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Talented but elitist surfing troupe led by 1976 world champion Peter Townend and 1976 runner-up Ian Cairns; ostensibly created to further the cause of professional surfing and thus improve the lot of surfers everywhere, but essentially a promotional vehicle for the Bronzed Aussies themselves, who are best remembered for arriving at surf contests and postevent banquets in matching velour jumpsuits. As a media phenomenon, the idea worked. "The Bronzed Aussies have made it impossible for us to ignore them," surf journalist Michael Tomson wrote in 1979. "Never before has any group in the sport been so scorned, so trodden, so insulted, and very occasionally praised, as the Bronzed Aussies."

The group was formed in 1976 by Townend, Cairns, fellow pro Mark Warren, and Sydney newspaper journalist/manager Mike Hurst. (Future four-time world champion Mark Richards declined an invitation to join.) The timing seemed right, as surfing's back-to-nature "country soul" period had run its course. Pro contest prize money and surf industry sponsorships were meanwhile on the rise, but still negligible, and the Bronzed Aussies—modeling themselves in part on the 1960s Australian pro tennis triumvirate of Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, and John Newcombe—hoped to sell their clean, brushed-back, prepackaged "glam-surf" image to corporate sponsors. As Hurst put it, the immediate goal was to make enough money so that Cairns, Townend, and Warren could comfortably get from event to event on the world tour, while the long-term plan was nothing less than the establishment of "a global industry, franchising ideas and products into every country in the world."

Australia's mainstream media initially showed interest in the Bronzed Aussies, but the surf media was less enthusiastic (Townend and Cairns, as 

 magazine put it, had done nothing more than "prove there is no need for surfers to look scruffy when they can look ridiculous"), and international big-money sponsorship never materialized. In his coverage of the 1976 Smirnoff Pro-Am, 

 writer Richard Johnston mockingly referred to the Bronzed Aussies as the "corporate kings of Australia," then played up the incongruity between surfers and corporate underwriting. "One begins to wonder if the endless summer is about to fade into the fiduciary fall." In a backfiring promotional gambit, the Bronzed Aussies in 1976 rented a mansion in the wealthy landlocked Sydney suburb of Pymble. The average surfer on the beach, taking it as an article of faith that the sport was best left noncorporate, nonconformist, and nonglamorous, meanwhile dismissed the Bronzed Aussies as ostentatious at best, and rank sellouts at worst. When Bronzed Aussie surfwear and a line of Bronzed Aussie surfboards were later introduced, both met with swift commercial failure.

Cheyne Horan became a Bronzed Aussie in 1977, just a few months before Warren quit the group; Jim Banks joined in 1978, not long before Horan left and was replaced briefly by Steve Jones; Banks quit in 1980, saying that the group's dictatorial rules and strictures "slowed down my surfing." Townend and Cairns kept a quieter and less-ambitious version of the Bronzed Aussies alive into the early '80s. Townend later claimed that he invested and lost nearly $100,000 in the Bronzed Aussies. Sounding for better or worse just as he did in 1976, he also resolutely claims that the Bronzed Aussies had a "huge impact" in transforming surfers into "legitimate sportsmen."

Bronzed Aussies

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