interview by Andrew Crockett (year?), from his book Switchfoot

You and Gordon Woods were at the coalface of surfboard manufacturing in Australia, would you say that is correct?

 in Sydney, yes I would say that is true. There was no one else in Australia doing at that time (1950s) that I know of.

The first era I can remember was when there was a lot of bodysurfing going on, long before flippers and that, you know? There were articles in the paper describing the sort of attitude you should take to the wave when you were bodysurfing. Then handboards came in and you could bodysurf with a handboard, they were very efficient and effective. Later in the 50s there was a team of surfers from Bondi Beach, Sydney that had handboards (about 2 feet long) with rails and they were also equipped with flippers. Soon after that we experimented with making hollow boards and into the toothpick era – the 16 foot era. After the war there was some Tom Blake style surfboards left in the surfclubs and we started copying that style board, 14-16 foot long. The surfclubs started to recover from the exodus during the war years and by the 50s there were carnivals every weekend in Sydney. They were paddle races, so that is what we made, paddleboards. That became the first era of standup surfboard riding that I know of in Australia, standing up on 16 foot toothpicks.

In 1956, when the Americans came over for the Olympic Games in Sydney it was a complete revolution in surfboard design. . . immediately. We started making boards with fins on them.

It was a pretty steep learning curve when foam came into it, no one in Australia had any idea about the chemicals and moulds. There was numerous failures.

If you think about surfing in the 60s and 70s and you look at it today, do you like what you see?

There is an enormous difference over that period really. I started in the 1940s, 70 years ago, before surfboards. In the early days, surfing was bodysurfing mainly and racing paddleboards and that is where surfboard riding began. The difference is spectacular really, when you consider they are now doing things like aerials.

How do you think competitive surfing changed the evolution of surfboard design?

 The surfboards evolved so quickly and dramatically over the ten or twenty years from 1956 onwards, after the Americans came to Australia with their balsa Malibu’s. Once we introduced the fin it progressed very quickly. It went from single fins to tri fins in a space of ten years. Since the tri fin the surfboard has arrived at a situation where the boards are pretty well…evolved, to perfection. Competition offered a financial incentive, money crept into it and sped up the design process.

How do you feel that your experiences in the ocean affected your life on the land?

 I was born in Bronte and lived very close to the beach. My mother retold to me that the first trip she did with me, when she got home from hospital was to ride down to the beach with the pram. So, I was exposed to the ocean right from the time I was born and I never moved away from it. Life was about the tides, the wind and the weather.

4) Of all the characters in surfing (particularly in the 1960s) can you tell me a memorable story about one of them? (I am trying to get at the characters in the 60s and how that era was so free and so loose, it is something we dont have today - well not in America or Australia - perhaps in Mozambique!)

 I was the boat captain at Bronte surf club in the 60s, we wasted a lot of time in surfboats. By the 1960s I had five or six children, was making a lot of surfboards/running my business (Wallace Surfboards) and my surfing career had well and truly finished. I never really followed the competition side of surfing, I was too busy making surfboards and making babies.

Are you a fan of contest surfing and do you like watching it these days?

 It is amazing to see what they can do, plus they have perfect waves to surf.

Can you describe one of your ‘peak experiences’ while surfing, where was it and what made it so memorable?

 There were so many. With the surfboats, I recall some big waves at Bronte and we would wait down at the south end for the big ones to come. The traffic going around Tamarama to Bronte point was all pulled over on the side of the road to watch. People used to come down and shoot movies when those big waves were on.

Your generation has been through so many era’s of surfboard design; from timber to balsa to fiberglass to shortboards and fashion boards, there is so much accumulated knowledge. Have you any desire to pass on your knowledge to the next generation?

 Not really. I served my apprenticeship as a Pattern-Maker, it is an engineering course that takes five years. That is how I learned my skills…it is all about precision workmanship, using timber. The Engineering industry in Australia is all but defunct now; by comparison to what it was when I was young. There are no Pattern Makers anymore and the trades have all but disappeared, in Australia. Everything in Australia has changed so much…the car industry for example.

Of all the things you know about surfboards, plan shapes, floatation, bottom curves, rails, fins and functionality – which bits are the most overlooked by modern shapers?

