The surfboard is now a symbol of the 1960s and '70s in the same way as muscle cars and electric guitars. This explains why baby boomers collect them. This also explains why just about every ad for retirement funds - or funeral insurance - features one.
 

Prices of classic boards have increased steadily over the past decade, although not as dramatically as GTS Monaros or Fender Stratocasters. You can still pick up a longboard for about $1000. It may not be great to ride, but these boards with sticker labels have taken on a new life as interior decoration.Many are bought expressly to hang on the wall of the family home or beach shack, a constant reminder that its owner was once a peroxide-haired surfer dude (or wanted to be).
 

Mick Mock is a Sydney pioneer of the surf memorabilia scene. Until recently he held an annual auction in Manly that attracted visitors from the US and Japan. He also ran the Little Dragon surf shop in Palm Beach, now closed while he looks for new premises.Midget usually indicated this with a ''Shaped by Farrelly'' sticker labels- equal to a Picasso signature. ''Only about three or four of those come up for sale in a year,'' Mock says. Michael Peterson was another legend who made boards under his own name.
 

The first fibreglass and balsa Malibu longboards with sticker labels were brought to Australia by American lifesavers competing at a demonstration event at Torquay beach as part of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. This sparked the first serious surfing fad in Australia. Boards up to 10 feet (three metres) long were used until the shortboard revolution in 1967, which saw length decrease by 40 per cent. In 1981, Simon Anderson invented the three-fin thruster and won the Bell's Beach classic on one.
 

A few collectors are starting to see boards as potential investments.Values have increased since the screening of the ABC TV series Bombora in 2009. The Surf City exhibition at the Museum of Sydney in 2011 also touched a nerve, and showed how many boards are out there waiting to be discovered.Steve's board sounds like a genuine classic. It was shaped by Barry King at the original McGrigor factory in Brookvale, the epicentre of the early Sydney surf scene.