Pam Burridge (b. 1965), surfer, won her first competition in 1977 at the age of twelve, won her first NSW state championship in 1979, and was national champion the following year. She went on the international circuit when she was sixteen and by the age of seventeen had earned her first of six runner-up finishes in the world championships. Persevering with her sport through personal turmoil in the 1980s, she won the world championship by a record margin in 1990, becoming the first Australian women’s world champion. She retired from competition in 1993, and, after a comeback, again in 1999, ranked eighth in the world amidst more, and fiercer, competitors than she had faced as a pioneer in the early 1980s. She was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1995 and gained a place on California’s Surfing Walk of Fame in 2017.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2011
© Lorrie Graham
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