Surfing Places, Surfboard Makers

Introduction

This is a book about surfboards. Surfing is an ancient interaction between humans and the environment, a fluid and exciting pastime where breaking waves, the body, and a surfboard interact. As the only essential instrument for surfing, the surfboard is a point of physical connection between the body and the surface of the wave. Surfers use their board to paddle with enough momentum to connect with a wave’s shifting energy before maneuvering to their feet and riding its breaking crest toward shore. To surfers, their board is more than a piece of expensive equipment; it is symbolic, even talismanic. Surfboards are emblems of cultural, social, and emotional meanings. Contained in a surfer’s favorite board are physical reminders— marks, scratches, and imperfections—along with memories and stories that embody a surfing life. Etched into surfboards are experiences of joy and elation from skillful rides, embarrassment and disappointment from wipeouts witnessed by others. Surfboards are also products infused with centuries of cultural practice, artisanal skill, and design precedents. This book examines surfboards as artifacts rich in history and cultural meaning.

This is also a book about the places where surfboards are made and the people who make them—especially focused on the Pacific region. We explore surfboard making as a form of creative production and local cultural heritage. The story we tell is set against the international popularity and emergence of surfing as a multibillion-dollar industry. As well as discussing the dynamic international situation surrounding the surf industry, we examine three local scenes of surfboard production across the Pacific: O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, Southern California, and east coast Australia. In these three places we visited independent surfboard-making workshops (thirty-three in total) over the course of five years, interviewing people, watching surf boards being made, and sometimes going for a surf or a beer with their workers or owners. These workshops are located in coastal suburbs and towns with vibrant surfing cultures, adjacent to iconic surf breaks. Some, such as Brewer and Downing Surf boards in Hawai‘i and Bennett Surfboards in Australia, had been in the same hands for over five decades. Hawai‘i, California, and Australia are unquestionably the three most prominent hubs of surfboard making globally, regions where unique skills have developed in designing high-quality surfboards suitable for local conditions. In these surfing places boards are more than sporting goods; they are functional artworks that capture local cultural and environmental qualities, customized and personal tools through which to engage with liquid nature.

Since the 1980s surfing has become big business. Companies with local origins including Rip Curl, Quiksilver, and Billabong have turned into corporate entities. Some surf brands have even been listed publicly on stock exchanges and pursue new ways of producing and selling surfing gear to the masses. Surfboards are the figurative heart of a global industry with immense power to fuel consumerism. Tentacles have spread into related retail industries and manufacture of wet suits, apparel, shoes, sunglasses, watches, and hats. Global surf brands have helped popularize the sport and its idyllic image. But with cheaper prices, brand visibility, sophisticated distribution systems, and large marketing budgets, corporate surf firms are also one among many threats to the viability of small surfboard-making workshops in Hawai‘i, Australia, and California.

Some of the stories we tell in this book are consequently about how small surfboard-making workshops survive in an increasingly global industry—and what worries surfboard makers about the prospects for making surfboards by hand in an era of cheap mass-produced imports. We tell other stories too: industrial-design stories about the history and secrets of quality surfboard making; geographical stories about the particularities of surfboard production linked to local surfing conditions and subcultures; and historical stories of Polynesian people and the earliest origins of surfboard making. We hope in this book to enhance appreciation of surfboard making as a special form of local creativity invested with emotion, culture, and meaning. At times, though, we also explore the darker side of surfboard production. The surfboard industry involves the exploitation of workers, harmful health effects caused by chemicals and manual work, sexism, fragmentation, broken promises, and general failure to pass down skills to a younger generation. These challenges are matched by an immense reservoir of passion and perseverance among board makers. While surfboards and surfboard manufacturing raise issues of local culture and globalization, there is much more at stake: ownership of heritage, corporate power, emotional work, gender, class, and generational change. This is, then, an apologue of skilled artisans who grew to prominence from countercultural origins within the surfing subculture and their struggle for survival in an age of wide-scale mass production.

Surfing Places, Surfboard Makers

In this book we tell surfboard stories. But to make sense of things, we also draw out the deeper meaning and significance of surfboard making at this precise point in history. Nowadays two main predictions are made for the surfboard industry and debated in surfing magazines, news media, and among surfers themselves. First, that the traditional craft method of making boards by hand is a “dying art” headed for extinction as machine automation and standardized production take over. Second, all the talk of new, automated production technologies is exaggerated. Surfers will continue to desire high-quality boards for specific places and waves, made locally by independent workshops. The surfboard-making industry is at a crossroads.

Our reticence to rush to glib conclusions about the future of surfboard making and the surfboard industry explains why, in this introduction, we spend some time situating the book geographically, culturally, and economically. Comparisons of O‘ahu, Southern California, and southeastern Australia in chapter 1 reveal key differences and resonances. In each location surfing is a highly visible and popular activity. The most immediate distinction is the Polynesian cultural heritage of surfing in Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian colonial experience and incorporation into the United States, and the unparalleled postwar expansion of tourism that followed. These contextual factors all underscored Hawai‘i’s becoming the fabled birthplace of global surfing in the twentieth century. Southern California and east coast Australia, by contrast, are both coastal regions in industrialized nations that experienced rapid postwar suburban growth. Surfing was a newly imported, yet iconic, cultural watermark of the social change that accompanied population growth and suburbanization—emblematic of the youth, naïveté, and heedlessness of the era.

Notwithstanding contextual differences, there is a remarkably consistent and interlinked story that unfolds throughout the book about surfing subculture, history, geography, and surfboard-making practices. Surfing in each of Hawai‘i, Southern California, and southeastern Australia grew from travels and exchanges by surfers in the early twentieth century. The first surfing ambassadors were revered Hawaiians who took the sport (and surfboard-making practices) to the world. Later, in the other direction, Californians and Australians “discovered” Hawai‘i, and the direction of movements, collaborations, and migrations among surfers and surfboard makers would become more complex. Board designs, makers, and styles of surfing increasingly crisscrossed the Pacific from the 1950s onward—not without politics, contestation, and fragmentation along class, gender, and racial lines.

