1928 - 2018

Scott Brewster Dillon was one of the great larrikins of Australian surfing. He was born in Bondi and legend has it he was riding waves aged 6. He became a lifesaver at 15 and rode a 'toothpick', a 16-foot-long hollow, timber surf ski board.

Phil Jarret wrote in 2018: “One day in 1949 he was surfing off the Ben Buckler rocks when the shark meshing boat pulled alongside him to disentangle a four-metre white pointer. A pack of sharks then surrounded the boat and the surfers as they attacked and ate the maimed white pointer. Far from deterring Scott, the incident turned him into a celebrity … and he subsequently became a spear fisherman and shark hunter.”

In his teens, Dillon boxed at Bondi Surf Life Saving Club events, where his father was treasurer. He was twice Australian amateur bantamweight champion. After World War II, the thrills of the speedway appealed and he drove midgets and sedans, winning three NSW titles.

At age 24, after narrowly missing a place on Australia’s boxing team for the 1952 Olympics, he departed on what became a 10-year working holiday lumberjacking in Canada and Alaska, boxing in the United States and surfing big waves in Mexico, Hawaii and California.

Dillon returned to Australia in 1957 and became a pioneer surfboard manufacturer, making boards with Noel Ward in Wellington Lane at Bondi before setting up Scott Dillon Surfboards at Brookvale making longboards in 1961. He joined Gordon Woods, Barry Bennett, Greg McDonagh, Bill Wallace and Denny Keogh, later known as the ‘Brookvale Six’.

The suburb became a mecca for the surfboard shaping industry. The first boards were solid Malibu-style, made of balsa wood. He also pioneered the first polyurethane foam surfboard blank. His boards were highly valued by big-wave surfers including Nat Young. When the short-board era began, many of the pioneers closed, including Dillon.

In 1967, he moved to Coffs Harbour and in 2001 established the Legends Surf Museum. In 2004, he was inducted into the Surfing Hall of Fame as one of the original six legends of the Australian surfing industry. Dillon died in 2018, aged 90.

Images courtesy the Jack Eden Collection.