#230 - Sean Mussett: The art of not being a dick.

Nostalgia hits hard as Sean Mussett, the one-eyed legend of Australian skateboarding, takes us back to the gritty golden era where the skate scene was as raw as the elbows we scraped. With his tales of vert ramps and punk bands, Sean – our very own Gravel Burns – pairs up with skate historian Jim Turvey to lace up the narrative with rich skateboarding lore. Their stories span from the iconic "drain" to the Mereweather ramp and beyond, painting a vibrant picture of friendship, rebellion, and a shared passion for skateboarding.

We explore the deeper imprints of skate culture on personal growth and societal shifts. Sean's path from a visually impaired kid to an inspirational figure in both the skate and education worlds is a testament to resilience. The conversation takes a dive into the reinvention of school learning amid government lockdowns, how skateboarding blurs the lines between sport, art, and entrepreneurship, and the interplay between generational trauma and progressive shifts in community values. Yes, we go deep, and the topics are stacked. We don't hold back.

Wrapping up, we're not just talking about perfecting fakie pop-tarts on vert ramps; it's about embracing the ethos of kindness and positivity Sean embodies. This ride isn't only about the thrill; it's a life lesson in authenticity, the importance of staying true to oneself, and fostering a legacy of improvement for our youngsters. So, hit play and join us on a journey through time, culture, and the life-affirming philosophy of "not being a dick".

Enjoy,
Shan

THT gets by with a little help from these friends...

 (Intro) Music by Def Wish Cast.
Song: Forever
Album: The Evolution Machine
www.defwishcast.com.au
https://defwishcastofficial.bandcamp.com/

INDOSOLE - Sustainable footwear 
Code: THT
(15% discount shipping is WORLDWIDE and fast).
Sandals made from recycled Tyres. Timeless footwear for the conscious consumer.

BELLMOTT - Ready to drink Coffee
Code: THT
(Get 15% off your first two online purchases).
Pre-mixed cans of coffee goodness, Iced Lattes and more. Ethically sourced coffee beans, made in Australia, made my Musicians, Skateboarders and Artists. It's all about caffeinating culture, inspired conversations and  shared creativity.

KRUSH ORGANICS - CBD oils and topicals
Code: THT
(Get a HUGE 40% Discount...shipping is WORLDWIDE and fast).
Purveyors of the finest CBD oils and topicals. I think long and hard about who I want to be affiliated with. Do the research yourself, the health benefits of CBD are unquestionable. It’s done so much for me, especially during times of stress and anxiety, it’s improved the quality of my sleep and sped up my recovery-time post workouts, surfs and skates... and it’s all natural.

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:17

Hey, it's Shan here. This week I catch up with Sean Mussett. Sean is affectionately known by his friends as Gravel Burns, legendary Australian skateboarder, originally from Coffs Harbour and also Newcastle, australia. Old vert skater from way back in the day we're talking back in the day 70s OG of Australian skateboarding and he sits down for a long conversation about his life music, art, he's designed graphics for skateboards, been the front man of punk bands and skateboarded his whole life. Sean is very open about sharing, about how he lost the sight in his right eye as a little baby and, yeah, an amazing skateboarder, like he says, with one eye, one-eyed skateboarder. It's really inspiring, actually. And he's an educator as well of students that are behaviorally challenged and we talk about our views on education as well. So we go deep on a bunch of stuff, but we do talk a lot about skateboarding For you skate nerds out there, you'll definitely get your fix.

Speaker 2: 1:32

In this episode we're joined by past guest skate historian, journalist, article writer, photographer, librarian. Mr Jim Turvey sits in to add his two cents and probably bring some um fact checking to some of the stuff we discussed, sort of. But yeah, jim's just such a rad vibe, I love having him around and um, he's also very, very close friend of of sean, so you know the vibe between the two was just epic. I love that. And hey and hey, listen, while you get a chance, go over and follow the Good Push. Past guest Nathan Keely will be riding his skateboard unassisted, pushing all the way from Port Macquarie to Newcastle. It's over 300 kilometers and he's raising awareness in order to prevent suicide and raising funds for awesome initiative. Talk to me, bro. So follow him on Instagram the good push or Nathan Keely and donate to the GoFundMe he has running at the moment. It's a good cause. There you go.

Speaker 1: 2:59

All right, Woo, I shave once a week. Whether I'm in the room, Really you look pinker. No, it all happened to me shaving yesterday. It was me shaving yesterday. I mean with the clip I don the car. Really you look really pink, huh? No, that's me shaving yesterday. This is me shaving yesterday? I mean with the clip, I don't know, yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't shaved with a razor since I was like 17. No, it feels weird when you do, or weddings I think Luke O'Donnell's wedding maybe Really.

Speaker 2: 3:19

How old are your kids, your eldest kids?

Speaker 1: 3:30

your eldest kid, my own son, is 25. Wow, just about 24, turning 25. Dude, is that a trip? Yep, it's amazing why it's. Why is it a trip? Yeah, it's just because in my head, in my head I'm 25, like that's the age I am, like he's about to turn my go-to age. So it's like, how can that be? And he doesn't like he is like me, but he doesn't look like me. So it's kind of like he's massive, like he's Jim's height probably, and another five kilos, and it's just so. It's the weirdest thing. Like I said before, I see him all the time we go to the pub and it's just like you're my mate, but you you're not. You're my kid. It's such.

Speaker 2: 4:05

It's the weirdest thing really is if you had to go back to 25 year old sean, what would you say to him?