In all three regions too, surfing subculture has been associated with nonconformity. Surfing passed through periods in which it was socially stigmatized, supposedly the province of lazy, ambitionless, and idle “beach bums.” Just as Native Hawaiian surfers were chastised by missionaries in the mid-1880s for being too hedonistic, in the 1950s and 1960s episodes of social dissension propelled surfing into the media headlines in California and Australia. Controversy arose around heavy drinking, drug taking, and outbreaks of violence. Suspicion and mistrust were directed toward surfing groups.1 The transition from an ancient Hawaiian craft to modern industry was a rocky one. Pioneer surfboard makers in each of the regions profiled in this book began in the heady days of the 1940s and 1950s. Surfboard making was a do-it-yourself pseudoindustry operating first from Hawaiian beaches and then out of garages and sheds in California and Australia. Informal, experimental, and almost completely unregulated, board making became a part-time accompaniment to days spent surfing, drinking, hanging out, and taking drugs (in some instances selling drugs too). Surfboards were made out of necessity, rarely with business acumen. Early surfboard making was characterized by coastal cultural life and small-scale backyard production. Work took place in scattered towns and small settlements adjacent to important beaches and in a sequence of new coastal suburbs (such as Bondi and Bronte in Sydney and Dana Point in Orange County), a linear rhythm of vernacular, coastal, craft-based production. A tension running throughout the book emerges out of this tumultuous period of transition. As an activity steeped in Hawaiian culture but subsequently dispersing to all corners of the globe, the sport has at times in its history been marked by instances of neocolonialism and insensitivity to Hawaiian customs. Clashes of surfing culture erupted. Disagreements turned violent when, for instance, aggressive Australian surfing culture, propelled by new shortboard designs, arrived on Hawaiian waves from the late 1960s, upsetting Hawaiians, for whom surfing was more a communing with nature (chapter 2). Californians and Australians, too, have arguably overstated their own innovations in surfboard design while failing to acknowledge Hawaiian traditions.

In contrast, running beneath these tensions is another, important story of stylistic and information exchanges catalyzed by surfboards themselves. Journeys by trailblazing surfboard makers to and from Hawai‘i were common. Even in the early days, surfers went back and forth across the Pacific. Hawaiian ambassadors of the sport who traveled to California and Australia in the early 1900s were remarkably generous with time and knowledge, enthusiastically teaching locals to surf and to make boards with no thought of protecting their expertise and production methods. For Hawaiian surfers, teaching others to make their own boards was not so much divulging designs or commercial secrets as furnishing people with the necessary skills to participate. Surfboard making was part of the experience of becoming a surfer. In time, early “expert” surfboard makers from California and Australia became fascinated with Hawaiian waves and surf culture. Although their crossings to O‘ahu persisted into the 1940s and 1950s, they were few in number and hardly the image of plundering privateers: some stowed away in Hawai‘i-bound steamers and lived rustically on fish and taro. Others paid their way across the Pacific by selling a few handcrafted boards to enthusiastic locals. Whereas until the 1960s most everyday surfers in the three settings stuck to their local beaches (international travel was still an arduous and expensive undertaking), early board makers were intrepid: they crossed the Pacific primarily to surf themselves or, as sporting ambassadors, to promote surfing, all the while picking up tips on design and construction. By this means early design templates and influences traveled across the Pacific. Although highly informal and embedded in local subcultural life, surfboard making was, even in its early days, influenced by international and cross-cultural flows of people, knowledge, and ideas.

After World War II, surfing increased in popularity in all three regions. The jet age connected the West Coast of the United States, Hawai‘i, and Australia. Surfing—particularly its California variant—began its progression toward mainstream social acceptance and heightened Western consumerism. Surfing popularity followed the release of Gidget in 1959, the commercial success of surf films like Big Wednesday and The Endless Summer (not to mention Elvis and his many Hawai‘i-themed movies), and the popularity of surf music, both the cult instrumental variety exemplified by Dick Dale and its pop format most famously produced by the Beach Boys.2 At the same time, both in the surf and on film, Hawai‘i became the celebrated spiritual homeland of surfing.

As more people took up surfing in the 1950s and 1960s, and as tourism in all three Pacific regions boomed, the market for surfboards grew locally. Several early surfboard makers found they could make respectable livings from crafting boards for local waves. Many still made their own boards, but a small core of “experts” emerged: they absorbed technological advances, took out loans, and established formal workshops (although as chapter 2 shows, the garage phenomenon is still found today). The earliest workshops were located near surf hotspots. Early board-making centers emerged on O‘ahu around Honolulu and the North Shore, in Southern California and suburban Los Angeles (within light-industrial estates), and along the vast Australian east coast, first in suburban Sydney and then in smaller regions such as the Gold Coast, Torquay, the North Coast of New South Wales (NSW), Newcastle, and Illawarra. These hubs of surfboard-making creativity popped up as new surf breaks were colonized and coastal communities grew around them. More regular international exchanges became possible and surfboard makers both created specialized designs for local waves and saw themselves as professionals competing in an increasingly transpacific industry. In the ocean, lineups had become crowded. Tensions inevitably emerged between local surfers and outsiders. In Hawai‘i this was further inflected by the colonial legacy and the perceived invasion of Hawaiian breaks by haole surfers. Despite these tensions, on the board-making side of surf culture exchanges across cultural boundaries were common and considered genuine collaborations on equal terms. These partnerships are exemplified in the links between Californian Greg Noll and Hawaiian Richard “Buffalo” Keaulana in the 1960s, and in the 1980s between Hawaiian master shaper Ben Aipa and world champion Australian surfer Mark Richards (explored further in chapter 3).

Another tension taken up in the book concerns that between surfboard making as expert science and everyday practice in service of local surfing communities. By the 1990s, surfing had become an acknowledged and legitimate leisure pursuit and globalized professional sport. Early innovators became renowned “legends” of the sport and master craftsmen (they are actually all men, as described in chapter 5): Bob Simmons, Gard Chapin, Hobie Alter, Joe Quigg, George Downing, Dale Velzy, Greg Noll, Dick Brewer, Barry Bennett, Gordon Woods, Bill Wallace, Scott Dillon, and Bob McTavish. Many of these legends are still alive and were interviewed for and appear in this book. Subsequent generations of innovators and hand shapers followed and reflected generational changes in preferred surf breaks and styles. Nonetheless, as we hope to show in the book, the story of surfboards is as much about the everyday, vernacular practice of surfing as it is about experts. In chapters 2 and 3 we discuss design innovations and innovators at length. Balancing the expert science of surfboard making is the reality that most surfing is enjoyed not by competitive surfers who want to revolutionize styles and tricks but by everyday people, for everyday fun. The surfboard-making industry reflects this: for all the stories of expert innovation in board design there are comparatively anonymous, usually smaller-scale operators and local do-it-yourself board makers who satisfy local demand for surfboards tailored to local conditions. Their boards might never feature in pro-tour competitions, and yet in all three regions, locally made boards flesh out the lineups of waves and are very much a part of surfboard making as cultural heritage and vernacular creativity.

