Alan 'Greeny' Green, 77, is understood to have passed away on Tuesday at his home in Torquay, following a brief battle with cancer.

In 1969, Greeny hooked up with Rip Curl's Brian Singer and Doug Warbrick yet struck out on his own two years later. Though he had partners at Quiksilver, such as Brewster Everett and John Law, it was Greeny's persistence and vision that took it from a literal cottage industry - the boardshorts were sewn in various living rooms and garages around Torquay - to a billion-dollar company with offices all around the world.

Unlike some of his industry contemporaries, Greeny always kept a low profile, though even during Quiksilver's long boom of success he'd walk the office floor and make the multinational feel like a mum and dad company.

Greeny is survived by his wife Barbara, and children Fletcher, Holly, and Roxy.

The following excerpt documents the genesis of Quiksilver and was taken from Phil Jarratt's book 'The Mountain And The Wave'.

Greeny at his office in the early-70s (Stephen Cooney)

The following summer the Rip Curl partners rented an old bakery and went into production for themselves, taking out their first advertisement, a full page in Surfing World heralding “the dawning of Rip Curl Surfboards,” with the promise: “We know what we’re doing and we’ll be around for a long time.”

A couple months before the Rip Curl ad appeared, a Bells regular named Alan Green pulled up outside the bakery in a 1953 Ford Customline, a recent 21st birthday present from his grandmother. He grabbed a bulging bag of patterns and samples off the back seat and marched in to do business.

Born in 1947 at Pascoe Vale in the working class suburbs of Melbourne, Green had learned to use his fists. When a teacher slugged him from behind for some alleged insolence, “Greeny” as he was known to all, turned around and king hit the man. Expelled from school over the pleas of his parents, Greeny got a job in the mail room at Ansett Airlines, and soon became the personal “gofer” of Sir Reginald Ansett, the airline’s founder and one of Australia’s most dynamic and ruthless businessmen. Ansett liked the boy’s spirit, but he advised him to finish school. A friend was about to enroll at Footscray Technical College to study accounting, so Greeny tagged along, lied about his high school diploma and was admitted to the course.

While still at school, Greeny had hitch-hiked on summer weekends down to the coast at Ocean Grove, where he learned to surf on the old boards stored in the surf club. As soon as he was old enough to drive, he started borrowing his mother’s Mini Minor and taking his Pascoe Vale friends along. One of them, Robert Ashton, recalls: “He was a bit of a bad-ass. He’d go into a shop and order a toasted cheese sandwich, and while they were out the back making it, he’d help himself to a carton of smokes. He was bold and brave and he always seemed to get away with it.”

With most of his classes at Footscray Tech at night, Greeny took a day job as a trainee accountant at a winery (perhaps laying the foundations for a legendary love affair with wine later in life) and then bookkeeper at Australian Divers in North Melbourne. With a steady job and a time-consuming passion for surfing, Greeny dropped his accountancy course without a diploma.

Greeny, at left, with Rod Brooks and Hawaiian Bobby Owens, Bells 1977 (Dick Hoole/Australian National Surf Museum)

Australian Divers was the creation of a “Commander” Batterham, a former career naval officer who had worked with the famed undersea expert Jacques Cousteau during World War II. After the war, Cousteau became a major investor in Batterham’s enterprise. By the time Green became their bookkeeper, Australian Divers made or imported everything a recreational or professional diver needed, including neoprene wetsuits. When Greeny pressured his boss to diversify into surfing wetsuits Batterham said: “You should leave and do it yourself. I’ll even sell you the materials at cost to get you started.” Greeny borrowed $1,500 from his father and set out to give the wheels of industry a spin.

By the time Alan Green walked through the door at Boston Road in the early summer of 1968-69, the Rip Curl partners were starting to realise that the slim profit margin on surfboards would take them only so far. Even as they penned their “We know what we’re doing and we’ll be around for a long time” slogan, Brian Singer and Doug Warbrick wondered how true this would be if they didn't diversify. Greeny convinced the partners that he knew how to make wetsuits and Singer and Claw saw the potential market, so the three men shook hands, cleared a space at the back of the bakery and tacked up a “Rip Curl Wetsuits” shingle.

“The first ones were a complete disaster," Greeny recalls. “John ‘Sparra’ Pyburne was a hot, young local surfer on the way up, so I decided to make the prototype for him. He’d stand there while I cut and glued the panels around him, but it was such a mess that he got the shits and took over as cutter. He’s still cutting rubber at Rip Curl today.”

