He was the first lost genius of Australian surfing. The tiny 15-year-old Bondi kid who won the New South Wales junior and senior titles on the same day, beating the incumbent and future world champion. A “little master” whose exploits, good and bad, entered the mythology of 1960s Sin City and whose tragic end – drowned on dry land opposite the beach he loved – went largely unmourned.
The cracked ballad of Kevin Brennan won’t rate a mention at Bondi over the 2025 summer. Fifty years after his death, his story, like the beach he made his own, is almost unrecognisable.
Today Bondi is a beautiful place for beautiful people. “Back then, it was ‘scum valley’,” says Monty Webber, a surfing writer – “cheap flats, cockroaches on the streets, syringes in the sand.”
Like the beach he came to rule, “Kevin had a good side but kept it hidden,” says Peter Bowes, an author and essayist.
Brennan was the second son of a single mother. The author Phil Jarratt wrote: “With his homemade haircut, busted teeth, and appetite for danger, he was the archetypal delinquent for whom Bondi’s surf was babysitter and battlefield.”
That’s where his fellow truant Bowes met him. “We shared a dislike of discipline,” he says. “But what was different about Kevin was what he did in the water.
“Back then guys surfed without style. Kevin was a boy among men but he was an artist. He had calm fluidity in all conditions and mastered every wave thrown at him.”
Back on land, Brennan’s footing wasn’t as assured. He had to steal to eat (Bowes says he subsisted on a smoothie of “double milk, two raw eggs, a teaspoon of vanilla essence, a slab of ice-cream, an overripe banana – all whipped hard, topped with cream and a Cherry Ripe”) and eluded captors by paddling into the horizon or letting a bombora spit him to Bronte.
People forgave Brennan when they saw his supernatural feats. “Kevin danced when he surfed,” Webber says. “Up ’n’ downs, floaters, re-entries, spinners, cutbacks. His ability to move spontaneously and instinctively on a heavy board and changing surface was remarkable. To do that you need incredible vision, rat cunning and imagination.”
In 1965, all Australia saw what Brennan could do. Riding a borrowed board with a broken fin, he wiped the floor with the world champions Midget Farrelly and Nat Young. “Brennan frequently hung five on the nose of his board as he took the left hand curl,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported. “At one stage he rode backwards, a feat seldom seen in competitive surfing.”
A crowd of 30,000 cheered as the impish 15-year-old won the junior and senior trophies. Until then Kevin had been nicknamed “The Head” for his spindly 140cm and 42kg frame and the grinning bonce atop it. Now the teen tearaway was state champion, Kev The Head swelled into an alternative meaning.
A steep slide down
The first wave of experimental surf films was rolling in. Paul Witzig’s Hot Generation broke in 1967 with “teenage wonder boy Kevin Brennan” as its star, snap turning and switch-footing at Noosa, Burleigh and Byron.
“He was the world’s first and best ambidextrous surfer,” says Grant Dwyer, who grew up alongside Brennan. “The Head was famous everywhere after that.”
The Vietnam war brought a new scene to Bondi. “The American soldiers did their R&R in the bright lights and badlands of Kings Cross,” Dwyer says. “Until then, beer and a bit of amphetamine were the poisons at Bondi.
“Kevin swung back into town in high acclaim and started to flit about the scene. Soon he was selling Saigon grass and making a fortune.”
But having stolen all his life, money had no value, and The Head got high on his own supply. “He was always heading for a hard landing,” Bowes says. “And it was a steep downhill slide.”
Brennan, always prickly, became a pariah. “Few will give Kevin any credit beyond his surfing,” Dwyer says. “He was a thief and bully, spiteful and arrogant. And drugs made him worse.”
As his rivals parlayed their talent into professionalism, global fame and business empires, Brennan descended into the maelstrom. “The last time I saw him was heartbreaking,” Bowes says. “He was splayed on an old mattress with other derelicts beyond help or hope.
“The giantkiller champion of ’65 was in there somewhere, but now everyone walked around him.”
“Toward the end, Midget [Farrelly] and his wife found Kevin hitchhiking up north,” Webber says. “They gave him a ride but Midget said ‘the fresh-faced young acrobat was a drug-fucked street freak’.”
The final fractured images of The Head were haunting, according to those around Bondi at the time: a shambling figure in Speedos and trenchcoat, smacked out and walking into storm surf with a lit cigarette on his lips.
Ten short years after he shocked the world, Kevin Brennan – Bondi’s greatest board rider – overdosed and died in a flophouse overlooking the beach. He was just 25.
