Endless Summer

The Largest Surfing Encyclopedia

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The long, thin deceptively gentle tubes of Burleigh provide one of the most alluring images of Australian surfing. Its warm, green waters also play host to what must surely be one of the largest single-break surf populations on the planet.


Burleigh Heads lies around eight miles south of the tourist empire of Surfers Paradise and 60 miles southeast of Brisbane -- the nearest major city. It is an ancient lava rock headland that is a continuance of an inactive volcanic mountain range. Burleigh influences numerous coastal features in the region -- all the way to Byron Bay some 100 miles to the south. It is a close neighbor to some other spectacular right pointbreaks, including Snapper Rocks, Rainbow Bay, Kirra Point and Currumbin, all of which can be found within 10 miles to the south.


Burleigh itself depends upon sand flow from the mouth of the Tallebudgera River, south of its headland. Prevailing south swells and winds draw the fine river sands around the headland and form it into a long sandbar of varying quality down the northern edge. When the sandbar is set correctly, it creates a super clean, long right barrel through a series of sections capable of holding swells (particularly from the southeast) up to 8 feet and sometimes bigger.


Burleigh's surfing history spirals back into the volunteer surf clubs of the '20s, several of which sprang up along the stretch between Point Danger and South Stradbroke Island. They served isolated communities of fishermen and vacationers from the farming country just inland, who came down to enjoy the fine white-sand beaches and ultra-clean water. Hard-core tourist development to Burleigh's north helped increase the surfing population through the '60s and early '70s. Paul, Rick and Gary Neilsen, Peter Drouyn, Tony Dempsey, Richard Harvey and former Sydney surfer Gordon Merchant spearheaded this movement. As the '70s wore on, guru shaper Dick van Straalen fed boards to the emerging school of brilliant young Point surfers: Tony "Doris" Eltherington, Guy Ormerod, Peter Harris, Eric van Druten, Paul de Paiva and the famous duo of Joe Engel and Thornton Fallander -- all surfers whose styles were marked by an extraordinary ease in the tube. Regular visitors included the all-star lineup from Kirra, Michael Peterson, Peter Townend, Rabbit Bartholomew and numerous others. In 1977, Burleigh was the venue for the first Stubbies Classic, the surf contest generally regarded as the beginning of big-league world tour competition; won by Peterson over Mark Richards, it was the first big pro event to feature man-on-man heats, a competitive form still used in ASP event today.


Being the closest of the classic Gold Coast points to the city of Brisbane and the tourists of surfers, Burleigh suffered early, and often, from heavy crowds in the lineup and from equally heavy tactics by hard-core locals, who thought little of physically attacking clumsy interlopers and enforcing a climate of intimidation, particularly on smaller days. While a thick layer of respect (not to say fear) still permeates the local consciousness, there are just too many regular Burleigh surfers for such tactics to be effective nowadays. A nice morning surf at the Point is now shared by hundreds of surfers of all varieties: longboarders, bodyboarders, grommets, women, veterans and surf-skiers. Weaving through the pack will be many surfers of distinction, ranging from pro heroes Luke Egan and Mark Occhilupo, six-channel guru Allan Byrne and soul ripper David Rastovich, right throu
gh the core locals like Dwayne and Peter Harris, Ryan Gray, Nick Heath, Brad Jeffries and many more.

-- Nick Carroll, January 2001If Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships, Bruce Brown's movie, The Endless Summer, launched a thousand times that many surfboards. This classic 1964 surf flick opened up a whole new realm of surfing experience, plus it was the first authentic surfing movie to bust through the cultural barrier and into the eyeballs of mass-market theater-goers.

Bruce Brown's sixth film, The Endless Summer, is the archetypal tale of two California surfers, blond Mike Hynson and dark Robert August, hitting the road to follow summer and surf around the world. Even though their efforts weren't always rewarded and "you shoulda been here yesterday" became the film's sub-theme, the message is clear in this quaintly stilted and goofy work of cinema verite: surfers are a tribe who knows no boundaries.

Brown filmed in Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii and California. Things didn't always go according to plan, but Brown wasn't the kind of guy who did all that much planning anyway. He was more in the school of flow. Somehow, even when they had no luck with the surf, something would happen. They'd meet someone (like future world champ Nat Young) and something happened.

So, a day late or not, everything turns out just as perfect as the wave they discover at Cape St. Francis in South Africa in one of the most revelatory and compelling moments in surf filmdom. There are bigger, better, scarier and more exciting waves in lots of other surf flicks, but none pay off quite as satisfyingly as "Bruce's Beauties." There, in that sequence, was magic indeed. When the film was finished, Brown knew he had something good in the can.

The Endless Summer was a big success on the circuit -- so big that Brown and his promotions man, Paul Allen (who ran ahead arranging shows and coordinating publicity) thought they might be able to attract a national distributor. With Brown's easy, homespun narration woven into a nice soundtrack by the Sandals, they worked on trying to sell it, came up dry and finally decided a test run in the U.S. heartland would be convincing, if it worked. So they booked a theater in Wichita, Kansas, and the film broke house records there for two solid weeks.

When that didn't work, they took the film to Manhattan and booked it into the Kuyps Bay Theatre, where Brown charmed the bored Big Apple critics at a preview screening, telling them he'd paid a hundred bucks for the room, so he expected good reviews. He got them, and the rest is history.

"For some reason," says Brown, "the real entrenched film critics seemed to like it, maybe because it was different from what they were used to seeing. We weren't one of them, so a lot of the media in New York were into helping us out, not hurting us. If they did a review and wrote, 'Brown did a shitty movie,' we'd have been dead. But nobody knew who I was, and maybe they felt it wasn't worth criticizing, so they pretty much gave us good reviews and helped us out."

The Endless Summer played the Kuyps Bay for a year. Meanwhile, it was picked up by Cinema 5 for national (and then worldwide) distribution. The reaction of Kansans and New Yorkers was echoed by audiences around the country when the film finally went into distribution in 1966. It was similar to the reaction of the people crowding the beaches in Senegal and Ghana when Hynson and August paddled out and rode waves right in front of their villages -- they were stoked! Brown, too, was stoked; his $50,000 investment brought him millions.

"I've always been kind of a dreamer," Brown says. "You dream that something like that is gonna happen, and it did." -- Drew Kampion, May 2000