A brief history of surfboards - from grass roots to computer generated designA brief history of surfboards - from grass roots to computer generated design 

Tim Barlass

The date is about 3000 BC. The place, Peru. The key ingredients are totora reeds (it’s a kind of giant bullrush), skill and courage. What have you got? Bind the four-metre long reeds together and add a paddle, you have a caballito de totora or ‘little reed horse’, a floating board. You may well have the birth of wave riding – and a precursor to surfing.

Carlos "Huevito" Ucanan from Huanchaco, north of Lima in Peru keeps the ancient tradition alive and has visited Australia to demonstrate the construction and his skills on the caballito at Noosa.

Fast forward 3300 years to 300 AD. In Polynesia, solid wood boards are now the wave vehicle of choice. Surfing has arrived.

In the centuries before the arrival of Captain Cook in Hawaii surfing was at the core of island culture. According to The Art of the Surfboard by Greg Noll, an American pioneer of big wave surfing, the status of an individual dictated what type of board they could use: short and wide for commoners, and long 18ft (5.5m) and narrow for the chiefs.

Various kinds of competition were staged when the surf was running. “The stakes could range from a pig to a wife, from a canoe to a man’s life. Surfing was a joyful endeavour that could also turn deadly serious,” writes Noll.

Captain Cook and surfing aren’t normally synonymous but this sketch of Karakakooa Bay in Hawaii by John Webber, the official artist on Cook's third voyage to the Pacific, has an interesting detail. It depicts islanders greeting Cook’s ship HMS Resolution – they thought he was the returning Hawaiian God Lono. In the lower left centre of the picture is an early ‘surfer’ paddling out to meet Cook’s ship.

After Cook was killed on Hawaii, First Lieutenant James King was assigned the task of continuing Cook’s journal. It is King writing in his journal, of which there is a copy at the museum, that provides the earliest written account of surfing.

King writes of the islanders: “Both sexes are surprisingly expert in swimming, which among these people is not only deemed a necessary art, but it is also a favorite diversion. One particular method, in which we sometimes saw them amuse themselves with this exercise, in Karakakooa Bay deserves to be related. The surf, that breaks on the coast round this bay, extends about 150 yards from the shore, and within that space, the surges of the sea are dashed against the beach with extreme violence.”

He goes on: “About 20 or 30 of the islanders take each a long narrow board, rounded at both ends, and set out from the shore in company with each other. They plunge under the first wave they meet, and, after they have suffered it to roll over them, rise again beyond it and swim further out into the sea.

“When, in consequence of these repeated efforts, they have gained the smooth water beyond the surf, they recline themselves at length upon their board and prepare for their return to shore... The amazing courage and address, with which they perform these dangerous manoeuvres, are almost incredible.”

It wasn’t for another century and a half that technology and ingenuity began the transformation of surfboards into the sophisticated computer designed boards that we recognise today.

Though Australia was first introduced to surfing in the late 19th century by traders and travellers who had passed through Hawaii, the surfing demonstrations of Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku in 1914-15 was a significant moment in Australia's surfing history.

Solid hardwood planks were common on Australian beaches between World War I and World War II and pre-dated the Australian surfing boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Designs were often similar to the Duke's 1914 board,and were shaped from sugar pine purchased from Hudson's Timber Mill in Sydney, and incorporated many of the standard Hawaiian design characteristics.

The end of World War II opened up new possibilities in surfboard design. Many new materials had become available through advances in technology during the war. As a result, fiberglass coated Malibus were developed in the late 1950s. These allowed surfers a greater range of manoeuvers than early wooden boards.

The 1950s also saw experimentation in surfboard design, with additions such as a fin aiding maneuverability and stability. The Malibu shape was introduced to Australia in 1956 when a group of Californian lifeguards brought with them new Malibu boards. Australians began experimenting with balsa, foam-and-fiberglass designs, and eventually the Malibu went into mass-production.