Surfing In The Mid-80's

The endless summer of the late 1960s, surf scene was very small however according to Hamish Fitzsimmons (2004) surfing has come a long way since that period, the sport exploded in popularity in the 1960’s as surf boards became lighter, smaller and cheaper. Murray Walding (2008) states that “up until that stage it had just been essentially a small cottage industry with occasional forays into marketing things like surfboards, t-shirts and wetsuits, and I think it went along fairly smoothly, a nice sort of logical progression until the mid-80's, when there was a huge boom in the surfing industry”. It was during this time when Billabong had strongly secure its place in Australian surf culture and Gordon Merchant (founder of Billabong) was prepare