A few weeks back a good friend phoned to tell me he’d just heard that Shane Stedman, the legendary surfboard manufacturer and bon vivant of the surf culture, had passed away about a fortnight earlier.
I thought, that’s not possible. Shane always made a lot of noise. When he goes we’ll know about it. So I called him in Crescent Head and he picked up. A scratchy old voice said: “Still here, mate.” But he confided that his time was nearly up, and that he was at peace with that, and would exit on his own terms. We had a long talk about life, love and friendship, and we said our goodbyes.
So I wasn’t shocked to wake up on the other side of the world to the real news a few days ago, but like so many in our surf world who knew this human dynamo, I was deeply saddened, even though at 85, you can rightly say, well, he had a good innings, as many have said in tributes everywhere. (This applies until you reach about 80, when you start to think, hang on, I’m not done yet!) This was as true of Shane as anyone I’ve ever known. He remained a force of nature, even when the lung disease which had affected him for so long began to dominate his daily life.
Shane and I had been friends since the ‘70s, first meeting at the inaugural 2SM Coca-Cola Bottlers Surfabout, billed back then in 1974 at the dawn of pro surfing as “the richest pro contest the world has seen”, with a mighty seven thousand bucks on the line. I’d just come from the depths of a London winter, and as a new reporter at the Sunday Telegraph, I’d yet to adjust my work attire to the warmer, more casual tone of Sydney in autumn.
As I clambered over the rocks at Fairy Bower in my heavy green business suit and leatherette Beatle boots, a voice called out, “Watch it, young fella, you’ll go arse over tit!” The powerfully-built, deeply tanned, bare-chested bloke sitting behind a card table with a microphone and a notepad resting on it, had an elfin face and a sense of humour to go with it. Instantly likeable, even though he was cracking up at the absurdity of my clobber. This was Sydney’s “Mister Surf”, Shane Stedman.
A few nights later at the presentations in a city bar we had a few beers and became mates. And we remained mates for life, despite the fact that within the year we would also be radio rivals, not that I was ever a real threat to Shane, whose morning surf reports for 2SM, Sydney’s highest-rating station, were based on real sightings of all the key breaks as he tootled along the coast in a sponsored Suzuki beach buggy, before heading to the factory at Brookvale. As the new editor of Tracks, I’d been hired by the ABC’s new rock station, 2JJ, to present a more outrageous version of the same information, aided and abetted by Tony Edwards, the creator and voice of Captain Goodvibes, who would chime in midway through my report, “Yer full of shit, Jarratt! Oink! Ya haven’t even got out of bed yet!”
It was funny, and sometimes it was a little bit true.
By the time we met, Shane had already lived what seemed like a lifetime of experience, from growing up as Tony, mostly at Crescent Head, a barefoot bush kid who learned an abiding respect for First Nations culture through his schoolmates, and first felt the lure of the surf, to studying engineering by day while changing his name to Shane and becoming a rock star by night (Shane and the Trojans), going into surfboard production in a rented shed at Eastwood in Sydney’s west, to finally making the move to Surfboard Central in Brookvale in the late ‘60s.
By this time the original “Brookvale Six” had just about doubled in size, but the pioneers didn’t necessarily appreciate latecomers moving in on their turf, especially flashy young bucks like this bottle blond wannabe. But you couldn’t not like Shane’s energy, and you certainly couldn’t ignore it. While his early boards were a bit rough around the edges, while still in the shed at Eastwood, not only had he shown a flair for marketing – signing up rising superstar Russell Hughes and producing his first signature model, The Excellor, to be followed by the more psychedelic Crystal Vessel – but he had become a serious retailer, producing shop boards for the big sporting goods outfit, Mick Simmons. A newcomer to the industry, Shane had already learnt how to be cool while mass producing.
Around this time, Shane met John Witzig at a Bob Evans surf movie premiere. John was then the editor of Surf International but soon to become a cofounder of Tracks, a guy who could write, edit, take great pictures and sell ads. He walked up and said: “You’re Shane, aren’t you? Do you know your ads are shithouse?”
And they were, but not for long. Shane’s audacity and Witzig’s edgy sense of humour was a match made in heaven, starting with the hilarious hoax ad which appeared in the debut issue of Tracks in October 1970, showing Shane and his rival/mate Nipper Williams cosying up in a four poster bed, with the headline. “We’d like to announce the formation of Shipper Surfboards.” A more controversial ad from the same period showed a seemingly naked pretty girl lying on the sand with her legs akimbo, a Shane Standard (his cool popout model) on top of her, with the line, “I love my Shane”.
All of this, plus Shane’s media profile and the fast-growing “Shane Gang” – which featured such stars as Ted Spencer, Butch Cooney, Richard Harvey, Terry Fitzgerald and a very young Simon Anderson, to name just a few of the surfer/shaper/designers who passed through –
Soon made Shane Surfboards the most successful operation in Brookvale, or anywhere else in Australia, a position the brand would maintain for decades, even as it branched into offshoots like wave skis, sailboards, vanity units and, of course, the Ugh Boot.
There are so many wonderful stories from an incredibly colourful and creative life, although Shane would always insist that his greatest creations were his beloved and talented children, Bonnie and Luke. When Shane asked me to help him produce his memoir, The Shane Gang, back in 2018, the hard thing was not what to put in but what to leave out. We spent a lot of time debating this, but in the end we agreed to include a chapter of a few of the bush ballads he had penned, a little in the style of Banjo Patterson. The closing stanza of Campfire Cowboy seems a fitting way to end this heartfelt tribute to a man who meant so much to so many of us:
And when the mulga burns away, I stare into the coals,
A man has many dreams through life, but rarely kicks his goals,
I wonder how much longer, I can wander and be free,
And be a campfire cowboy, with the mates of used to be