Some time during the southern summer of 1969-70, Greeny’s mind wandered to another challenge. In his view the surf trunk, or boardshort, screamed for innovation. The dominant Australian brands, Platt’s and Adler’s, both of which had evolved from the sewing machines of the mothers of well known surfers, were a bulky fit, and the heavyweight fabric often caused rashes and chafing on the upper legs. The few imports, usually canvas or nylon, were not much better. A couple of Torquay surfers had begun tinkering with new designs - part of a general process that Claw called the “creative soup” of the surf-mad town at that time. Greeny decided to see if he could do any better.

The Australian Divers wetsuits incorporated a shoulder entry secured by a Velcro strip and a metal snap at each end, and Greeny had brought this design feature (and a huge supply of snaps and strips) with him to Rip Curl. Now, as he fitted the snaps into the neoprene and tested the closure, it occurred to him that the same system could replace buttons and flies on boardshots. That night in the Torquay flat he shared with his schoolteacher girlfriend, Barbara, he sketched some designs on a pad, focusing on fit. Making use of wetsuit parts, Greeny developed the first technical boardshort. He drew a yoked waistband, higher at the back then the front, with scallops on the legs to ensure ample movement. The next morning he delivered two bolts of cotton in contrasting colours and his sketches to one of his wetsuit sewers. He said: “Do us a little favour, would you love?”

Quiksilver ad from the mid-70s featuring the Velcro fly and metal snaps

In 1970, with no room left in the Boston Road bakery, Greeny’s Rip Curl boardshorts division operated out of a series of rented flats and shop fronts around Torquay. At the sewing machine, Carol McDonald turned out 20 to 30 pairs a day while Greeny added the snaps. The Rip Curl partners had already decided on a separate brand for the boardshorts, but it was left to Greeny’s girlfriend to come up with a name. Barbara Green recalled many years later that she had just read a definition of the word “quicksilver” that seemed to match elements of her boyfriend’s personality - “elusive, mercurial”. It helped, too, that a favourite album on the couple’s turntable was by the San Francisco psychedelic band Quicksilver Messenger Service. So Quicksilver it was.

At Cash’s, a Melbourne labelling company, Greeny flipped through volumes of logo designs and selected a swan, or a “duck”, as he preferred to think of it. But then he began to have second thoughts about the rights to the name. Without the money to do a trademark search, he decided to play it safe, changing the name to Kwiksilver and even designing the lettering, until McDonald pointed out that a “k” next to a “w” was an embroider's nightmare. Finally he settled on Quiksilver, thus ensuring that the fledgling brand would forever be misspelled.

The first two versions of the Quiksilver logo, both created by Greeny. 'The Duck', at left, only made it onto a few hundred pairs of shorts, while the mountain and the wave, despite passing through many incarnations, is still in use today.

Quiksilver soon moved into a shop next to the post office on Pearl Street, Torquay, and Greeny hung up a shingle. With plans for a wider range, he needed fabric at a good wholesale price and, through a friend of his father’s, he met a German immigrant rag trader. Joe Ronic had contacts behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, where excess stock piled up in the wake of another unrealistic Soviet five-year plan. Though he specialized in dress fabric, Ronic also had access to a double-twisted poplin used mainly for raincoats. Greeny asked Ronic how they might structure a deal. The older garmento must have liked the kid, because he said: “You tell me how much you want and what colours, I dye it for you and you pay me when you sell your range.” This generous arrangement, which remained in place for several seasons, put Quiksilver on the footing for future profit. It was a kick-start that Alan Green never forgot.

If Quiksilver boardshorts were going to take on the world, the duck had to go. Greeny again pulled out his sketch pad and began playing with the shape of a wave. He drew the outline of a breaking wave with a few droplets of foam hovering around the lip. Then, for good measure, and for balance, he added a tiny snowcapped mountain underneath it. While surf and snow were not the kindred spirits they are today, Greeny felt that they both represented nature’s A-list. He took his sketches back to Cash’s where designers refined them into a square patch with QUIKSILVER in capital letters across the bottom. It was a difficult and expensive logo, but by the time it went into production, Greeny was convinced that the little mountain and wave on the bottom of the leg made a profound statement about the new brand’s commitment to its cultural roots.

//PHIL JARRATT