Surf City, Sydney

Bryan Hughes takes us back on an early 60s road trip to Crescent Head with a mob of Manly surfers …

Breakdown shot…

…..this was at the old petrol station at Cowan, (near Berowra) on the way back from Crescent…..I don’t remember what was wrong with the car but there was plenty of advice, probably boiled on the long climb up from Brooklyn……yeah, check out the radio…and this was before cassettes and even 8 track cartridges……also if you look back in the line of traffic I reckon that’s a Roll’s, pretty rare even then…..

Camping shot…

…..at Norah Head….the bloke on the roof was Jeff Fergus, it’s Ray Joyce on the right and I honestly can’t work out all the others except Chris Johnson in the middle….he was from the USA and didn’t surf but was the best skateboarder around back then (we had old skates on bits of board and he had the first real trucks with composite wheels I think I’d ever seen)…..the tarp tied to the front of the car was our sleeping shelter and belonged to my dad, we used it on plenty of trips and I still have it…..out of interest the board I had then, (Jeff’s standing on it on the car) was an 8’6″ balsa “Crow Surfboards” from the USA…never found out how it got to Australia but I bought it with my paper route money in the summer of 1959….

Crescent shot…..

……taken about where the first cabin in the campground is now……Jeff being harassed by a local dog……I wonder what he was eating…..

All words and photos courtesy Bryan Hughes