"Flight of the Larrikin," the History of Surfing section I posted earlier today, sets up Australia's mid-'60s rise to surfing dominance. "Larrikin" is an Aussie word for a loud, rowdy person, usually but not always young, and fits perfectly around the neck of Down Under surfing in general during the post-Gidget boom. Manly Beach surfer Bob Pike, however, was a glaring exception. The anti-Larrikin. One of his country's most respected surfers during the early '60s, Pike was quiet, contained, low-voiced—not solitary, quite, but never one to run with the pack. When Pike took his own life in 1999, at age 59, Deep magazine editor Nick Carroll wrote the following tribute.

Bob Pike was the first and greatest of Australia's big-wave riders. In the early 1960s he traveled to the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, and rode with the legends—Hawaii's Jose Angel and Buzzy Trent, California's Pat Curren and Rick Grigg and Greg Noll, surfers who pioneered the monster waves of Sunset and Waimea and outer Pipeline, and unknowingly helped create a millions-strong worldwide surfing boom. Bob's era of surfing was a time of great discovery, a time when every experience was new, a time when each wave might test you to some unknown limit, a time when a man unsure of his ability, or frail of mind or body, would be swept aside like driftwood on a lonely beach.

When he died by his own hand in his car near Tweed Heads, NSW, on May 20 this year, at the age of 59, Bob took with him a unique and irreplaceable strand of our collective history.

An only child, Robert Hughes Pike grew up one street back from the Manly Surf Club on Sydney's northern beaches, and a few years ahead of his old friend Midget Farrelly. He began riding waves on "toothpick'' hollow boards in 1955 at Manly and at Freshwater Beach just around the headland—the beach where, in late 1914, Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku introduced Australians to the sport of surfing. Pike was 16 when Californian lifeguard surfers Greg Noll and Tom Zahn came to demonstrate the first lightweight Malibu-style boards at surf club carnivals in 1956. During their stay, Zahn left a board at the Manly club, and Pike began using it.

One afternoon Pike was coming in from a surf, with the borrowed board, and Zahn angrily confronted him: "What are you doing with my private property?” Pike, taken aback by the huge Californian, immediately did the most grommet-like thing imaginable and fibbed that he was thinking of buying the board—whereupon Zahn changed his tune and offered it for sale. Stunned, Bob had to borrow money from his father to make good on the deal.

Five years later, in 1961, Pike was working as a sheep-shearer in central Queensland when a group of his Sydney mates began planning a trip to Hawaii. This was the first concerted effort by Australians to tackle the surf of the North Shore, and while many of the boys were really only into it for the beer and good times, Pike saw something else entirely. "I was really into surfing when I went to Hawaii," he told Shane Peel, editor of 

magazine, in a rare and grand interview in 1998. "A lot of people weren't, they were into having a rage. I dunno, I just got bit by the surf bug and realized [by going to Hawaii] how much it was in my blood. It was a passion. And not just surfing, the whole way of life. When we sailed in there [Honolulu] and the girls came out and put leis around our necks, before the boat was even at the dock . . . . And from the ship you looked up behind the beach, into the cliffs, and felt the cool tradewinds blowing across you. Sailing into Ala Moana and there’s this bloody unbelievable left hooking off and, oh, it was just . . . I was home! Nineteen or 20 years old, I was, and for the first time I was home. My soul was hooked. It wasn't like that for me in Australia because the big thing in those days was to get drunk and all that sort of stuff, and you were fighting the clubbies all the time. Meanwhile, out there in the great big world, there was this sort of pioneering thing that was still happening."

Riding a board shaped by Pat Curren that he dubbed “the ultimate gun", Bob rode immense waves at Pipeline and Waimea, and staying on Oahu while his compatriots headed back to the relative calm of Australian waters. The following year, 1962, 

 publisher John Severson invited him on a trip to Peru, where Pike, surprisingly, won the hot-dogging division of the Peruvian International Championships—the first overseas surfing win by an Australian.

Back in Australia, Bob shunned the emerging surf industry, taking a job instead as a fireman. He surfed North Narrabeen and Dee Why Point. Like many great riders of his time, Pike became dislocated from the surfing community when professional competition arrived—it may well be that he never knew just how venerated he was by the generations of Australian surfers who followed him, decades later, into the big Hawaiian surf.

In his interview with Shane Peel, Pike himself downplayed the idea of putting value on fame or recognition, as well as the idea of earning a living from the sport. "People have said to me, 'Oh Bob you could have gone on with it, you could have made money, you could have turned it into something.' And you know, that was just never the purpose of my surfing life. It was something I loved doing, that's all. And when I went to Hawaii I was out there on my own, with no-one and I just loved it! To have traded on that would have felt like I was losing my morality as far as surfing goes. So in a sense, yes, it never amounted to anything in my life. But it doesn't matter, because I loved doing it. That's all that counts. If no one had ever heard of Bob Pike, if no one had ever known if I had surfed or not, it wouldn't matter one iota.”

BOB PIKE BY NICK CARROLL. "THE FIRST AND GREATEST AUSTRALIAN BIG-WAVE RIDER"

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