The boardshorts came first, and they came out of a home workshop on Queensland's Gold Coast. In 1973, Gordon and Rena Merchant began cutting and stitching board shorts at home and selling them to local surf shops along the coast. Gordon, a keen surfer and board shaper, had a specific complaint with the trunks available …

Across the Pacific from Southern California, a parallel skate culture was taking shape in the 1980s — smaller in scale, thinner on infrastructure, but no less serious in attitude. The Australian scene that emerged during that decade was shaped less by skatepark design and industry marketing than by the same coastal …

Surf shops anchored the coastal retail economy of 1980s Australia in a way that had no direct parallel anywhere else on earth. From Torquay in Victoria to Burleigh Heads in Queensland, these stores were not niche curio outlets. They were the primary commercial interface between beachside communities and the hardware, …