"Midget", his schoolyard nickname, became shorthand for surfing when riding waves was symbolic of a new nationalism as Australia turned from England to the United States and baby boomers embraced California dreaming in their secret inner life.

Farrelly was a world surfing champion and an innovative surfboard shaper and surfboard mogul, but his moment came on January 2, 1963, when the outsider from the far side of the Pacific unexpectedly won the Makaha​ International Championships on the west side of Hawaii's Oahu​ island.

It made Farrelly a national hero and he rode the wave of fame for years. But curiously, he became a prophet without honour within the surf tribe: some surf media tastemakers eschewed him, preferring to fan the fire of rivalry with his former protege Robert "Nat" Young. Farrelly did little to disabuse his tormentors, speaking out against marijuana at a time when getting high and opposition to the Vietnam War were large parts of middle-class youth culture.

As a result, he is regarded as the patriarch of Australian surfing but a man tinged by an acerbic yet misunderstood edge: His 1965 book, This Surfing Life contains the observation: "When you're comfortable, you're dead."

Farrelly, who has died of stomach cancer aged 71, grew up in an Australia where World War II made people want to stay home but he was one of the few youngsters to experience another life.

Born in 1944, he grew up living between the surf and the harbour in Pacific Parade, Manly, and attended Manly Village Primary School. He also lived in Canada and New Zealand and his father, a taxidriver, holidayed with his family in Hawaii. It was there that Farrelly caught his first glimpse of the beach not filtered through the lens of the SLSC movement.

The "Hawaiian beach boy" culture bit deep and, like many Australians in 1960, he left high school at 15 but a bank or trade apprenticeship was not for him. Instead, he did something highly unusual: he hung at the beach.

He'd seen the early surf moves at the Freshwater SLSC​ and stood on the Queenscliff headland watching Dave Jackman paddle an 11-foot balsa gun onto a giant "Queenie Bombie" wave. There and then, a group of home-grown beach boys on Sydney's northern beaches decided to go to Hawaii without passing go.

In the summer of 1962-63, Farrelly made his second surf trek to Hawaii with a crew from Queenscliff, Freshwater, North Steyne and Bondi. He was like the 1.72cm kid brother but in the Makaha final danced across the wave faces – his sister Jane was a ballerina – and shut down the big Hawaiians Rabbit​ Kekai​ and Nappy Napoleon and the Pipeline specialist, Californian John Peck.

"They gave me the trophy. I remember an Australian couple in the Makaha crowd saying, 'Good on you,' and Ron Church taking that photo of me with the trophy on the Keyo board I'd shaped for Hawaii," Farrelly recalled four years ago."I got into my car – you could buy a bomb for $50 without windows, $100 with windows – and drove back to the north shore to tell the other blokes I'd won. They probably had some beer."

It took a couple of days for news of his win to reach Sydney, but he returned home the hero.

Single-handedly and almost overnight he wrenched the beach from the muscular and military culture of the life-saving clubs and gave small men a place on the sand. He wrote a Sun Herald newspaper column, established a surfboard-making business and eventually the Sydney-based Surfblanks manufacturing company, appeared at shopping malls, spruiked for Philishave​ electric razors and helped form the Australian Surfriders' Association, helped launch the International Surfing Federation to oversee subsequent world titles. He also starred in many surf movies, invariably made by the other patriarch of Australian surfing, the late Bob Evans.

By 1964, as Beatlemania and Cassius Clay gripped boomers, Farrelly showed he was worthy of the celebratory, winning the first world surfing championship on his home beach. Some 65,000 watched him ride the sandbank in front of Manly's Corso to snatch the title.

But one of his fellow finalists, Californian Joey Cabell​, inadvertently became the seed of the Australian world champion's undoing in the surf world.

While Farrelly gave a flawless display of smooth riding in the curl, replete with a "showy" raised-arms turn that was captured forever by the scores of photographers lining the sand, Cabell, riding a board some 10 pounds lighter, was all over the wave face and lost points for dropping in on fellow competitors. But that Sunday afternoon Cabell's bustling, "involved" style, started the shortboard revolution in Australia.

Inspired by Cabell, some Australian surfers, including Bob McTavish, Young, Kevin Platt, headed north to the new-found surf mecca of Noosa Heads and Byron Bay to experiment with board design, eventually chopping off about a metre in length of the surfboards of the day.

Young won the 1966 world championship on a small board and was immediately painted as some new-age god in the most influential of the surf media of the time, Evan's Surfing World magazine.

Drugs were not a part of youth culture in 1966 but as surfers started to head to the West Coast in the 1967 "summer of love", marijuana and LSD became part of the life surf. Shortboard exponents personified Californian cool.

It was called the "New Era" but in the race to be hip Farrelly was collateral damage, yesterday's hero, as surfing embraced a brasher trend when going with the flow was replaced by an aggressive more asserted style, both at sea and on land.

Farrelly's treatment as a boardmaker has been shoddy. Even as the shortboard revolution raged, Farrelly played a pivotal yet ignored role in the development of the vee-bottomed board that allowed surfers to go up the face of a wave rather than simply race away from a breaking curl.

He claimed he was riding the design a full year before hipsters Young and McTavish were filmed riding vee-bottoms in large waves at Hawaii's Honolua​ Bay in 1968.

Despite his achievements, Farrelly fell off the memory banks: Australia's Surfing Life magazine totally ignored him in its 1992 list of "The Top 16 Shapers of All Time"; he suffered the same fate in SURFER magazine's 2009  "Fifty Greatest Surfers of All Time".

Little wonder perhaps. For years, his media opponents had ignored or suppressed his superb and continuing contest record after his 1964 world record win. In fact, he was a far more successful competitor than his rival Nat Young.

Farrelly was runner-up in the '68 contest at Puerto Rico's Rincon​ Beach, and the '70 world titles at Victoria's Johanna Beach; Young placed 4th and 6th, respectively. Farrelly also won the 1970 Gunston 500 in South Africa.

In 1986 Farrelly was inducted, along with Nat Young, into the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame. But the pair never really had a rapprochement.

He has lived at Palm Beach since the 1960s. In later years, he coached surfboat crews at the Palm Beach Surf Life Saving Club. They even allowed him into the $10,000 a head Cabbage Tree Club. Not even such an exclusive enclave could deny such a famed water man. Still, Farrelly did not think much of the Palmie elites; he competed in the surfboat for Whale Beach SLSC.

Farrelly is survived by his wife Beverlie, and their three daughters.

Damien Murphy