A good example of tensions between expert and everyday can be found in chapter 1, where we discuss the 1950s “discovery” of O‘ahu’s west side and North Shore surf breaks by California innovators such as Wally Froiseth and Greg Noll. Their expeditionary efforts undoubtedly widened the global scope of surfing and drove new surfboard designs in Hawai‘i and back in California. But the much-touted stories of such innovators must be viewed against the fact that Hawaiians had already been riding these fabled waves. They had likely done so for centuries. Hawaiians maintained board-making practices and pursued board-design innovations of their own, outside tourism, outside the cash economy. Theirs was an unheralded form of surfing and surfboard making, for local Hawaiian consumption rather than as part of a trumpeted, Western narrative of surfing conquest and discovery. The tension between the spectacular and the prosaic would later repeat itself in California and east coast Australia too. Iconic surfboard makers are accompanied by lesser-known neighborhood workshops and workers, many of whom survive on local demand and whose bodies wear the scars and pains of a lifetime’s toil in pursuit of artful passions. Throughout the book we accordingly attempt to profile the efforts and perspectives of both the “masters” and the “local heroes” of surfboard making.

Across the three famous surfing places the surfboard industry now reflects an interconnected past (discussed in chapter 2). Within each Pacific region are strings of beaches now joined in extensive, coastal urban complexes, along which surfboard workshops are periodically located. Remarkably, even though separated by many thousands of miles, surfboard makers in each of these regions shared, by the early years of the twenty-first century, similar economic conditions, occupying comparable market niches and each limited in their potential workshop size by forces largely outside their control (chapter 3). Because many modern foam surfboards have only a short life span, regular local surfers in each region generate constant demand for new custom surfboards. High turnover is due to the constant abuse inflicted on surfboards by the ocean and the surfing body, which places uneven pressure across the board’s surface. Local surfers of a sufficient skill level prefer to have their new boards custom-made to their body size and shape, and to suit their preferred local waves. At the same time other forces—uneasy relationships with retailers, declining margins, excessive debts, and corporate power—prevent most surfboard makers from ever reaching beyond their local base to become bigger commercial operations. What emerges is a story about the character and scope of artisanal forms of craft production, the consistent limits to growth when making bespoke, functional objects for primarily local markets.

O‘ahu, Southern California, and east coast Australia are each in their own ways idyllic surfing places of global significance. These three prestigious surfing regions have an incomparable roster of world-renowned breaks (Sunset Beach, Banzai Pipeline, Malibu, Trestles, Bells Beach, Snapper Rocks, Kirra, and Sandon Point), large surfing memberships, and rich networks of expert surfboard makers. Hawai‘i, California, and Australia are the three most recognizable surfing places in the world, producing all but four of the world surfing champions since 1976. While the three regions are defined by their own social, political, cultural, and economic landscapes, each place is also an iconic surfing mecca, sharing particular surfboardindustry characteristics. Connected by their distinctive surf culture, these are ideal locations for examining locally vibrant scenes of surfboard production against a backdrop of the global commercial intensification of surfing. Two of our case-study regions, Southern California and east coast Australia, are in relatively distant, opposite corners of the Pacific Ocean. The other is an island in that ocean’s center and the historical heart of surfing. This book is therefore a Pacific story of common narratives and points of difference.

Recognizing surfing as an activity pioneered by Pacific Island cultures, we explore the unique skills, cultural heritage, and knowledge characterizing surfboard manufacturing. Boards are assembled with specialized materials, designs, tools, images, stories, networks, and markets. Surfboard makers are colorful local identities and economic players in a multimillion-dollar manufacturing industry. But surfboard making also demands discussions of the physical, immaterial, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of making things. In its unique ways, surfboard manufacturing contributes to the vitality, creativity, and shared cultural heritage of these three emblematic places. Surfboard making is an economic asset in each region. Jobs, brands, markets, profits, and incomes are created. Beyond the economic, surfboard making is symbolic in terms of the human skill sets, specialized knowledge, social links, and traditions it circulates. We explore both these industry and cultural dimensions, investigating an ancient form of artisanal production while providing updates with insights from three parts of the world where surfboards continue to be made and consumed locally.

Since the 1990s, modern computerized production methods have brought about a number of important changes in the way surfboards are designed, made, and purchased. Automated or mechanized systems of production (discussed in chapter 7) now operate in the surfboard industry according to economies of scale different from those of traditional manual approaches (the focus of chapter 4). In these two chapters, we draw parallels in surfboard production: one linked to an artisanal tradition, the other connected to forays by surfing into mainstream global culture, its attendant commercialism, and intensified use of mechanical technology.

The reason hand-based and automated production have been separated into different chapters in this book relates to significant differences in Introduction 9 production, market scales, and the relationships and interactions between workshops, makers, customers, and tools. Crucial to making sense of the changing dynamics of the surfboard industry is not so much the degree or level of technological integration in the surfboard’s “systems” of production, the conscious and systematic way people make things. Rather, it is understanding how technological change generates different relationships between boards, surfboard makers, customers, and workshops. The integration of new technology into surfboard manufacturing has become a flashpoint for conflicts between traditional hand shapers, workshop owners, surfing retailers, and big corporate giants in the surf industry.

Surfboard Making as Cultural Industry

In response to the growth of surfing over the past two decades, researchers in the social sciences and humanities have become more interested in exploring the cultural, social, environmental, and political dimensions of surfing.3 Postwar generations associate a surfing identity with distinctive environmental knowledge, values, beliefs, language, and membership of subcultures, or “surfing fraternities.”4 The marks of a surfing identity are also observable in fashion, personal adornment (tattoos, haircuts, cars, and stickers), styles, and tastes in music.5 Scholars have explored histories of surfing in the context of American colonialism, popular culture, and radical politics, engaging with the practice of surfing to conceptualize the “surf zone” as hierarchical and gendered, where strict “local” regulations and pecking orders constantly regulate surfing space and performance.6 Whereas scholarly work has been crucial for understanding the history, practice, and popularity of surfing, there has been much less attention paid to understanding surfing as an industry.7 This is surprising given the saturation of surfing into popular media industries (in film and music, for example) and the geographic spread of surfing participation and consumption. Our focus on surf boards is just one element of the wider surf industry and represents the first extended examination of surfboard making as commercial manufacturing.

Surfing has, more and more, a global geography. Surfing hotspots are found in Peru, Brazil, Costa Rica, Spain, Portugal, France, South Africa, Indonesia, Micronesia, and Cornwall, England. Prized surf breaks of these different world regions feature in surf films and magazines. Qualifying surfers for the professional World Championship Tour come from a wider list of nations than ever before. Such has been the geographic mobilization of surfing as subcultural style that it is now possible for inland towns and cities in Australia and the United States, hundreds of miles from the coast, to sustain a local surf shop trading in brand names and surf fashions. Clearly, surfing has come a long way from its Pacific Island cultural origins. It is now a multibillion-dollar global industry encompassing sporting goods, footwear, apparel, films, and surf travel. Surfboards are an essential element of this commodification—arguably, the central element. Without surfboards there is no surfing participation or subculture from which to appeal to the fashion-orientated apparel and media markets. Surfboard production constitutes an important component of the overall surfing industry but also authenticates companies such as Rip Curl and Quiksilver. Branded surfboards buttress their status as genuine articles while they contribute to a greater international distribution of a range of other consumer goods.

