Torquay, 1969
Torquay, Victoria, is a small town on Australia's Great Ocean Road, and in 1969 it produced two of the brands that would define global surf apparel: Quiksilver and Rip Curl.
Quiksilver traces to 1969 in Torquay, credited with the boardshort design that built modern surf culture from Bells Beach outward into the world's lineups. A few streets and a few months away, Doug "Claw" Warbrick — fresh off a summer shaping surfboards — and Brian Singer, a science teacher who resigned days after the two agreed to go into business, founded Rip Curl in March 1969, working out of Singer's garage at 35 Great Ocean Road. By November they had outgrown the garage and moved into the old Torquay Bakery; by 1970 they had expanded into wetsuits, adapting diving-suit technology for surfers. Rip Curl built its identity around "The Search" — an ongoing hunt for the perfect wave — and around Bells Beach, and the company is still headquartered in Torquay today.
The third leg of the story starts slightly later and up the coast. In 1973, on the Gold Coast at Burleigh Heads, surfboard shaper Gordon Merchant and his wife Rena began hand-sewing knee-length boardshorts and selling them on consignment to local surf shops for A$4.50 a pair — about A$5,000 in sales in the first year. Their triple-stitch seam, developed to survive the mechanical stress surfing puts on fabric, became a standard construction technique across the entire surf-apparel industry. The company took its name, Billabong, from the Wiradjuri word for a creek that runs only in the rainy season.
Three founding stories, three different garages and shopfronts, one shared cause: a wave of small Australian coastal towns deciding, independently and almost simultaneously, that surfers deserved clothes built for the water rather than borrowed from everyone else's wardrobe.
Article references
The houses in this story
- Quiksilver Australia
The Torquay original since 1969 — boardshorts that built surf culture, from Bells Beach to the world’s lineups. Early pairs were stitched at a kitchen table in Torquay and sold from the back of a car; Barbara Green named the brand. store page → · open in the atlas → - Rip Curl Australia
Australian surf brand founded March 1969 in Torquay by Doug 'Claw' Warbrick and Brian Singer, who shaped boards from a Great Ocean Road garage before adding wetsuit production in 1970. store page → · open in the atlas → - Billabong Australia
Founded in 1973 by surfboard shaper Gordon Merchant and wife Rena in Burleigh Heads, Queensland; the triple-stitch seam they developed for handmade boardshorts became a surf-industry standard. store page → · open in the atlas →