Meet Mullet, aged 97: he's the original Bondi rescuer

JOHN STROUD has seen plenty of surf drama in his time - he was there on Black Sunday in 1938 when hundreds of people were washed off a sandbank at Bondi Beach. At the age of 96 he is being honoured for his commitment by the North Bondi Surf Life Saving Club.

By InvestSMART · 2 Aug 2009

By InvestSMART ·
2 Aug 2009

JOHN STROUD has seen plenty of surf drama in his time he was there on Black Sunday in 1938 when hundreds of people were washed off a sandbank at Bondi Beach. At the age of 96 he is being honoured for his commitment by the North Bondi Surf Life Saving Club.

Mr Stroud has been around so long joining the North Bondi club in 1928 that the rules have had to be changed for him.

Today the Maroubra resident will become the first person to receive an 80-year Surf Life Saving Australia award. Previously, long-service awards only went up to 75 years.

Mr Stroud, born at Kogarah on September 27, 1912, moved from hotel to hotel in Sydney with his publican father. It was not until 1925, when he went to a public school at Bondi, that he became intimately acquainted with the surf.

He started surfing, became a successful competitor and joined the North Bondi club. He earned his Bronze Medallion, mandatory for all surf lifesavers, in January 1929. He went on to become a patrol captain. He also acquired the nickname "Mullet", although a shark that glided beneath him during one surf decided he would not make the dish of that day.

There were plenty of dramas. On one occasion the body of a fisherman floated into shore and a club member volunteered to bring it in: "He grabbed the arm and the arm came off, and you could hear his yell from the clubhouse."

Successes included a win in the Australian Rescue and Resuscitation Championships, as they were then called, in 1932-33.

In 1935 the North Bondi club hired two Fokker aircraft run by Charles Kingsford Smith's company and flew to a competition in Newcastle, only to find that on their way back the weather turned nasty. People on the ground had to use car lights to help the pilots find the airstrip.

The Black Sunday rescue was the worst day of Mr Stroud's surfing life. "We were pulling people out by the hair, any way we could." Five could not be saved.

Mr Stroud joined the air force in 1940 and served in New Guinea and the Pacific islands. He returned to New Guinea after the war and ended up diving to extract non-ferrous metals from Japanese wrecks.

He married in 1949, returned to Australia, built a house at Oatley, and worked for Pioneer Concrete until his retirement in 1956. He last surfed 16 years ago.

Mr Stroud thinks surf lifesaving is easier today, with the rubber duckies replacing the time-consuming and difficult running out of the line.