How Isabel Letham became a legend, and gave rise to women's surfing in Australia

If you ask Pam Burridge what she sees when she looks at this black-and-white photo, she'll give you a distinctly technical description: "I see her riding a board eight-foot-six long and really difficult to ride." Burridge, who is recognised as a pioneer of women's surfing, knows exactly how much of her career is due to the woman in the photo: Isabel Letham. In the 1960s, according to Graham Cassidy, former president of the Australian Professional Surfing Association, "women were despised in the water". "Now we've reached a point where surfing has reached its tentacles into so many different parts of Australian society that surfing is almost an aspect of people's ordinary health or fitness," he says. "Most Australian surfers would have an understanding that is this formative figure in our history", Serong says, "and it's interesting that other surfing nations don't have a significant early pioneer of the sport".