Written by Tim Baker

This was taken from Issue 600 of our mag but is now available to read for free below.

If Robbie Page’s extraordinary life ever becomes a Netflix series (and here’s hoping one day it will), I for one would binge the shit out of it. The new season has just dropped and some might think the script writers have jumped the shark –  TV industry slang for becoming ridiculously improbable (based on an episode of 60s nostalgia TV comedy Happy Days, wherein local tough guy/heartthrob Fonzie jumped over a shark on his motorbike).

During our most recent chat, Robbie was admiring his newly born son, named Djalu, an Indigenous word meaning ‘lightning’, (in the Yolgnu language of Arnhem Land), after his partner Christie gave birth on Robbie’s 58th birthday.

“You’re like Mick Jagger now. You’re a legend,” Christie told Robbie, after Djalu’s arrival. Christie is a fifth-generation fisherman’s daughter from Barwon Heads and the former personal chef of Byron-based Hollywood hunk Chris Hemsworth.

“When Djalu’s 22 I’ll be 80,” Robbie marvels.

Robbie has just signed a new contract with his former French clothing sponsor Oxbow, who based their campaigns around Robbie’s radical surfing and outrageous on-land persona back in the 90s. “Robbie is my wizard. He will be with Oxbow for life,” Oxbow founder Fabrice Valeri once famously declared. Together they pioneered the Masters Surfing Titles, staged at Puerto Escondido and Tavarua in the late 90s.

Changes of ownership scuttled Fabrice’s bold promise but 30 years after Robbie’s pro- surfing heyday, Oxbow have made a movie about their most colourful team rider. Walkabout – the songlines of surfing, celebrates Robbie’s Indigenous ancestry and unwavering, freewheeling commitment to fully indulging his passion for surfing, refusing to yield to the passing of time. In Walkabout, Robbie’s re-united with his old French surfing buddy Arnaud Mestelan and they roam the coast from Crescent Head to Bells Beach and back with Robbie’s Indigenous mate, Wayne Carberry. Directed by award-winning director Matty Hannon (of Road to Patagonia fame), it’s a gripping, poignant and hilarious documentary on one of our great surfing characters.

New baby. New sponsor. New film. Is 58 the new 30, or is Robbie simply such an enigma, so unbound by societal norms, that pedestrian matters like linear time and age simply do not apply? Certainly, the series so far supports the latter thesis.

Who could forget season one, where a young, lily-white, blond-haired Robbie grew up in poverty in the Bellambi housing commission in Wollongong, brought up by his Indigenous mother and a largely absent Irish father. “I’m the original Houso,” Pagey says. He recalls his mum sending him to the neighbours to ask for potatoes and other staples they couldn’t afford. “That’s what I grew up on. It was the most embarrassing, horrific thing ever.”  But the tough upbringing served him well when he made it on to the pro tour. “I knew how to ask for sponsorship or a place to stay.”

The ocean proved his salvation. “I threw all my madness into the ocean,” he declares in Walkabout.  He remembers the ‘repo man’ banging on the door to re-possess their Christmas presents and household items bought on hire purchase, that his mum couldn’t keep up payments for. Surfing provided a lifeline, his sharp intuitive skills perfectly suited to the abundant and varied waves of the NSW south coast. He found his ideal testing ground at Aussie Pipe and the ideal mentor in longtime goofy-foot standout, Terry Richardson.

He remembers feeling like a wild horse who couldn’t match it with the broken-in horses from good homes and families with solid education and polite manners. His only hope of survival was to unashamedly remain a wild horse. “I kept getting kicked out of school and kicked off footy teams,” he says, often for fighting or otherwise failing to conform. “The conformative stuff kills me. I’m not interested in being your broken-in horse at all. I’m not into being a good boy. I’m not cultured. I’m just going to remain a wild horse.”

There was season two, where the Boy from Bellambi took his colourful act to the pro tour, a solid string of amateur results to his name, and a wild peer group of unapologetically loose units to spar with – Rod Kerr, Simon Law, Matt Hoy, John Shimooka (RIP), to name a few. The ASP tour of the late 80s and early 90s went to bustling coastal holiday towns in peak summer season, which often meant crap waves and wild nightlife. Pagey held down a solid top 30 spot for the best part of a decade, highlighted by his win in the 1988 Pipeline Masters and a leading role in cheesy Hollywood surf flick, The North Shore. His charismatic, manic charms earned him friends, sponsors, women, a glorious global adventure of good times and opportunity unfolding at his feet. The boy from the Houso made good.

