Australia's most influential surfer is someone most haven't heard of, argues Tim Baker in his new book Renowned surfing author Tim Baker has released a new book Australia's Century of Surf. WHEN Surfing Australia celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, it marked the occasion with a web poll to decide Australia's 10 most influential surfers. Like many such exercises, it was a process fraught with controversy that started more arguments than it resolved. In my own study of our surfing history, Australia's Century of Surf, I argue that our most influential surfer was in fact a district court judge and knight of the British realm who few surfers have ever heard of. Sir Adrian Curlewis enjoyed a 40-year reign as president of the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia. Sir Adrian Curlewis was the son of district court judge Herbert Curlewis and Ethel Turner, who penned the classic Seven Little Australians. Sir Adrian enjoyed a 40-year reign as president of the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia, from 1935 to 1975, interrupted only by three years spent as a prisoner of war, first at Changi and then on the Burma Railway. He was also a pioneer surfer, the second boardrider at Sydney's Palm Beach in the 1920s, fond of "stunting" on solid timber boards in his youth - standing on his head, riding backwards, jumping from one board to another. As SLSA president he was head of the Shark Advisory Board that introduced shark nets to Sydney beaches in the 1930s, bringing to an end a spate of fatal shark attacks. Among numerous other civic achievements, in 1960 he convened the international conference that led to the universal adoption of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and the current accepted practice of CPR. His astonishing tenure at the helm of the SLSA spread Australian surf lifesaving techniques around the country and around the world. Author Tim Baker with his book. Picture Ian Currie. His promotion to the SLSA presidency coincided with the shift from the Hawaiian-style timber "solids" to the plywood "hollows" in the mid-1930s. Yet Cur-lewis decried the move away from solid Hawaiian-style boards and the resultant loss of ride performance in favour of paddling speed. Yet 20 years later, Curlewis equally deplored the shift from hollows to the lightweight balsa malibu boards introduced by US lifeguards visiting Australia for the International Surf Carnival in 1956, despite their superior wave-riding capabilities. Ironically, Curlewis had organised the 1956 carnival in Torquay as a great celebration of Australian surf life saving, after it was overlooked as the exhibition sport for the Melbourne Olympics in favour of Australian football. Unwittingly, he had sewn the seeds of the greatest threat to the SLSA in its history, as surfers adopted the new lightweight equipment in droves. An arch conservative, it was largely his intransigence over the new balsa boards in the late '50s that led to the great surfer/clubbie cultural divide, a defining trait of Australian surfing. His harsh treatment during the war and his embrace of the surf club motto "vigilance and service" hardened his attitude toward the frivolous play of boardriding, and he became an enemy of the newly emancipated surfers in the 1960s. The first generation of breakaway surfers cast Cur-lewis as a pantomime villain for his campaigns to control, regulate and, in some cases, ban and confiscate surfboards. And yet his predictions of the moral dangers of undisciplined and unregimented youth would largely be realised in the years ahead as the new movement produced a devastating trail of drug casualties. Ironically, Curlewis may have been among the first Aussie surfers to experience a mind-altering substance, while working on the Burma Railway. Surfing writer Tim Baker has traced the history of surfing in Australia in a new book. Aged 41, too old to be conscripted and with a wife and two young children, he enlisted in the army at the start of the war. He was stationed in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese and taken prisoner. His family didn't know if he was alive or dead for 18 months. Almost half the 7000 prisoners who worked on the Burma Railway died from malaria, cholera, beri beri, tropical ulcers or malnutrition. Cur-lewis kept secret diaries all through the war providing a horrific record of the suffering endured. He was instrumental in maintaining morale among prisoners and helped run "Changi University," providing lectures and study opportunities to help prisoners keep their minds active. "It was essential for men to have something to do to keep them going," he wrote. An educational scheme was started to keep their minds and bodies fit. Anything that we thought of, we would find someone who was an expert in it. I learnt motor engineering. One of the few ways prisoners found to stave off hunger pains was to find something, anything, to smoke. Pages were torn from books as cigarette papers, and tea leaves or dried flowers were smoked. Curlewis described a type of tobacco provided by local "elephant boys," which they dubbed "sheik's beard" because of its thick, black texture: "If you stood up and smoked one puff it made you so giddy that you just fell over straight away. So the only way to do it was to lie on the ground, roll a cigarette and take one puff. That was sufficient. Upon his return from the war, Curlewis boasted he was discharged from the army at 4pm and was in his barrister's chambers half an hour later with a brief for the next day. Author Tim Baker at home with his two children (L-R) Vivi and Alex. He developed an earnest regard for the need for discipline, physical fitness and organised activity for otherwise wayward youth, saying: "I'm satisfied that I only survived because of my physical fitness." These ideas would come to have a profound effect on his reign as SLSA president. As one newspaper report put it: "Since Capt Adrian Curlewis has been presiding at the SLSA meetings in khaki, the Association seems to be getting the military complex. He thinks country and interstate clubs are run in battalions. When Curlewis retired in 1975, the SLSA was still reeling from the dramatic drop in membership through the 1960s, as a new generation of surfers eschewed the surf clubs for wave-chasing surfaris. A new administration finally allowed women to become club members, and launched the Nippers program to woo youngsters to clubs. Curlewis died peacefully at home in 1985 at the age of 84. For all his vigilance, service and civic achievements, he left behind a beach culture deeply divided between two tribes who have only recently come to an uneasy peace. Australia's Century of Surf by Tim Baker, Ebury Press, RRP $45. On sale now.