Issue 592 features a new series exploring the dark seams that run through Australian surf culture. The first installation of ‘Dark Lineage’ invites you to consider the volatile journeys of Bobby Brown, Kevin Brennan and Keith Paull. A gritty and at times confronting body of work, which deals honestly with the issues around mental health that are often overlooked in the quest to romanticise and deify surfing figures. Below is the profile of Kevin Brennan which featured in Issue 592.
Kevin ‘The Head’ Brennan
Kevin Brennan, who grew up in Bondi Beach, was nicknamed ‘The Head,’ because his head was so much bigger than the rest of his tiny body. The Head was a surfing prodigy, who in 1965, at the age of 15, won both the junior and men’s divisions of the NSW State Titles at his home break, Bondi. In doing so he beat both Midget Farrelly and Nat Young, on a borrowed board with a busted fin, in front of 30,000 people.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported:“Brennan frequently hung five on the nose of his board as he took the left hand curl, and at one stage rode backwards with his foot on the nose, a feat seldom seen in competitive surfing.”
Kevin had a rough upbringing and spent many nights at the houses of friends to avoid the tension in his own home. As Phil Jarratt put it: “Dad shot through early. Mum drank. Her boyfriends monstered the boy. And with his homemade haircut, busted teeth, and appetite for danger, he was the archetypal delinquent for whom the Bondi surf was both babysitter and battlefield. Australian surf culture took off through these tough kids locked out of home.”
His childhood friend, Grant Dwyer, told me The Head’s home life was pretty bad.“He had a single mother who had to work hard to make ends meet. His older brother, Phillip, was gay, which was uncommon back then. Everyone loved Phillip but it must have been hard for Kevin, who was tiny and had small man syndrome. He had to become a big man to prove himself. He was bullied and became a bully. He was also a very good thief. He pinched money from people’s clothes on the beach and from inside their cars. He was incredible on a surfboard. In the top five goofy-footers in Australia by the time he was 15. He was the first of us young Bondi boys to be invited to join the Windansea surf club.”
I asked Grant what he thought went wrong.“It always comes back to home life. His demise was very quick. US soldiers on R&R from the Vietnam war were bringing Saigon grass into Kings Cross. Kevin started to spend more and more time there and was the first kid to sell grass to other kids down at Bondi. Then the heroin got him. Next thing he was selling his backside at the Cross.”
I quizzed Grant whether taking drugs seemed like a natural progression for a surfer back then. “We all did what our heroes were doing. Kevin was our hero, and we did what he did. The old saying was ‘I’ll turn you on.’ First it was grass and then LSD. And after you’d been turned on, you’d go and turn on someone else.We were a part of the cultural revolution.The footballers and cricketers back then weren’t smoking grass and taking acid. We were. We were anti-war and living lives of freedom and adventure. There was still the old-fashioned army mentality amongst the older generation, and they thought we were cowards. But we were just having fun.”
Mike Bennet said: “A lot of good guys came out of Bondi. Good guys that surfed great and made a success out of their lives. Not much is said about them – but that’s the way life works. Bad news makes the head-lines.”Matt Warshaw romanticised the good times for Bobby and Kevin: “The best longboard surfing in Paul Witzig’s Hot Generation, for my money anyway, takes place at Tallow
Beach in Byron Bay, with teenage wonderboys Kevin Brennan and Bobby Brown.Sand dunes and blue skies. Nobody else in the water, and crystalline sheet-glass lefts pouring through.”
Phil Jarrett surmised: “Kevin Brennan was a classic Bondi boy, tough, damaged, lost. It’s not complicated. He crashed and burned. He was the first casualty of Australian surfing.”
I only saw Kevin Brennan once. It was in late 1974. He was dishevelled, barefooted and wearing a long army trench coat. He kicked my surfboard out of his way as he entered a building on Bondi’s beachfront. He complained: “Fucken young surfers always gettin’ in the way.” A friend told me who he was and what he had achieved.I thought: “You legend.” But I thought he looked a bit like he was putting on an attention seeking act. As if, even though he’d given up surfing he was still doing something that would keep people talking about him.
Robert Conneely observed: “He ended up a derelict in an overcoat walking the beachfront. He was playing at being psycho to get a pension but ended up believing his own ploy. Even still, he’d bum a board off the beach, go out and rip, step off on the sand and walk off.”
Kevin ‘The Head’ Brennan died from drug related asphyxiation in 1975 in a Bondi Beach dosshouse called The lellen. The dark lineage had been born and would only grow over the decades to come. Many great Australian surfers would fall under the spell of self-destructive legends and willingly emulate their demise. As Robert Conneely was quoted: “Kevin was to his generation, what Michael Peterson was to the next.
