Pam Burridge (b. 1965) is one of Australia’s first female professional surfers. Given her first surfboard at ten, Burridge learned to surf at Manly. She won her first competition in 1977 at the age of twelve, won the New South Wales State Championship in 1979, 1980 and 1981, and was national champion in 1980 and 1981. At fifteen she turned professional and went on the international circuit; a year later she was ranked in the top five on the international pro rankings. By the age of seventeen Burridge had earned her first of six runner-up finishes in the world championships. Persevering with her sport despite personal vicissitudes throughout the 1980s, she won the world championship in Hawaii by a record margin in 1990, becoming the first Australian women’s world champion. She retired from competition in 1993, and, after a comeback from 1996 to 1998, ranked eighth in the world amid more and fiercer competitors than she had faced in the early 1980s. After competing for almost twenty years, she moved from Sydney's northern beaches to the south coast in 1998, opening her own successful surf school in Mollymook. Burridge was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1995, and California's Surfing Walk of Fame in 2017.
Lorrie Graham photographed Burridge with her beloved surfboard made by Geoff McCoy, one of her first sponsors.
Purchased 2011
© Lorrie Graham
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Well behaved women seldom make history, as the saying goes, and the National Portrait Gallery, consequently, is full of awesome Australian women who refused to conform to narrow ideas about their place and their worth.
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