Then there was season three and the script writers figured our hero had enjoyed enough good fortune and it was time for a little noir in his otherwise sunny world. Flying from Spain, where pot was legal and the small wave grovel-fest in Zarautz inspired wild partying, our boy landed in Tokyo for the Japanese leg of the Tour. Customs and immigration officers took one look at Robbie’s long blond locks and colourful Oxbow fashion – all bright colours, flowers and bold patterns – and pulled him aside for the full treatment. They went through his luggage and personal effects with a fine-tooth comb, determined to find evidence of his unsuitability to enter a country that could not have been further removed from the liberal Spanish hedonism. The grim-faced officers grew increasingly agitated as they failed to find any contraband, until they got to his wallet and a small, folded square of blotting paper fell out. Robbie remembers it fluttering through the air in slow motion like a leaf and recalling with horror, ‘the acid!’ The residue of a huge night out in Zarautz.

Pagey spent 88 days in solitary confinement in a Tokyo jail, occupying the same cell that former Beatle, Paul McCartney, briefly found himself in after a minor drug bust. He remembers watching the leaves on a tree outside his cell change from green to orange to red and then fall earthwards, realising he’d been incarcerated through the change of seasons, his globe-trotting magical mystery tour suddenly brought to a halt. No one from the Association of Surfing Professionals, staging its Japanese events only a couple of hours drive away, did anything to advocate for their surfer or even visit him. It was left to his longtime shaper Phil Byrne to fly to Japan and try and assist. Robbie was eventually found guilty and deported. He flew straight to Hawaii on his existing ticket, hoping US customs wouldn’t notice the cancelled stamp on his Japanese visa. He’s always been an arsey bastard and sailed through Honolulu arrivals. The ASP Board voted to ban him from competition for 18 months, effectively bringing an end to his competitive career, despite the fact that many of those voting had been known to ingest the odd prohibited substance. He felt bitterly betrayed.

Presumably the scriptwriters had studied Joseph Campbell’s seminal text on story structure, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and Campbell’s theory of the Hero’s Journey. Because the wild oscillations in fortune continued in season four. Within months of being released from a Tokyo prison, Robbie had returned to France to visit his sponsors and plead for leniency and be re-united with his French girlfriend, who happened to be the granddaughter of French President Francois Mitterrand. From solitary confinement to the Mitterrand’s presidential palace in the space of a few months. Oxbow welcomed him back with open arms, unbothered by his brush with the Japanese penal system. And old Francois reportedly read an account of his granddaughter’s boyfriend’s ordeal in a major feature article in news magazine Paris Match and declared, “Robbie has done nothing wrong”.

Robbie discovered the French sensibility, the open-mindedness and acceptance of difference, suited him better than the narrow thinking and conservatism of his homeland. He made France his home for 10 typically eventful years. His sometimes chaotic and shambolic life path belies a keen street smarts and shrewd judgement. He ran a bar on the beach in Hossegor for many years, did well with real estate, fathered two boys to his then-Moroccan girlfriend, threw himself into the early days of big-wave and tow surfing in Europe.

When that relationship fell apart in season five, he returned to Australia to lick his wounds and get in touch with his Indigenous ancestry. That led him to Crescent Head, halfway between Sydney and the Gold Coast, about as far as you can get from the surfing mainstream on the east coast of Australia, and home to a tight-knit Indigenous community, Saltwater People with a love of the ocean and wave riding. Even though it’s over 500 km north of his ‘Gong upbringing, it felt like coming home.

He picked up an acreage property cheap halfway between Kempsey and Crescent, and threw himself into his surf wax business, Cream. His great, and sadly departed friend, surfer/artist/musician/shaper, Chris Lundy, produced the logo and all the artwork for the brand on a visit from Hawaii, holed up in Robbie’s rustic beach shack, fed a diet of good food and primo weed. Robbie’s two sons, Ismael and Brooman, now big, strapping lads, moved out from France and helped with the family business, pouring wax into moulds, packing it and cruising up and down the coast selling it to surf shops with their dad. Along the way, he picked up an ISA World Masters Title in Peru, forsaking his beloved herb for a full two weeks to ensure he could pass the mandatory drug testing.

He eventually opened a surf shop of his own on the road into Crescent, a form of hilarious, grunge surf commerce, equal parts business and theatre. Customers can have little idea what they are in for when they pull over at the non-descript industrial estate and walk through his doors. Here Robbie holds court, giving full expression to his wide-ranging views on everything from Indigenous culture, the state of the surf industry, the spiritual failings of White Australia, what’s wrong with pro-surfing and the attitudes of surfers in the water at our more crowded surf spots. It’s a rolling, free range manifesto that unfolds in rapid fire bursts of passion, jumping from one topic to another, like a pin board of events in a true crime podcast.

And he’s recently returned to Hawaii for the first time in 18 years, to renew old acquaintances with the locals and his beloved Pipeline. He recalls sitting on a bench at Pipe, a memorial to his old friend and fellow Pipe Master, Derek Ho, watching the majestic wave do its thing, wondering if he still had what it took to paddle out and pull in. He ran into Derek’s cousin Mason Ho, who calls Robbie Uncle, and the pair paddled out together.

