Age shall not weary them.

When you’re old time doesn’t stand still anywhere, not even in the tube, if you could bend over enough to get in one.

A year goes by in a nano-second, but that’s how long ago it was when I wrote in this space about our first interview sessions with the Brookvale surfboard industry pioneers for a documentary called Men of Wood and Foam. Rereading that blog now, I can feel how excited I was to have captured the stories of these grand old men before it was too late. Now, as the film premieres on the History Channel and then goes on the road with the Band of Frequencies, who wrote the soundtrack, I know we got it in the can just in the nick of time.

The film focuses on the “Brookvale Six” – Gordon Woods, Bill Wallace, Scott Dillon, Barry Bennett, Greg McDonagh and Denny Keogh – who range in age from 91 (Gordon) down to 79 (Denny), but there also many valuable contributions from contemporaries in the Brookvale factories of the early 1960s, such as Joe Larkin, Bob Cooper, Shane Stedman, Bob McTavish, Nat Young and the late Midget Farrelly. (When I started out on this project I had no idea that only Midget, at the younger end of the spectrum, would not live to see the film.)

In the course of the year since Shaun Cairns, Mark Warren and I set out to interview the pioneers, time hasn’t been the ally of some of them. Billy Wallace’s immobility finally forced him into a nursing home, then a broken hip as the result of a fall saw him hospitalised for some weeks. Now he faces many months of painful physiotherapy, but his spirits remain high and his sense of humour is intact. When I gave him a private screening of the final cut in his room (his Wallace Surfboards sign hanging above the bed) he laughed at all of his own jokes and some of Scotty and Gordon’s.

Shaun Cairns, Gordon Woods, Mark Warren, and Phil Jarratt filming 'Men of Wood and Foam'

When I phoned his Coffs Harbour nursing home to arrange a visit with Scott Dillon, his chief nurse Steve told me that Scotty, who suffers from dementia, was a bit down in the dumps. “Do you reckon we could get him a blank and set him up a little shaping bay?” Steve asked. With a lot of help from Billy Tolhurst and Burford Blanks, I arrived at the home a week later with a brand new blank, which Steve set up in a little portico outside Scotty’s window.  A couple of weeks later Steve phoned to tell me that Scott had been shaping every day and was talking about going back into business!

Scotty’s best line in the film is, “You can’t even get a beer in the nursing home these days”, so I smuggled in a couple of beers for the screening in the common room. We sat and guzzled happily while passing nursing staff turned a blind eye, and occasionally marvelled at the youthful images of Scott on the screen.

“That’s me!” Scotty cried gleefully.

Scott Dillon at Coffs Harbour

In Sydney I screened the film for Gordon Woods and Denny Keogh in their respective homes, and am happy to report that both were in glowing good health. Greg McDonagh and Joe Larkin have not been so robust of late, but both seem to be rallying. Barry Bennett, meanwhile, refuses to acknowledge his 85 years and continues to get up pre-dawn and blow foam – the last original still standing in Brookie, and more power to him.

I was just a kid when I travelled up to Brookvale from the South Coast to buy my first new surfboard off the rack at Woodsie’s. Gordon himself came out and helped me choose a poo brown Nat Young model, then the older blokes from our boardriders’ club put the monster on the roof and off we went, over the bridge and down the coast, stopping for fish and chips at Lumb’s and celebratory beers at the Coledale Pub. It was the beginning of a rite of passage that lasted until I went to Jacko and Peter Clark in the Shire because it was closer, then when my mates started making boards locally.

Now I’m old and the Brookvale Six are ancient, but those memories are etched in me like measurements burnt on a balsa stringer. The old boys of Brookie had their day, made their dough and moved on happily enough, with the exception of Barry, who’ll, by his own admission, only leave kicking and screaming or in a box. But they turned our generation on to the possibilities of modern surfing, and they deserve to be remembered and revered.

I hope our film helps that process. //PHIL JARRATT