1950 - 1975

Many surfing aficionados consider Kevin ‘The Head’ Brennan – so nicknamed for his large cranium – to be Bondi’s most talented surfer ever. He took the surfing world by storm when he was only 15.

As a 15-year-old dynamo, he won the New South Wales junior-league surfing title before entering the senior division and winning it as well. In the space of a day, he beat some of the world’s best surfers, including Bernard ‘Midget’ Farrelly and Nat Young. He went on to feature in Paul Witzig’s 1967 cult surf film The Hot Generation, in which he thrilled audiences by performing his ‘switch foot’ antics and deep-tube riding.

‘The Head’ is remembered as being a mischievous, small-statured man whose surfing ability some people described as supernatural. He grew up in a single-parent home in Bondi and serially wagged school to spend the day in the Bondi surf, where, cigarette in mouth, he’d paddle out, ride a wave ‘switch foot’, take one last drag and flick the butt into the ocean.

In 1994, Sydney punk-rock band The Celibate Rifles – who’d formed in 1979 – immortalised him in their song ‘Kev the Head’.

Sadly, Kevin died at age 25, having overdosed on heroin at the back of a seedy Kings Cross nightclub.

Images courtesy Terry Jenkings and the Jack Eden collection.