“I got annihilated in the barrel. It’s been 18 years, I couldn’t believe the force,” he says. The pair wiped out on consecutive waves leading to a strange underwater meeting. “Mason’s body gets driven right through mine under water, he pushed and kicked me away. I pop up. He goes, Uncle, you okay? I’ve never met anyone under water before,” Robbie laughs. 

He drew inspiration from Mason’s dad, Michael, a pro-surfing pioneer and ageless charger. “Michael’s out there at 66. You’ve got to live that wild cowboy life to pull it off,” he says.

Robbie has strong views on how surfing generally, and pro-surfing in particular, treats its Elders. He reckons every former pro tour surfer should be granted a certificate for coaching and judging upon retirement, without having to jump through the various administrative hoops required, arguing they’ve already graduated from the most elite surfing finishing school. While he sees young Aussie pro-surfers fawn and cower to the Hawaiian locals, he says they show no such respect to their surfing Elders at home. And while he often espouses a rose-tinted peace and love world view, he’s not averse to threats of violence in the water, one more example of Robbie’s mad bi-polar ways.

“We need a whole change in Australia in the water. Anywhere I paddle out in Australia and cunts don’t show respect, Brooman will throw them into the trees. They don’t have to worry about me. We’re a three-man team. We’ve got to change this fucking game,” he says.

At the heart of the Australian malady, he sees a failure to come to terms with our colonial history, to recognise the great national treasure we have in the oldest living culture on the planet. “White Australia is spiritually bankrupt,” he declares boldly, before embarking on one of his more esoteric, existential rants. “If you’re man trying to be spirit then you’re gone, there’s no butterfly for the caterpillar. We’re spirit trying to be human.”

What gives him hope is the power of surfing to uplift Indigenous communities and offer a joyful common ground for black and white Australia. He’s formed his own Indigenous surfing brand, Royal Indigenous Surfing Company, with the mantra, “Walking and surfing together to make a better world.” He sponsors a few young Indigenous surfers and draws spiritual sustenance from the great gathering of the Indigenous surfing titles at Bells Beach, Victoria, each year. Robbie has four Indigenous masters (over 35s) surfing titles to his credit and one Grand Kahuna (over 50) title and is passionate about promoting Indigenous surfing as a way of empowering First Nations people.

“It’s a mass celebration of freedom, they are a modern-day corrobboree. It’s not one Indigenous group in control and we all get there together, everybody goes, the Victorian guys run a good show. It’s the most wholesome Indigenous surf comp I’ve been a part of. Our little girls are crazy surfers.” Indeed, Rob sees women’s surfing as the purest element of the sport these days, with less of the ego and posturing of its testosterone-fueled male counterpart.

It’s a crisp Autumn evening as the sun sets on a small industrial enclave on the outskirts of Kempsey on the road into Crescent Head on the NSW mid-north coast. There is clearly mischief afoot, a sense of brewing energy, a fitting finale to season six.

A row of vans has parked behind the Cream surf shop, featuring an over-sized mural of an iconic image of Pagey coolly bottom turning at massive Pipeline, painted on the side of the brown brick building. Musical instruments, cartons of beer and eskies full of food are being unloaded, as the proprietor himself is ensconced in the backroom of the surf shop wrestling with an apparatus known as ‘The Volcano’. This balloon like device allows for the inhalation of vast clouds of vapour generated by heating cannabis buds, without the adverse health impacts of smoking – important when your consumption is as prodigious as Robbie’s.

“There’s heaps of dope in the film,” Robbie declares proudly. In fact, this very same volcano makes several cameos in the film. “I’m the number one advocate for the herb. I believe it’s a medicine of God.”

Walkabout screens to a full house, in a cavernous warehouse space next to the Cream surf shop, as the Crescent Head surf community gather to hoot and holler, and Rob appears buoyed by the community support. Afterwards there’s a free-ranging jam session, featuring a cast of accomplished musicians, including Robbie’s legendary blues singer sister Gail, whose powerhouse vocals bring to mind Aretha Franklin. Gail’s been on her own harrowing journey, and like surfing for her little brother, music has gotten her through. The music-making continues until 2 am, a last hurrah of sorts before new parenthood arrives.

“This is the start of something special,” Robbie declares afterwards, beaming with the good vibes and creative surfing spirit generated on the night.

A month later, Djalu enters the world on his dad’s 58th birthday. Robbie sounds ecstatic. “I haven’t smoked a joint for three days in honour of my son. It’s the first time in 12 years I haven’t smoked for so long. I wanted to see how high I could get just off him.”

It’s hard to see how the script writers are going to top this..