In late November 1958, Barry Bennett sat in the family home in Harbord, Sydney and wrote a letter to Greg Knoll of California. Barry was trying to solve a problem. The balsa wood he was using to manufacture the then lightweight Malibu boards in Australia could not be trusted. As he wrote to Knoll: “It has a lot of cores and knots.”

Still: “Surfing season is in full swing here and I’m getting orders twice a day. It seems like every other person on the beach will have a balsa board like the one they’re selling. Greg never replied to Barry’s letter, although he kept a copy of it, and was still proudly showing it to the public until his own had recently passed. Because until then, Barry himself – in his cool way – was as big a deal as Da Bull, or really anyone at surfing. The way he chose to fix the 1958 dilemma would touch millions of surfing lives over time, even though most of those millions would never have been aware of the invisible hand behind their boards.

The way he chose to fix the 1958 dilemma would touch millions of surfing lives over time, even though most of those millions would never have been aware of the invisible
hand behind their boards.

Born and raised in Bronte on Sydney’s East Beaches, where he joined his dad at a local swimming club. At the age of 14, he took the next step, which was the surf club in those days. And, well, boom. “That’s where I bought my first hollow wooden surfboard, one of the guys out there,” he told ABC’s Bombora series in 2008. “For five pounds. I took it home on the running board of the tram.” The 14-year-old then proceeded to take the whole thing apart and put it back together again, waterproofing and all. That can tell you something about the time and about the person.

Barry apprenticed to an electrician, but he kept coming back to board-building. At the age of 16, he found a hollow-board building blueprint in an old surf lifesaving manual made for a fellow in a surf club, and discovered a small market for his hobby. In the 1950s, he met Margaret Magnis, a girl from Sydney’s north side; they were married in June 1958, and moved to Harbord, where he took a job with Mackeller Council in their electrical business.

He quit the electrician gig and began full-time balsa board manufacturing under house in Harbord. By 1959 he had moved to a block of land and factory on Harbord Road, just across the street from the factory where Bennett resides today. He later told people that the move was partly motivated by chemical exposure to him and Margaret’s first child, Greg. This risk stemmed from an experiment Barry was doing in the home garage, his way around the balsa dilemma: blowing up the foam.

Today, polyurethane foam is in the original – both literally and figuratively – of the global surfboard industry. Even now, making it is complicated, involving a tricky mix of
chemicals and an unstable expansion from
liquid to solid foam.

In Australia at the time, it was an unknown animal. But with bad balsa in hand and no response from Knoll, Barry has to try something new. “I had a flight engineer fellow at Qantas,” he told me, “and he had another fellow who was flying empty over California. My partner brought back photos of the process and the mixes needed. Barry and his business partner Greg McDonagh found a local chemical supplier, A.C. Hattrick & Co., but found that the chemical mix didn’t look right initially – the blanks would shrink the wrong way. He began importing the two-part mixture from the United States, borrowing money to support the purchase.

Over the years and millions of blanks,
board-makers from Australia came to see Barry with great respect and awe. They were younger than him, and were living in a shaky world. “Those were very turbulent times, the early 70s, especially for young people,” legendary NSW Central Coast designer Bill Cilia told me. “We were moving out of Vietnam, and there was the whole LSD thing. It was hard to pin down a direction. Working at Barry was a steady, positive thing.” Bob McTavish had a similar experience, who was hired by Bennett in 1971. “I was into commitments,” says Bob. “My life was changing, I had kids to support
me.” McTavish says Bennett had a wonderful 12 months before San Juan brought him back to Byron Bay.

The famous BB star or diamond logo is said to have been designed by John Severson, who came from California to live with Bennett and help establish the early 1960s surf movie show. “Barry was the first entrepreneur,” He says. “He saw that it was better to have a small piece of every surfboard made in Australia, not to make a small number of surfboards and barely survive. He was a very simple man. For his part, Barry looked at his young, creative
business partners of the time with the sober look of an elder. “They really knew how to make boards, but most of them had no idea of actually running a business,” he told Bombora. “They were always in trouble with taxes or they couldn’t pay their bills... I think they thought every dollar they got at the front door was a profit, and they spent it that way”.

An excellent swimmer as part of the Bronte SLSC junior team, Barry tried board racing but turned to surf skis, racing seven times from Molokai to Oahu and winning the Australian title, as did his son Greg. Bennett Surfboards continued to make racing equipment for surf clubs and nippers, even as the company leaned into the longboard renaissance of this century.

Barry was honored with several honors over the years. Among others, he was inducted into the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame in 2016, gained membership of the Order of Australia, and was the first Australian to be inducted into the International Surfboard Builders Hall of Fame. He felt the respect deeply, but none of this changed his essential nature.