Christchurch surfboard exhibition shows sport's history

  • 25/03/2017

Christchurch's surfing community has put together a massive collection of surfboards to celebrate the sport's history.

Their exhibition, at the Duke Festival of Surfing in New Brighton, records a century of surfing in New Zealand.

It's a room full of memories - a collection of 151 surfboards from around the world.

Some of them go back to the early 1900s, when surfboards were simply a plank of wood.

"I've watched the boards go from long to short, and then longboards are coming back in as a Malibu, or Mel or Logger," says volunteer curator Simon Allard.

Mr Allard helped set up the two-week exhibition in New Brighton Mall. Every board has been donated by the local surfing community.

Some of those boards are extremely rare, like one see-through Perspex Pointer inflated by helium.

A third of them have been donated by local surf shop operator Keiry Bennett.

"I found a couple at the dump. They were s***ers, but I was thinking, we can't have those being dumped," Mr Bennett says.

One hidden gem was a 1930s Hawaiian classic, recovered from a farmer's shed.

"That's worth $30,000, which is pretty good considering I paid $150 for it," Mr Bennett says.

For Mr Allard, it's a celebration of everything good about the sport.

"You paddle out, go under the first wave and it washes all the problems away. They're still there when you come in, but when you're surfing, it seems to all go," he says.

It is a century of progression captured in one room.

Newshub.