Obituaries Australia

Midget Farrelly, by Jeff Carter, 1967

National Library of Australia, 40204788

Bernard (Midget) Farrelly (13 September 1944 – 6 August 2016), born Paddington, Sydney, was the first Australian to win a major surfboard-riding title, the tenth International Surfing Championships at Makaha, Hawaii, in January 1963. Surfers considered the contest, organised by the prestigious Waikiki Surf Club and sponsored by the Waianae Lions Club, the unofficial World Championship. In May 1964, Farrelly won the first official World Championship at Manly, Sydney, in a contest organised by the newly formed Australian Surfriders’ Association (ASA). He placed second in two other world championships (1968—on a countback—and 1970), and won two Australian national titles (1964 and 1965) and the prestigious Gunston 500 in South Africa (1970).

As president of the New South Wales Surfriders’ Association and vice-president of the ASA, Farrelly advocated for the organisation of Australian surfers and the sport. He was also involved in the formation of the International Surfing Federation. In the early 1960s, conservative Australians frowned upon surfing which symbolised a morality of pleasure and self-expression and which ran contrary to established social mores as epitomised by the apparently structured and disciplined surf lifesaving clubs. Farrelly pressed surfers to mobilise against a hostile Surf Life Saving Association, municipal councils, and the press. His win at Makaha helped transform media opinion by focusing national pride on the surfer who defeated the Hawaiians at the sport they invented. Companies paid Farrelly to endorse their products and he began a regular column in the Sun Herald which was syndicated across the country. In 1967 he hosted the The Midget Farrelly Surf Show on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation which appeared over ten weeks during prime-time Friday evening television.

Thoughtful and eloquent, Farrelly articulated better than most the experience of surfing and the moment when a surfer merges as one with a breaking wave. ‘You go into oblivion’, he wrote. ‘Suddenly all your life is there in this long, long, stretched-out wave; you’re removed from the past, everything that has been on your mind has become immaterial, everything goes to jelly, and you feel completely removed from the world around you. Nothing matters any longer but you and the board and the wave and this instant of time’.[1]

Farrelly’s style of surfing evolved over the late 1950s and early 1960s. While he took cues from the Californian surfer Phil Edwards, Farrelly developed a distinctive fluid elegance, performing smooth, tight, controlled turns which he choreographed as a dance with the breaking wave. In the second half of the 1960s surfboard design and surfing style entered a state of constant flux. Surfers now sought greater manoeuvrability on the wave and to transform the ‘dance with the wave’ to a ‘dance on the wave’ in which they attacked the face from every conceivable angle, seeking to ‘reduce it to shreds’.[2] This so-called ‘new era’ precipitated intense debates around what constituted advanced and progressive surfing.[3] Debates over style spawned personal rivalries, fuelled judging controversies in competitions, and led to enduring historical arguments including those around the origins of radical surfing and Farrelly’s legacy.

The surf media tended to ignore Farrelly during its ‘counterculture’ phase in the late 1960s and 1970s despite his continued competitive success and his production of exquisitely crafted high-performance surfboards. Publicly-stated opposition to the recreational drugs that infused surfing further marginalised him in surf magazines and films which he accused of promoting ‘a bum set of values’ and misleading many people, some of whom even ‘died on the needle’.[4]

Farrelly began making urethane blanks—the foam core of the surfboard—in the late 1960s and established Surfblanks Australia. His business earned a reputation for quality products among local and international board shapers. A deep thinker, he was curious about and interested in the sciences relating to surfboard design and manufacture—hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, chemistry; one historian describes him as ‘endlessly inventive and exploratory’ and classes him ‘a scientist of surfboard design’.[5] Farrelly kept a low public profile after his competitive career but he never lost his passion for the ocean and continued to surf along Sydney’s northern beaches. His love of the ocean and desire to introduce its motions and moods to others was such that later in life the surfer who had been on the frontline in the conflict with ‘clubbies’ in the 1960s crossed the threshold to become the sweep for the women’s surfboat crew at the Palm Beach Surf Lifesaving Club.

Farrelly rejected the dominant narrative of the new era in which developments were driven by a small coterie of surfers and designers, notably Robert ‘Nat’ Young, who won the world title at San Diego in 1966, Bob McTavish and George Greenough. He maintained that the changes in performance during this period emerged organically among a myriad of individuals who were largely overlooked. Farrelly’s enmity with Young, which stemmed in part from two diametrically opposed personalities compounded by the rancorous politics of an emerging sport, is legendary in surfing history; the two never reconciled.[6] Pointedly, despite his own conspicuous contributions, Farrelly made no attempt to locate himself in this history; equally, his new era peers all publicly acknowledge his influence on the sport. The Australian Surfing Hall of Fame inducted Farrelly in 1986 and the Surfing Walk of Fame at California’s Huntington Beach inducted him in 2007.