We seek to illuminate the contrasting but simultaneous stories of the globalization and sophistication of surfboard manufacture at the corporate scale and the continuation of unique forms of vernacular surfboard making at the local scale. Surfboards are not just a form of basic sporting equipment. Instead, boards are a form of cultural production, with some parallels to skateboards and snowboards, to ukuleles or electric guitars. All are essential bits of equipment for a particular pastime and have additionally become valued cultural artifacts, statements of personal identity and belonging to a wider community. In thinking about the appeal and consumption of cultural products, Mike Featherstone has used the concept of “aestheticization” to describe the extension on the part of consumers in their spending habits, so that goods are now used to construct a personal identity as much as answer a utilitarian purpose.8 Surfboards are one of these goods.

Cultural industries of this sort are said to encapsulate a creative dimension, with competition between firms based on innovation rather than price.9 For economic geographer Allen Scott, the cultural industries “comprise all those sectors in modern capitalism that cater to consumer demands for amusement, ornamentation, self-affirmation, social display and so on.”10 Included are the physical products, events, and intangible services of industries such as fashion, music, film, design, and jewelry making. All these activities contain high symbolic value relative to functional purpose. The cultural industries are now considered important drivers of economic fortunes because they generate new employment, attract place-based investment, and diversify labor skills. These are industries in every sense, consisting of small and large businesses, with inputs and outputs, workers, sometimes unions, and diverse workplaces. However, creative production differs from more mundane forms of production because it depends on cultural expertise, taste, aesthetics, and innovation—the work of musicians, artists, directors, actors, and designers. Creative production requires knowledge of subcultures, tastes, and fashions to succeed.

Surfboard making has not yet been analyzed as a cultural industry, but in the locations we discuss in this book, it is clear this is precisely what surfboard making is. In each region, customized surfboard making involves high levels of creative and artisanal skill, knowledge of fashions and subcultural preferences, inheritance of Hawaiian origins and precedents, constant innovation in designs as well as retention of traditional techniques and materials stemming from specific cultural histories. As we discuss in chapters 1 and 2, cultural traditions, personal passions, sporting competitiveness, and local geography all shape the surfboard industry as much as any narrow commercial concerns.

The geographic focus in previous research on the cultural industries has typically concentrated on such large cities as New York, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo and their inner-city cultural districts. In such spaces are pools of artistic labor, clusters of design firms, bohemian subcultures, and social buzz.11 The inner city supports concentrated hubs of cultural production and consumption that enable opportunities for creative people to pursue meaningful careers in niche industries without having to resort to repetitive, low-cost production in order to remain viable. Commercial surfboard making has existed in places where local surfers have created a market for boards matched to local wave conditions. Because of this, surfing hubs do not appear in the same places as one might find concentrations of other cultural industries. Surfboards chart a rather different geography of cultural production, focusing instead on coastal suburbia and on the often small, scattered places along coastal regions where proximity to high-quality waves and resident surfing subcultures have given rise to a unique cultural industry.

A related point to emphasize is that surfboard making is intimately tied to physical and cultural geography: the combination of unique bathymetry, climate, and subculture that in large part explains where surfing is concentrated (and surfboard making along with it). In surfboard making, physical geography is utterly omnipresent. The presence or absence of reliable-quality waves and amenable climate wholly determines the presence of active surfing scenes serviced by custom-surfboard workshops (discussed in chapter 2). Prevailing waves in O‘ahu are very different from those in Southern California or southeastern Australia. Hence, local board makers have adapted techniques over time to suit local environmental conditions. Nevertheless, as explored in chapter 4, corporate actors who have globalized and standardized production of surfboards have sought to sever these links to physical geography, enabling production to take place in manufacturing complexes in locations with low labor costs, much as for many other commodities. Custom board making, on the other hand, remains dependent on 12 Introduction local surfing scenes, and local surfers, for their part, seek boards crafted to their bodies and their style of surfing on local waves. The connection to physical geography in this custom scene remains real—a lively and central part of everyday conversations, decisions, and manufacturing methods in the grassroots surfboard industry.

To meet the growing demand in surfing in the 1950s and 1960s, the industry expanded through a number of small firms, ostensibly workshops, located in close proximity to popular surfing towns. Virtually all aspects of making a surfboard were carried out within the factory. As chapter 4 explains, in a traditional custom method of making surf boards, expertise is held by individual surfboard makers, who by and large handle all aspects of production themselves, from consultation with the surfer through to final delivery of the board. The hubs of activity described here are diffuse: anonymous workshops in plain industrial estates; altered garages in surfboard makers’ own homes; small shops in beachside surf communities—all tiny in comparison with the recognized centers of “world culture.”

Nonetheless, consumers pay a premium for surfboards from these modest workshops. Boards are personalized, stylish, and functional. Offering high-value-added products infused with artistic and rarity value, surfboard makers in Hawai‘i, Australia, and California survive despite intense competition from corporate players. They provide somewhat more expensive but high-quality boards, personalized to individual riders (through which surfers gain a measure of prestige) and tailored to local marine conditions. As a consequence, place is highly significant for understanding surfboards. As cultural goods, surfboards bring together regional identities, physical geography, popular local pastimes, and artisanal skills. This interweaving fits with another feature of cultural industries more generally. Local scenes that emerge around forms of cultural production can in some cases achieve a measure of national or global fame. In this situation, place of origin can add commercial value (or cultural notoriety) to products, as in Hollywood films or Parisian fashion. This phenomenon also applies to locally made surfboards in Hawai‘i, Australia, and California. In other ways, surfboard making links to a previous era of the manufacture of physical goods. Although aesthetic and design components of surfboards are important (described in chapter 4), the physicality of surfboards is central to their usability and popularity, and the politics and economics of the surfboard industry have much in common with those in other kinds of manufacturing (taken up in chapters 6 and 7). Surfboards are a type of physical product linking cultural and commodity forms of production. For this reason, in various chapters we describe in detail how surfboards are created as a physical product and how the process of making them has evolved.

Connecting industrial design to geography, chapters 2 and 3 describe how board-making techniques developed from specific coastal places and the individual specializations involved in surfboard manufacture. Discussing the locally specific practices of surfboard making, chapter 4 documents the custom system of production now viewed as “traditional.” Custom production is a bespoke, manual, and creative approach to surfboard making, where social relationships form between makers and local surfers.

