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Cheerful, resolute, down-to-earth regularfooter from North Coast, NWS, Australia; winner of the 1964 World Surfing Championships. "She was the most determined surfer I've ever seen," Sydney boardmaker Joe Larkin said. "And it wasn't long before she was better than all of us." 

O'Donell was born (1937) and raised in Sydney, the daughter of an auto mechanic father and stenographer mother, and didn't begin surfing until age 23. Freshwater and Manly Beach were her go-to breaks, and she was informally mentored by Aussie surf legend Snow McAlister

In 1964, O'Donell was the surprise winner of the Australian National Titles, and just a few weeks after that, at Manly, she defeated American champion Linda Benson of California to win the sport's first-ever World Championships. 

At 27, O'Donell was the oldest female competitor in the event by more than three years. "Phyllis was completely at ease," the Australian-published 

 magazine wrote at the time. "Her placement in the wave was ideal and her trimming and arching through the hollow sections pretty to watch. O'Donell was a decisive winner." The live audience on the beach was later said to be 60,000 strong, and this was a factor as well. "There was a huge crowd, which played to Phyllis’s exhibitionist streak," surf writer Sean Doherty later wrote. "A city radio station was holding a stomp down the beach, and the music was spilling out over the lineup. 'They started playing this really groovy music and I totally went along with it,' she remembers. 'If they hadn’t played the groovy music I don’t think I would have won. I forgot about the crowd and the surfing. I was there for fun'.”

The diminutive O'Donell (5'2") was a steady presence on the surf scene over the next few years: in 1965 she repeated as national champion; in 1966 she placed third in both the Makaha International and Australian National Titles; in 1968 she was third in the World Championships; in 1970 she was third in the Nationals, and in 1971 she placed fourth.

A smiling, friendly person on land, the bob-haired O'Donell could be a minor terror in the water. "I was horribly, horribly aggressive," she recalled in 2001, "and I swore like a trooper."

The year before winning her world title, O'Donell and her family had moved from Sydney to a home near the Queensland border; O'Donell because a fixture at Rainbow Bay and the other Gold Coast pointbreaks, and a member of the Kirra Boardrider's Club; Queensland and North Coast NSW would be O'Donell's home base for the rest of her life. 

O'Donell lived for a few months in Redondo Beach, California, in 1968, and worked in the showroom at Dewey Weber Surfboards in nearby Hermosa Beach. She was a judge at the Australian Women's Surfing Association's 1980 National Championships. She appeared in a small number of surf movies, including Bob Evans' 

In 1996, O'Donell became the second woman to be inducted into the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame.

O'Donell, Phyllis

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