1933 - present

The surf-o-plane was a small, moulded, inflatable, four-ribbed rubber mattress used for surfing and surf rescues. It was invented by Dr Ernest Smithers, a Bronte physician and keen surfer, who first demonstrated it at Bondi Beach in 1933.

Ernest’s good mate and noted Aussie aviation pioneer Sir Charles Kingsford Smith backed its launch and influenced many local councils to make the ‘surf mats’ available for hire at Sydney’s popular beaches. The first official surf-o-plane race was held at Coogee Beach in February 1934, and holiday makers in countries such as the UK, South Africa and New Zealand were soon experiencing the joys of gliding along on the crest of a wave.

Ernest spent eight years going around local motor garages asking for inner tubes from the tyres of old cars to experiment with while honing his handiwork. He made hundreds of rubber surf planes before settling on his “improved type of pneumatic surf board or float”, which was only about 3 feet long, 20 inches wide and 7 inches high. Made of heavy-duty thick rubber, it had two handles attached to its nose, for manoeuvring, and a valve in its tail, for blowing it up, if necessary after deflation, while waiting for the next set of waves.

In a US patent that Dr Smithers filed in 1934, he described the surf-o-plane as “an improved type of pneumatic surf board or float”, and a newspaper report of the time, headed “Riding on Air in the Surf”, included a photo of a freshly out of the surf Ernest standing and smiling as he fondly holds on to his own surf-o-plane.

Dr Smithers had his patent request accepted on 14 December 1933, and the new toy was instantly and hugely successful on Bondi Beach. It was soon being mass produced, and on Sydney beaches, males and females of all ages were hiring it by the half hour. Late in 1933, Bondi’s chief beach inspector Stan McDonald resigned from his post to take up the ‘surf-o-plane and deckchair’ franchise at the beach’s north groyne, and surf-o-plane riding was thereafter synonymous with Bondi. Stan was the ‘go to’ man for recreational surf-o-plane hire for 50 years.

The device was also often used in surf rescues, including during 1938’s infamous Black Sunday, when Bondi lifesavers had to rescue 250 people after a sandbar collapsed and the beach descended into pandemonium.

The surf-o-plane remained the main alternative to the surfboard till the 1960s and into the ’70s, when the surf mat and bodyboard replaced it in popularity. Many Aussie champion surfers first took to the waves on a ‘surfo’ or ‘rubbery’, which it was called, and generations of ‘grommets’ used one to increase their confidence in the waves enough to become surf lifesavers.

Courtesy the Waverley Library Local Studies Collection and the State Library of New South Wales.