"It's amazing":Pam Burridge in Girls Can't Surf.Credit:Madman
"We probably wouldn't have picked it from where we were,"she says."[Last] year excluded - they get equal prizemoney then there's a year-long lockdown where they're virtually not competing - but it's amazing."
Burridge,who runs a surfing school at Mollymook on the NSW South Coast,was part of a generation of female surfers whose battles to become established on the professional circuit are chronicled in a lively new documentary,Christopher Nelius'Girls Can't Surf,which is having a world premiere in the Sydney Film Festival's summer season this month.
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It shows women professionals having so little money in those struggling early years that they would sometimes have to sleep in their board bags in contest tents,then compete when the waves were considered too poor for their male counterparts. They sometimes competed at the same time as organisers held a bikini competition on the beach. And their prizemoney was half what male surfers were getting.
"It was hectically hard and the culture was terrible but it was of its time and it needed changing,"Burridge says."We were fully willing to be in boots and all. But,looking back at some of the stuff,oh my god,it was really bad."
Burridge became a professional surfer at 16 - almost accidentally when she was invited to a pro contest in Hawaii after winning an amateur Australian title - in 1981. She won the world championship in 1990,carving a path for future Australian champions Pauline Menczer,seven-time winners Layne Beachley and Gilmore and two-time winner Wright.
"It was like growing up in a weird family,I guess,"Burridge says of joining the tour.