Chapter 5 aims to explicate the gendered, emotional, and embodied surfboard industry. As an extension of US and Australian surfing subculture, the surfboard industry is highly gendered, the manual work considered masculine. Yet surfboard workshops are settings that require highly tuned embodied skills: a fine sense of feel, keen eye for detail, ability to relate with customers and materialize designs that match their expectations. Surfboard makers work in informal, subcultural settings. They become emotionally attached to the work, lifestyles, and social life from employment in the industry. Lurking, too, is a sinister side to loving the job. Emotional attachment has helped make workers vulnerable to exploitation by larger, profit driven workshops.

Chapter 6 shifts the focus of the book beyond the local to describe the global boom in surfing popularity. Since the 1980s, surfboard making has been commodified and packaged as part of globalized, mass-production chains. Chapter 7 continues the theme, focusing on a more recent approach to surfboard production: automated technologies that have become apparent in the surfboard industry only since the mid-1990s. Compared with manual, customized production, automated surfboard manufacturing involves a contrasting relationship between market scale, technology, workforce, and customers. Mechanized production is used both by global surf brands and by independent board workshops seeking to maintain relevance and market share amid global competition. The human dimension of surfboard making (and its complex social and emotive content) is eliminated in a mechanized form of production. Instead, the focus turns to supporting instantaneous purchase in retail shops, product branding, and fast fashion cycles.

Globalization, intense retail competition, and changing systems of production have exacerbated monopolistic tendencies and speeded up the race to contract cheaper offshore manufacturers. Such trends threaten the viability of localized, smaller-scale workshops. Simultaneously, the influx of mass-produced, generic surfboards has meant that local makers 14 Introduction can differentiate and authenticate their boards by maintaining focus on traditional approaches to customization. Local workshops offer distinctive, personalized boards to suit local environmental conditions, something not possible with mass production. It is by these means that surfboard-making scenes in O‘ahu, California, and Australia maintain viability. Local workshops offer more expensive but usually higher-quality boards tailored to individual surfers and local environmental conditions. Local factories can also offer unusual materials, traditional “instinctive” hand-shaping techniques, and unique designs. Custom makers thus capitalize on the discontent “hard-core” local surfers have with surfboard homogenization.

Chapter 6 also explores the paired development of the international profile and social acceptability of surfing and a concentration of power in a small number of “big” surf firms that, more and more frequently, acquire smaller, independent companies. In 2009, the two largest multinational surf firms—Billabong and Quiksilver—generated US$3.6 billion in retail revenue.12 In response to this trend, surfboard production in big factories as well as in many small, local workshops has become organized around what is known as a vertically disintegrated system of production. In this arrangement, firms supply workshops with a limited subset of materials, including “blank” foam, fiberglass cloth, chemicals, paint, tools, accessories, and waste removal. These workshops deliver their services directly to factories—a distinct rupture from the custom system of making surfboards (where all aspects of manufacturing were performed in-house). Disintegration spreads financial risk.

Another key challenge for custom-surfboard making is generational knowledge transfer. Because hand-based surfboard making is highly technical, creative, and requires long training and experience, very few people possess the requisite skills. As we point out in chapter 7 in our profiles of surfboard makers in O‘ahu, California, and Australia, these operations have remained small, frequently consisting of only two or three people. Workshops have been reluctant to take on additional staff, train younger apprentices, or share secrets with others. There is, in other words, a peculiar character to the local labor market in surfboard manufacturing. Production is heavily reliant on a small number of individuals with personal reputations and unique strengths and styles. Many of the original (and surviving) surfboard makers began working in the industry during the 1960s—as the West Coast surfing craze globalized and became part of popular culture. A large number of the makers we profile in this book are at or close to retirement age. As becomes clear in chapter 8, a succession problem looms, and it is uncertain whether hand-based craft techniques will survive beyond the working careers of current practicing surfboard makers.

Surfboard Making as Cultural Work and Cultural Heritage

An overarching interest of this book is the experiences of those who scrape a living from making and selling surfboards. Our aim is to turn attention to the custom side of the surfboard industry, beyond high-profile brand names and flashy retail stores, and to spotlight this unique yet precarious form of local cultural work. In chapters 6 and 7, the experiences of surfboard makers are discussed in the context of global economic shifts and growing cost pressures on local operators. The picture is arguably bleak for the future of making boards by hand in an age of corporate power and automated production. Nonetheless, local surfboard labels and makers also have agency in maintaining commercial workshops. They please loyal customers and differentiate their high-quality, personalized surfboards from cheaper, mass-produced imports. We describe the various tactics and adaptations for sustaining viability.

The material and cultural practices of the artisans at the heart of surfboard making are a central feature of the book. We focus on the personal, emotional, and political significance of making surfboards for a living. Surfboard manufacturing is an archetypical cultural industry involving technological innovation, design flair, and expert knowledge. But for many, surfboard making is also about the repeated crafting by hand of physical objects over a career. We are interested in what values and emotions are invested in this kind of bespoke production. This form of manufacturing is driven by knowledge, innovation, and creativity. Production is also deeply shaped by an ongoing importance to individual workers of the materiality of making things by hand. Work is performed for customers whom makers meet and know personally. Surfboards are unique material things, made by skillful cultural workers.

In ancient Hawaiian times, and in surfing counterculture’s early days, surfboard making was characterized by community and commensurability with a surfing lifestyle. The independent workshops profiled in this book now participate in economic settings that are highly competitive. Mass-produced, “pop-out” boards are available for sale in Kmart and Costco. Surf-brand superstores from Huntington Beach to Torquay also sell standardized, mass-produced boards. At the custom end of the market, there are competing workshops making boards within each region. Customers can scroll through Web sites to order their next surfboard without having to set foot inside a workshop. Larger surfboard manufacturers such as Global Surf Industries, Surftech, and Firewire Surfboards have outsourced, contracted, mechanized, and sent production offshore. Their boards are imported to 16 Introduction sell through local surf retailers. Exactly how this situation has transpired and influenced the texture of working lives in the surfboard industry is revealed in chapter 7.

Following the maxim that the shifting nature of the economy can be best uncovered by learning the experiences of workers, we tell the story of the shifting dynamics of the surfboard industry from the perspective of surfboard makers themselves.13 Changes in the organization of countless industries have been profound since the 1970s. The intensity of globalization, spread of communication technologies, and pervasiveness of free-market political ideologies have all impacted on the stability, patterns, and geography of work.14 With a more connected world and the spread of free-market thinking, big business can more efficiently access cheap labor farther afield. Manufacturing has moved offshore to places where labor costs and regulation compliance are low. In surfboard making, this has taken a while to happen. Mechanized automation developed quite late in the surfboard industry, in the 1980s, and was not implemented widely until the late 1990s (considered in chapter 4). Even so, the globalization of production has transformed the surfboard industry along with the everyday working lives of surfboard makers.

