By the time we captured our first vision of Midget Farrelly surfing live, he was already the 1964 World Surfing Champion—a household name who was highly marketable. In fact, he had published his book This Surfing Life and even had his own branded skateboards, which were the first to be commercially available in Australia.

Our first glimpse of him came during Easter 1965, when gigantic swells pounded Bells Beach. The surf was so huge that the best 20 surfers in the country gathered at Fisho’s Beach for what turned out to be probably the greatest expression sessions on Malibus ever seen in the southern states. The waves were a perfect, peeling 2 to 3 feet, and we watched in awe as Midget and Nat Young stole the show, alternating between five and ten toes on the nose wave after wave. Along with a hundred or so other spectators, our boards stayed firmly on the roof racks of Dad’s EH Holden wagon.

The whisper floating around the carpark was that Midget was riding the first stringerless board. Mine, sitting on the car, was a triple-stringer Pyke weighing 42 pounds (over 19 kilos), so we waited until Midget walked past. Sure enough, his 9-foot Mal was completely naked—no timber stringer. “What was he thinking?!”

In 1967, Midget’s public persona took another giant leap forward with the release of ten half-hour episodes of The Midget Farrelly Surf Show. He was just 23 years of age. I am pretty sure the show went to air late Sunday afternoons. We never missed an episode, and the program would always start with a classic Midget backhand bottom turn followed by a walk to the nose. No individual before or after has had such an amazing impact on bringing surfing to the eyes of the general public.

Cutting an occy strap to open the 1975 Surfworld exhibition with the Skyhooks frontman, the late Graeme “Shirley” Strachan. Picture: Keith Platt

The 1968 World Surfing Titles at Rincon in Puerto Rico almost brought another title to Midget when he placed second to Fred Hemmings. Ten-time Easter Bells winner Gail Couper remains convinced that “Farrelly was robbed.” Regardless, participation in the sport of surfing was growing at a phenomenal rate, eventually culminating in Australian surfers dominating the world rankings ever since the first professional competition at Bells Beach in 1973.

The Easter Bells competitions from 1966 to 1973 provided the ultimate opportunity for Victorians to catch a glimpse of their heroes. In particular, we loved seeing Midget with his long blond hair and heavy, cabled white cardigan, and Nat with his green felt hat and his Weimaraner dog by his side. These images, along with their radical riding, are forever etched into the memory banks of their adoring fans.

In 1970, the World Surfing Titles came to Bells Beach. Longboards had been replaced by shortboards—and in the case of most of the Aussie contingent, they were way too short (under the 6-foot mark), which severely handicapped favorites like Wayne Lynch and Nat Young. Midget, who had been overlooked as a serious threat, placed a very creditable second to American Rolf Aurness.