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04/03/2005: "Surfer Postcard .......including era background trivia"

The road into Seal Rocks NSW still today has 3km of dust and dirt at the arrival end - but it used to be much worse.

It has been a road where max speed was 10kph, yes - just ten k's per hour. The team on the postcard would have chewed dust all the way with their back window down on the old panel van. An old bed matress protected the malibu's.

The era? 1967 'The Beatles' music had become psychadelic, Jimmi Hendrix was experimenting, 'The Beach Boys' had "Help me Rhonda" on the charts and I'd just finished ten days work, ten hours a day at the Sydney Royal Easter Show.

The ten days was spruiking Terror's of the Deep (a sideshow featuring stuffed sharks) which paid me enough to buy a brand-new Rolleimarin housing with a Rolleiflex medium format camera, (which made the above postcard photo possible).

Unfortunately film for me was very expensive then, so just this single frame was exposed. It captures the early era of longboard surfboards. At auctions such as this weekend's Noosa Festival of Surf a well-preserved malibu from the sixties will fetch maybe $2+K if it's a top brand in good shape. Also attending are both Endless Summer surfers Robert August and 'wingnut'. But a screening of the movie (which everyone has seen a million times) discouraged at least one person from attending the weekend.

Footnote: Scott Dillon - the surfing legend, now aged about 76 is attending the festival (in his hot V8 Sandman panel van with an enterage of six young women. They'll be based complimatary as VIP's in Noosaville at The Islander. Scott is a great inspiration for all of us.

A true Peter Pan of the marine world that the more serious diver fraternity is beginning to appreciate. Remember, Scott was spearing fish five years before young Wally Gibbins.