Meanwhile, since the 1970s in countries like the United States and Australia firms have become smaller, niche providers of goods and services, sustained by contract work, collaborative arrangements with other firms, and widespread use of information technologies.15 Employment tenure is characterized by flexibility, geographic mobility, shared leadership structures, and expectations of responsibility on the individual rather than the firm. Cultural workers have come to be seen as “poster” representatives of this “new” epoch of capitalism.16 From musicians to filmmakers, designers, and writers, cultural workers “symbolize contemporary transformations of work.”17 Across most industries, workers are expected to multitask, be prepared to shift activities at a whim, and accept casual or project-based employment. Travel to different locations for picking up short-term contracts is common, and workers must be available for communication outside normal work times via e-mail, Facebook, Skype, and smart phones.18 The working day has been stretched. Surfboard making has absorbed elements of all these transformations. Craft-based systems of production with Hawaiian origins adapted in twentieth-century surfing counterculture have been overlaid with all the trappings (and traps) of the globalized knowledge economy.

Proponents of free-market globalization point to the power and choice offered to workers, who can better balance their working and private lives. Flexible working conditions supposedly free up time for rest and leisure. There is some truth in this for surfboard makers. From the industry’s very beginnings surfboard makers sought to balance making a living from crafting boards with having ample time to surf. It is tempting to idealize surfboard makers as so-called free agents in the knowledge economy, determining their own working schedules and corresponding lifestyle.

Most of the time, however, the reality is far less ideal. Although firms now see workers less as factory-floor fodder and more as unique, highly skilled and adaptable individuals, paradoxically the terms of employment grow ever more insecure. 19 Autonomy and freedom are assumed to characterize cultural work, but the work is exploitative in several ways: the stable factory job with strong political solidarity has been replaced by short-term cycles, continual judgment against “key performance indicators,” and the ever-present threat of available contract and project work drying up.20 In the surfboard industry, union representation is nonexistent. “Doing it for the love of it” has become an invitation to (self-)exploitation.21 Precariousness describes the increasing number of workers engaged across all sectors of the economy in forms of casual, temporary, contracted, insecure, illegal, discontinuous, or irregular forms of employment.22 In chapter 8, we discuss the fact that surfboard makers are also part of a precarious employment landscape. Workers are often linked into tenuous subcontracting roles. Security and entitlements are rare, but expectations remain high. Workers must grasp principles of branding and marketing, handle computers, use Internet ordering systems, and maintain performance benchmarks. Surfboard makers now often work on a casual basis from week to week, never quite knowing how much work is coming in or what the week’s paycheck will be.

Labor precariousness is a theme running throughout this book, reflecting the overall uncertainty around the industry’s future. Precariousness has been exacerbated by recessionary conditions, the rise of multinational surf brands, and widespread availability of mass-produced surfboards. But as we also reveal, there are peculiar characteristics of surfboard workshops that powerfully alter worker experiences and make precariousness in the industry especially pronounced. These characteristics include the subcultural values of surfing, the informal and unstructured nature of careers, the laid-back industrial-relations environment, a guarded attitude toward skills development, and generational succession.

Against this depressing picture of precariousness and uncertainty, we develop a more affirmative, textured understanding of the work involved in making a surfboard. We argue that surfboard making is a form of rich local cultural heritage in each of the regions profiled in this book—and is surprisingly resilient, even with the pressures of mechanization and globalization. This resilience stems from the emotional attachment to surfing, the need to purchase boards regularly, and demand from local surfers to have boards customized to their body size and shape, as well as prevailing local waves.

A growing awareness of the importance of cultural history and cultural heritage—both tangible and intangible—has led to increased interest in the history of surfing. Tangible cultural heritage relates to physical sites, artifacts, buildings, monuments, and artworks.23 Surf-culture museums in California, on Australia’s Gold Coast and in Torquay, and inclusion of rare ancient and early modern surfboards in the archives of the Bishop Museum on O‘ahu (arguably the world’s finest museum of Pacific Island cultures) testify to the growing appreciation of surfboards as tangible cultural heritage. Boards are artifacts that capture the essence of the history of the sport and subculture and cement the link between modern surfing and its ancient Polynesian roots. In some circles antique surfboards (and new ones made in traditional wooden style) have become museum pieces, highly expensive artifacts won at auction by wealthy collectors for decorating corporate boardrooms and restaurants. Many such boards are never ridden in the waves.

In contrast, intangible cultural heritage refers to the practices, customs, and methods that produce such artifacts, stemming from “learned processes . . . knowledge, skills and creativity.”24 These practices inform and develop from oral exchanges or gestures and include culturally important stories, dances, languages, customs, handicrafts, rituals, music, and other arts. Intangible cultural heritage thus “provide[s] living communities with a sense of continuity with previous generations . . . important to cultural identity, as well as to the safeguarding of cultural diversity and creativity.”25 We explore the tensions surrounding surfboards as tangible physical heritage and surfboard making as a form of intangible cultural heritage. In the three regions profiled in our book, surfboard making constitutes a specific form of environmentally determined artifact production, a handicraft mythologized and cherished for its skill and creativity. Surfboard makers produce physical commodities in a manner that draws and relies upon historical myths and continuities, giving rise to a distinct, regionally located cultural industry. Without such myths and historical continuities, surfboard making, even by hand, would constitute little more than a type of high-end sporting goods manufacture.

Though history is an important part of the story, we do not want to romanticize surfboard making as a relic art form from a bygone era. We are keen to emphasize that making custom surfboards is an evolving, hybrid creative practice. Design innovations are continually sought. Surfboard making is the work and product of artistic skill, creativity, and experimentation, Introduction 19 transmitted but also evolving across the past thousand years. Such an extended legacy does not imply surfboard making is static but rather always in flux, frequently politicized, influenced by breaking waves, shifts in technology, and power plays in the industry. Those individual surfboard makers in Hawai‘i, California, and Australia who continue to design and manufacture custom surfboards maintain, challenge, and update cultural traditions. This is especially so in Hawai‘i, where Hawaiians have revived wooden construction methods as a means to link modern surfing with its ancient past. Beyond our analysis of surfboard making as precarious cultural work, we therefore attempt to make a case in this book that surfboard making is a form of evolving local cultural heritage—precarious and passionate, and worthy of greater recognition and respect.

