,” reflects Josette. “I’m different from Philly. I didn’t have the aggressiveness. But they respected her, too. I’d sit out and talk to them, and we’d surf together. No hassles. It was a different type of surfing from the competitiveness of Snapper today.”

After four years living together, Phyllis and Josette’s romantic relationship waned. Josette moved out, but the two remained close. As Josette says, “We were best friends before and after our relationship. There’s more to love than sex. It’s about the heart. It feels good to be with that person.” Over time, Josette would prove a mainstay for Phyllis, pulling her to the surface when she found herself underwater. While Phyllis’s outward persona oscillated between "Don’t mess with me!" and being an unapologetic lark, she grappled with plenty of darkness in her life. All or nothing to the core. Her midlife was riddled with periods of illness, alcohol abuse, overexercising, anorexia, bulimia, and depression.

Josette was there, beside her. Always. And Phyllis made it to the surface every time.

New Year’s Day, 2019, New South Wales. Phyllis and Joey sit in an air-conditioned room at a Pottsville nursing home, insulated from the din of cicadas outside. We’ve spent the last hour or so recounting their surfing lives and now the conversation turns.

“You went through some problems that were pretty horrific,” Josette says to Phyllis, before turning to me. “But Philly’s come a long way. She’s got through it all.”

“I’ve had a big life,” says Phyllis. No kidding. “I’ve been through a few phases,” she reflects.

“Yes, we’ve had a few phases,” agrees Josette in a Californian accent that hasn’t faded one bit.

When Phyllis and her sister Yvonne both reached a stage of life where they needed care, Josette stepped in. She became the unofficial caregiver and guardian to both sisters, who occupied adjacent rooms in the nursing home. She visited every week, fielded phone calls and managed their affairs. “I was always part of their family,” reflects Josette. “That’s why I decided to take care of them both.”

“You know, there’s another side to Phyllis that people don’t know about,” offers Josette. “They didn’t see how caring she was with her own mother when she had dementia. She’d help other people in the nursing home. Philly spent time doing that.”

A final question for Phyllis: “When you look back, do you feel you’ve lived a good life?”

“Good, clean, and purity personified,” she says, which prompts hearty laughter all round. “Pull the other leg,” she says dryly.

“Pull the other leg!” Josette agrees, laughing.

“I used to like cockatoos,” said Phyllis. “I took my cockatoo Stony to the beach one day and someone thought he was a seagull. How could you possibly believe a cockatoo to be a seagull?”

“Stoney was a naughty bird,” says Josette.

“When the Sunn sisters were over,” recalls Phyllis, “we’d just got out from surfing and were laying on the grass, Stoney would come and lick the salt off your skin and start undoing your top! I clipped his wing so he couldn’t fly. But unfortunately it grew back, and Stony said ta-ta and off he flew.”

January 2025. It’s been two months since Phyllis, aged 87, passed away in her Pottsville nursing home.

Josette tells me over the phone about the paddle-out at Kirra, Phyllis’s favorite wave. Former pro surfers Kate Wilcomes and Pauline Menczer did a wonderful job pulling it all together. An older generation of female surfers, including Josette, carried Phyllis’s ashes across the beach, atop her Joe Larkin board, before passing them down through each generation of female surfers to the waters' edge where Steph Gilmore paddled out into the nor-easter with a bunch of girl groms to scatter the ashes. This would have delighted Phyllis. She adored Steph, ringing her mum Tracy every time Gilmore won a contest, and would tell anyone who would listen that ‘Stephy’ had won eight World Titles.

Josette has kept some ashes to take to the cemetery to be alongside Sid, Enid, and Yvonne. What Phyllis wanted.

As Phyllis neared the end, she would grab Josette’s hand and say, “You’re my best friend. How long have we been friends? Fifty-five years?”

“No! Try 57!” Josette would exclaim, to which Phyllis would burst out laughing.

In retrospect, Josette says she didn’t realize how close the end was for Phyllis. When the realization did hit, she didn’t want to admit it. “I just could not accept she was dying. That Philly wasn’t going to be around.”

The nursing home called at 7:00 AM to tell Josette that Phyllis had passed during the night. Josette walked onto the verandah of her Terranora home and, as promised, phoned Kim McKenzie, a fellow surfer and good friend to both. As the two women talked, cockatoos flew in from everywhere. Brazenly swooping, blanketing the deck and railings, carrying on. Brash and loud, they squawked for a good ten minutes.  

Then the screeching abruptly ended. Silence. One by one the birds flew off in different directions.

"THE STORY OF PHILLY AND JOEY," BY ALICIA KING (2025)

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