This is a close up of a postcard I sent to Louisa two days ago. I couldn't read the sign in it, so I used my work phone as a magnifying glass slash camera. The postcard was of pre-decimal currency Surfers Paradise, printed in West Germany. The close up reminds me of a Marc de Jong painting.
For hire: umbrellas, surf-o-planes, windbreaks, indecipherables, rentable for a few bob. What's a surf-o-plane? A surfoplane sans hyphens is an inflatable rubber mat patented in the early 1930s by Bondi inventor Ernest Smithers. They took off, they hurt your nipples, they necessitated the eventuation of the rashy (or is it spelt rashie - my 2nd edition 90s Macquarie doesn't say, though it does define surfoplane as: 'a small, inflatable rubber float used esp. for shooting waves. [Trademark]')
Maybe the hyphens in surf-o-plane were to get around patent infringements. Smithers did sue someone for selling their own version of surfoplane, and then sold his patent to the infringer.
There's no wikipedia page for surfoplanes, but they get a mention under Pie iron, for Smithers patented a refinement of the jaffle iron (wooden handles). Trove has lots of surfoplane results, and there's a deal of internet surf research and blog posts to read about surfoplanes if you so choose.
Take the aer out of aeroplane and it's oplane. Who in the 1930s had flown in an aeroplane? How many rode a suffixed equivalent? Search for "oplane" in Trove and "exclude aeroplane"; aside from surf-o-planes, there are thousands of chair-o-planes and horse-o-planes (and the odd fly-o-plane and loop-o-plane (from which two youths and a girl walked away unhurt when the main shaft of the machine snapped in 1951 St Kilda)).
A chairoplane featured at Perth's 1927 Uglieland as the latest mechanical device, alongside 'a performing sheep possessed of great intelligence'. (Aside: Uglieland carnivals were run by the Ugly Men's Association, who seem to have been a little like Habitat for Humanity for post-WWI Perth, until Uglieland's venue White City got shutdown by wowsers and the Ugly Men lost their major source of funds.)
In 1946 while watching a horse-o-plane machine, Charles Foley, 16 was struck on the side of the head by a wooden horse. His mother collapsed in the ambulance to hospital.
Newspaper archive results for carnival rides are either advertisements or articles about accidents. There have been lots of accidents on horse-o-planes and chair-o-planes. Year after year, decade upon decade, deaths and tragic accidents. Not so the surfoplane. It chafed your chest, you might have got dragged out to sea on it, but shooting the waves was way safer than flying machines.