Emotional Labor: Personal Stories of Surfboard Production

Another important aim of the book is highlighting what participation in the surfboard industry means in the context of the everyday lives of surfboard makers. To accomplish this, we draw personal stories from our interviews with board makers: the emotions, frustrations, and bodily feelings that surround working, playing, and living a life as surfboard maker. Narratives of precariousness and cheap imports, although important, do not fully capture the experiences of workers cutting a living in the surfboard industry. Board makers are involved in a form of cultural production brimming with intense human interaction—between workers, customers, and local surfing communities. Quality manufacturing is contingent on refined bodily skills related to the making of things. Chapter 5 explores the emotional, gendered, and embodied dimensions of surfboard production, drawing attention to workplace interactions, relationships, solidarities, problems, and uncertainties. Felt emotions matter as much as economics in understanding the surfboard industry and the experiences of surfboard makers.

Researchers in the humanities and social sciences have put considerable effort into better understanding emotions and the sensory content of human relationships.26 The goal is to understand how emotions structure everyday life. Emotions play a key part in the production of personal, customized surfboards. Board making is an occupation like any other—a way to pay the bills. Making surfboards is also deeply embodied and emotional work. It is a process felt in the hands. Chapter 5 examines how emotions coalesce around creative practices through networks, relationships, and in the industry’s spaces of work and display.

Analyzing the emotional dimensions of surfboard making, we refer to the intimate, conscious, and situated bodily feelings, which rely on interpretation and categorization.27 In the context of our everyday experiences, these situated self-feelings (excitement, joy, anger, shame, pride, and frustration) help us make sense of the world. Emotions define our relationships with other humans and with the nonhuman world (such as that bundle of intense feelings surfers enjoy between themselves and the waves they ride).28 The experiences that challenge us emotionally are geographically situated and socially specific. As readable sensory responses, the emotions have powerful abilities to influence our actions and decision making.29 Decisions made by a commercial business or manual worker can involve multiple logics, rationalities, and emotions. As humans, we constantly work through intimate chains of ethical relations (the supposed moral course of action) with others within the realities and complexities of everyday life. For some workers, in particular contexts the emotions may be helpful, laid bare, and utilized. In other contexts and times, emotions may be deliberately suppressed, unacknowledged, or unwanted.30 Emotional display can last for a long period or fleeting moment, with life-changing significance or none at all.31 The emotions can occur physically, expressed through a sigh or shake of the head, but also well below the skin—readable only by those sharing a close relationship to an individual. In the case of surfboard making, the emotions have an everyday role in establishing relationships and in performing high-quality work where pride, an attention to detail, and persistence are essential qualities.

When we visited workshops in each region, we paid attention to the emotional engagements taking place in designing, producing, exchanging, and using surfboards. The emotions of surfboard making are important in this book for two reasons. First, the emotions are central to understanding how this form of cultural production exists and survives in three different places, when a rational-choice perspective would have killed things off two decades ago. In chapter 5 we show how the motivations, goals, values, and choices of surfboard-industry workers related to continuing with a precarious form of work are shaped by the industry’s emotional terrain, not by a natural desire for profit. The emotional terrain has both pleasurable and negative consequences for workers. Second, there is a heightened emotional register relating to the making of surfboards as tangible things. Surfboard makers participate in a form of cultural production shaped by intense human interaction. Craftsmanship is more than mere state of mind; as Richard Sennett has put it, “it has a sharp social edge.”32 The emotions permeate the making of surfboards as material goods and ascribe meaning to boards. Surfboard makers care about boards as material icons of their creativity. Workers making surfboards see them being used and delivering pleasure to customers. At the same time, customers continue to support workshops financially and otherwise, paying good money for quality craftsmanship and service from workshops with which they have emotional attachments. Ultimately, the customer receives a better physical product that works best in the waves they surf and stands apart from other boards. Despite globalization, mechanization, and all the surfboard industry’s new high-tech gear, pride in work and veneration of a surfer’s own custom-made board remain at the heart of crafting as a form of commercial production.

Gender Games

This book could not be considered complete without discussion of the gendered nature of the surfing subculture. Gender deeply infuses surfboard making. Variations in a surfer’s relationship to the ocean are inflected by gender, ethnicity, cultural background, and surfing style.33 As surf researcher Clifton Evers has observed, popular surfing breaks operate under strict social hierarchies with a constant power play negotiated between locals, nonlocals, bathers, surf lifesavers, and other beach users.34 On crowded, prized surf breaks such as Pipeline (O‘ahu), Trestles (Southern California), or Snapper Rocks (Gold Coast), groups of local surfers congregate in surfing fraternities. Surfers are brought together by a shared passion for riding waves, competitive ambitions, gender, class background, and close proximity to a break.35 These groups are also the chief consumers of custom-made surfboards, demanding high quality from local board makers.

According to sociologist Douglas Booth, these mostly male groups have a sense of ownership toward particular local breaks. Locals often regulate and restrict the wave access of nonlocal surfers, sometimes resorting to intimidation and violence to control access.36 In many coastal towns in Hawai‘i, Southern California, and east coast Australia, local families and surfers feel threatened by population change and influxes of mobile, well-off migrants. Breaks and beaches become crowded. Real estate prices and costs of living often rise. Local surfers resist incursions through control over surfing lineups and beaches. Members of local surfing fraternities develop similar styles of dress and hair and share tattoo types, social hangouts, board makers, and a distinctive language.37 Examples include the Bra Boys in the southern Sydney suburb of Maroubra and the Hui O He‘e Nalu group of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian) surfers who police the surfing space on the North Shore of O‘ahu.38 Such groups enforce local regimes of surfing respect and a strict chain of command at “their” breaks. Prized surf zones become oceanic territories that extend geographically onto nearby land. In these territories, surfing ability is crucial for negotiating a place in the local pecking order.39 The best local surfers get the most waves. Talented nonlocals might also gain respect and thus access to more waves. Ability and admiration in surfing culture revolve around subjective notions of style. Specialized surfboard designs created by workshops for surfers reflect this mix of territoriality, dominant local style, and prevailing-wave types.