 They are copying the boards that Kelly Slater is riding, that is the board they all want and that is the board they get.

There are other people who are looking at some of the older boards and they are copying them, putting them through the computer and trying to make boards like that. Some of those older boards are great, they are long and wide and easy to ride.

My generation has been superseded by the modern boards… the whole manufacturing process is entirely different. My generation experimented with trial and error more than anything. If we made a board and it worked, we would make another one.

Surfboards today have improved to such a degree and the material they make it with is so defined that they are simply mass-produced. The surfboard blank comes out nearly to the exact shape…there is very little shaping. We used to have to carve the blanks out of a solid block of foam, or balsa. Nowadays most of the work is in the glassing and the finishing. I guess the real skill these days is the person who makes the original pattern that ends up forming the blank that they take mould off.

We did make some twin fins in the 60s but we didn’t really progress to the tri fins.

I remember in the early days people would come in and want a board and I would ask them what sort and they would say 

‘I don’t care, I just want a board to put on the roof of the car so I look like a surfer.’

 People that had never been in the water in their lives. It was a good look for the girls you know.

Do you think we will ever see a mainstream surfboard that is 100% environmentally friendly in construction?

 I think it is quite possible. Whether we will see it, I will hazard a guess and say yes. Timber boards last as long as the timber does, whereas foam is suspect and not as durable. Foam can break down quickly. In the days when we first started making foam in Australia, the foam used to break down. Mixing the chemicals used to drive us mad! In the early days we had five components to mix into the chemical and it was like that for a few years until a two- component mix was available and it became a lot more reliable. In the early days, there was a lot of failures in the foam blanks that we made.

 I was mainly involved in the paddleboard scene. ..racing. A close associate Keith Hyrst from North Bondi was a champion paddler. Serge Denman came from Bondi and moved to Bronte. Henry Riley was also brilliant. 

 from Maroubra was a brilliant paddler and also a commercial artist, he did all my artwork over the years for Wallace Surfboards. He did all the artwork that ever went onto my boards. He also won a couple of National titles for board paddling and beat all the crack American paddlers in the Olympic carnival in Torquay.

 Well I’ve got to include my first employee who was Bob McTavish, he was a very innovative shaper. Darrell ‘Rooster’ Dell was a very good shaper and his boards were very much in demand at the time. Frank Latta was another very well known surfer/shaper who worked with me and also brilliant. When I left Sydney, after the 60s, and moved to Noosa Heads Frank Latta came with me and he kept shaping until the recession hit and everything fell over. I lost track of Frank after that and sadly he passed away in 2010. He loved his surfing and he was very good at it. John Mcilroy was my fulltime shaper and also very good.

13) When you think of the shortboard revolution, which shapers and surfers instantly spring to your mind?

My first employee when I moved to Brookvale was Bob McTavish, now there is a colourful personality.

It was a boom for business, a golden boom for surfboard manufacturing through the 1960s. All the manufacturers converged on Brookvale in Sydney and made thousands of boards. I reached a peak of making 120 surfboards a week at the end of the 60s. That was the peak of it. Everyone wanted a 7-8foot Malibu with a fin on it that was the busiest period for me. I moved away from Sydney, to Noosa Heads, in 1971 so that next period with even shorter boards was a bit after my time I guess.

Do you agree with George Greenough that the pointed nose on many modern surfboards serves no functionality at all and is purely there to make the boards ‘look cool’.

 They are trying to make a nose that cuts through the water neatly, but it is also dangerous. The degree of functionality is very marginal I would think.

As an elder of surfing do you have any advice you would like to share with the readers out there about surfing, lifestyle oranything else?? (I know a lot of us go through

intense things in our lives and we have things we can share that will help others who are perhaps going through a hard battle, i think that is what this questions is intended for...so, be as deep as you like, or not...)

 Surfing is a very healthy sport so go for it if you are that way inclined, it wont do you any damage unless you want to go get eaten by a shark!

Most people think the okanui was a Hawaiian word, but I think Bluey Mayes came up with it – ‘oka’ meaning aussie and ‘nui’ meaning new – the new aussie surfboard.

Bill Wallace

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History of Surfing