The best part of writing this blog is the people I meet – their spirit, experiences and lessons demonstrate the new age of ageing. What started as a casual walk on the beautiful beach of Bondi turned into an interview with Richardson – a local silver surfer who has been riding the waves for most of his life. Wayne was kind enough to share with us his long time love story with the beach.

“I was born in 1959 at the War Memorial Hospital in Waverley. I lived at Tamarama beach for my first 14 years where I learned to swim and surf from the age of 4. The reason I was at the beach at this early age is because my older sister would take me there all the time and so the beach became my backyard! I used to play on the waters edge and when a surf board washed up the shore I would grab it and paddle around on it until the surfer arrived. After a while they would let me borrow it for a  while and that’s the way you learnt to surf back then.

Pretty soon I had my own surf-craft made from rubber and so the journey began.

Starting on inflatable rubber surf-craft, then onto polystyrene shaped surfboards and then to fibreglass surfboards. The latter could only be surfed at certain times at Tamarama and so you went to Bondi to ride them all day long, and so we did!

At the age of 14 my family moved to Bondi and i was surfing there more and more as I had found a whole new group of mates at High school who also surfed there.
Sufboards were changing radically in the 70’s and us young blokes were reaping the benefits. The surfboards were smaller, wider and faster which suited us beautifully. Over the years friends came and went, some moved away from Bondi and some died. Throughout this time I made some great friends who became like brothers to me, and 40 odd years later they are still like that to me. We meet down Bondi most days and still surf together, having just as much fun as we used to all those tears ago. We really haven’t grown up at all and I strongly believe that our surfing keeps us young at heart. It’s my fountain of youth!!”