Over the recent history of competitive surfing, a prized style has come to emphasize fast, powerful, and aggressive direction changes combined with skilled riding of hollow barreling waves. Surfers are judged on ability to perform radical turns, launch aerial maneuvers, and surf deep inside the wave’s tube. Aggressive surfing developed only alongside advances in surfboard design and discovery of lighter materials for construction—for example, light, composite foams. The prestige assigned aggressive surfing styles beginning the late 1960s paralleled changes in surfboard design (discussed in chapter 2). Surfing on long, heavy timber boards did not allow surfers to perform vertical turns on the wave. Discovery of new materials and manufacturing techniques allowed makers to experiment with different designs and board shapes. These factors led to a shift in the dominant surfing styles in many regions. Using modern boards, surfers could more readily access the high-energy sections of a wave. Emphasis in US and Australian surfing cultures was placed on a masculine “high-performance” style, which involved surfers initiating an aggressive attack on the wave face. high performance

For many kanaka maoli, rather than aggressively attacking waves, skillful surfing meant moving in rhythm with the wave’s shifting energy. A prized surfing performance was a long ride surfed with a smooth and flowing style, regardless of the type of board being ridden. In ancient Hawaiian surfing culture, emphasis was placed on surfers becoming the water through the wave. Boundaries between surfer and ocean were blurred.40 Hawaiian surfers “danced with the wave.”41 This style, which persisted into the modern era, contrasted sharply with the styles in California and Australian surfing cultures, where prominence relied on control and aggression, cutting and shredding waves. California surfers focused on speed to enable the performance of sharp cutback maneuvers. In the 1970s, Australians took the approach further and used terms such as “ripping,” “hacking,” “shredding,” “cutting,” and “killing” to describe their surfing styles. When the shortboard revolution and a sanctioned professional surfing tour began—almost side by side in the 1970s—a dominant masculine style of riding became established (described in chapter 2). This dramatically shifted the relationship between surfers and the ocean. To be a skillful (masculine) surfer required the display of strength, aggression, control, and fearlessness. On the flip side, surfing performances associated with feminine Introduction 23 displays—slower movements, grace, and elegance—were devalued in the surfing hierarchy. To surf in this style was to shamefully “surf like a chick.”42

When greater numbers of female surfers began taking to the lineups in Hawai‘i, California, and Australia beginning in the 1960s, their surfing did not easily conform to the powerful masculine style. Amateur and professional female surfers were considered weak by their male counterparts because they seemingly lacked the strength and ability to surf aggressively.43 Since the 1990s, this perception has changed alongside the development of a more lucrative women’s world surfing tour, showcasing female surfing talents in challenging conditions around the world. Heavily masculine high-performance riding styles have also been partially decentered by the emergence of “retro” surfing styles and boards. Retro and hybrid designs are popular among aging baby boomers and hark back to the languid days before the shortboard revolution. The commodification of female fashions by the surf-wear industry (most prominently through Quiksilver’s dedicated female brand, Roxy) has also provided a commercial rationale for challenging gender stereotypes. Today, in Australia at least, three out of every ten surfers are female, a statistic highlighting the growth of surfing among both men and women.44

Still, the surfing subculture remains gendered. Ubiquitously, surfboard makers have been, and continue to be, men (discussed in chapter 5). The stories in this book are consequently noticeably one-sided and greatly shaped by the fact that all the surfboard makers profiled are male. Surfboard makers are keen surfers themselves, and many appear steeped in the subculture’s gendered ways. Engaging with and reflecting on the gendered dimensions of surfboard making (chapter 5) help to unlock sexism in the industry. But we also explore the sensory content of the work set against the subculture’s masculinist undercurrent. Despite the subculture’s masculine pretensions, emotions have a key role in surfboard making. In an industry dominated by men—many of them older and approaching retirement—the emotions coalesce around and within the body, in relation to creative practices, professional and personal networks, attachments to the job, gender stereotypes, and relationships with suppliers, tools, and customers.

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Finally, who are the characters in this book, and how did they come to be profiled? Between 2008 and 2012 we visited a total of thirty-three workshops and interviewed more than 130 workers from the three regions. Surf board makers generously showed us around workshops and described the nature of their work in situ. Larger businesses tended to 24 Introduction have workshops fitted out in an industrial-style warehouse, whereas several of the smaller operators had reconfigured a home garage or surf shop, turning it into a production space. Some were legends of surfing, master shapers with decades’ experience in the industry: Ben Aipa, Dick Brewer, Rusty Preisendorfer, Gary Linden, Mike Hynson, Barry Bennett, Bill Wallace, Scott Dillon, Joe Larkin, Geoff McCoy, and Bob McTavish. Many others were the quiet craftsmen or unassuming and self-effacing assistants who, day in, day out, make surfboards behind closed doors. Others interviewed were manufacturers of blanks, museum curators, industry-association figures, surf-culture historians, carpenters, and ding repairers. Their stories and experiences combine to form the spine of the book.

In Hawai‘i, participating workshops were on the legendary North Shore of O‘ahu, and to a lesser extent in Waikīkī, the mythological home of surfing. California workshops were all located in the coastal strip between Los Angeles and San Diego, where surfing grew to prominence and from where it was broadcast to the world by Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s. Over fifteen hundred miles of coastline link the three most prominent Australian surfing states. Here our interviewing concentrated on key hubs of surfboard manufacturing: the Gold Coast in southern Queensland; Byron Bay, the Northern Beaches of Sydney, and the nearby Illawarra region, all in NSW; and Torquay in Victoria. The number of Australian hubs of surfboard making included in the book reflects the scale and sheer ubiquity of surfing in that country, where a higher proportion of the population surf regularly (roughly 12 percent, or 2.5 million people) than in any other nation on earth.

Participating workshops gave willingly of many hours (and in several instances, days) of their time. Social connections became crucial for the research, not only within Australia, where we are based, but extending to Hawai‘i and California.

After interviewing a number of surfboard workshops already known to us, snowballing and word of mouth provided access to many more contacts. Although some workers were not personally known before commencing the research, many of these acquaintances became friends as the research evolved and traversed the Pacific.

We also made use of online forums and workshop Web sites. A large number of surfing enthusiasts interacted online over relevant topics and helped gain access to other industry figures, including within surfing mega-brands (some of whom were interviewed for the book). The ethnographic approach adopted for the book was supported by a quantitative documentation of the size and extent of the surf industry. In the United States, the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association provided access to their biannual survey of surfboard manufacturers and retailers. In Australia, the fledgling Surf Craft Industry Association provided a database of relevant surfboard manufacturers. The Gold Coast City Council also assisted with access to data on the contribution of surfing and surfboard making to that region’s economy. Reports from publicly listed corporate surf firms were also examined. Archival research was undertaken at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, O‘ahu. Analysis of historical records, film, photographs, and collected surfboards was undertaken. Similar work was carried out at the Surf World Museum on the Gold Coast and in Torquay and at the Surfing Heritage Foundation in San Clemente. The collections of surfboards, stories, and records at these museums revealed to us the important moments of design and technological change, shifts in the use of materials, scales of production, and the central figures behind the development of the surfboard industry.

A final note: We acknowledge that surfing includes many different forms of wave riding using many different forms of equipment. However, in this book we concentrate on the boards made for the form of wave riding in the Hawaiian kū tradition, in which a surfer uses a specialized board to ride breaking waves in a standing, upright bodily position.