Surfing

All About Surfing

When anyone becomes a world champion at anything—whether tiddlywinks, roller-skating back wards, or pushing peanuts with his nose —it is a pretty safe bet that sooner or later he will pro duce a book telling (a) how he became a champion, and (b) how you can be one, too.

This is what Australia's Midget Farrelly, world champion surfer in 1964, has done in This Surfing Life, an attractively pro duced book written in associa tion with Craig McGregor, a Sydney journalist, and selling at 39/6.

The book tells briefly and modestly of Farrelly’s rise to championdom, and, with the aid of many dramatic photographs and a few drawings, has some thing to say about every aspect of surfing from “waveology” and board manufacture to stunt riding and surfing's history.

The only point we could find to quibble about was a historical howler of the first water—that the first white man to see surf board riding was Captain Cook who “discovered Hawaii in 1778, on the same voyage as he discovered Australia”.

Someone at Rigby Ltd. (the publishers) ought to be severely caned for letting this hcrwler through, for as every Australian schoolboy knows, Cook dis covered Australia in 1770; Hawaii in 1778; and the two events occurred on his first and third voyages to the Pacific res pec ti vely. — RL.