Speaker 1: 4:13

to 25 year old sean. Oh, it'll be okay, it's gonna be fine. Uh, yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't go back and say maybe I'd say buy more houses in Mayfield Probably. I feel like that would have been a really good bit of advice.

Speaker 2: 4:31

Why is that popping off? Is that?

Speaker 1: 4:33

No, well, I had a couple and they were like we bought I had like three houses with a combined mortgage of less than $200,000. So if I had 10, I wouldn't be working for the Department of Education. Really, Probably Real estate mogul, that was my partner. My son's mum was really into the idea of that, like, buy property, not develop it, but just hang on to it and get more and that's your retirement plan. And we had a pretty good go at it, to be honest.

Speaker 3: 5:05

What year was that that you were purchasing property in newcastle?

Speaker 1: 5:10

90. I think we bought our first house in 94. Like by 96 we had three houses, yeah, and it was just dumb. It's just dumb, dumb, like as in dumb luck. Like I remember I didn't have a job. I came back from Port Macquarie to go to uni.

Speaker 1: 5:28

I finished uni and my grandfather had sort of done pretty well in business and he had like this bit of money for each grandchild and it was like $20,000 or something, which was like a million dollars in the 90s, and every grandkid could access this money. And I remember saying to my dad oh, do you reckon I could talk to Grandpa about getting this money for a house deposit? And he's like, sure, but you know, you don't have a job, you can't go to the bank and say I've got this $20,000, can you give me the other 50 just for fun? He said like it just didn't work and he goes oh, I can get a job, but can I get the money off, grandpa? And he goes, sure. So I sorted that out and like a week later I had a job, two weeks later I had a house. My dad still makes his head spin when he thinks about it. It was just the funniest thing.

Speaker 3: 6:17

Wow, man, there'll be 20-year-olds listening to this, in complete disbelief with their current housing market.

Speaker 2: 6:26

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1: 6:26

My son's one of them. Yeah, I was going to ask that, yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2: 6:30

How do you feel about the future of your son?

Speaker 1: 6:34

in that respect.

Speaker 1: 6:36

Look, he lives with his mom and he's really happy. He loves living in Islington it's like you know the village that it takes to raise a kid, kind of place and he, uh, he'll, he'll, um, his life is really good, like he's happy. That's the main thing. He's really happy. He's got a great bunch of friends, um, and I just don't, I think it's just not doesn't exist anymore that you know go out and work hard and make a living in a, you know, buy a house and that's not something you kind of it's not in his DNA sort of thing. I reckon I've unstructured that from him.

Speaker 2: 7:19

What do you think Australians are so attached to that dream? It's a really big part of our culture.

Speaker 1: 7:27

Yeah, I think colonialism is a massive part of that. Like get in and own something you know, like be the guy that owns the place you know, and it's just not sustainable. Obviously, we've proven that.

Speaker 2: 7:42

But you're not worried about your son in that respect, maybe never being able to get into the market alone, and things like that.

Speaker 1: 7:51

No, he's got two parents that own properties and one day they'll die, or two days they'll die. Hopefully. It would be terrible for him if they both died on the same day. But you know what I mean. So, yeah, I think down the track he'll get into the market. I mean some of his, it's not impossible. Some of his mates have come out of high school. They're the same age as him, a couple of them. They've bought houses. He doesn't want to live, you know, like more than 500 metres away from Swingtown.

Speaker 2: 8:28

It's interesting, uh, reflecting on your life, there's an element of being a misfit for a lot of that time. Would you agree with that statement?

Speaker 1: 8:35

yeah, you picked up on that really quickly. Um, yeah, I. Yeah, I've always felt like I feel like I. I. Um, when I was nine months old, I rubbed some dirt into my eye and it was like a reverse superpower thing. It's like, you know, your Superman comes to Earth and he's got superpowers because he came from another place. Well, I reversed, superpowered myself and rubbed a bacteria into my eye and then took out my right eye, so it's blind. So I feel like from my very earliest cognizance that I've felt different, like day one at school was so bad that I didn't want to do day two and I walked into the principal's office in my underpants because mum couldn't get me dressed. Yeah, misfit is definitely something I relate to very, very closely.

Speaker 2: 9:19

Wow, well, let's start tracking from the nine months old. That's a bit early, but yeah, I mean, how would you, if you reflect on your childhood, that time from, say, zero to ten? How would you reflect on that time? Do you have positive memories mainly, or was it a difficult?

Speaker 1: 9:41

era. Yeah, mainly positive. That's a really good time frame, zero to ten because I lived in Sydney. I was born in Sydney and I was the first grandchild. So you know, middle class white Australian people my dad's the oldest son, my grandfather's the oldest son I'm the oldest son, away we go. So I was very not spoiled not spoiled, but you know there was lots of love and affection. My parents were amazing, um parents and it really I didn't, I didn't have any kind of feeling of of not belonging until the first day of school and I got really badly harassed about my eye and and it was, you know, not strong is trauma's a big word these days, but it wasn't like traumatising, but it just made me go. Why are you people such wankers?

Speaker 2: 10:32

Like can we delve into it a little bit? Was it like teasing or questioning curiosity by other kids?

Speaker 1: 10:40

I think all of those things. I'm sure Jim's heard this story. I did a sticker and a T-shirt for the ramp rage and I was drawing the picture and I ended up with the guy who was doing a boneless on a ramp and I ended up with the head. To do last, which I've since worked out, is a bad idea. So I drew this cold shopping bag paper bag over his head because I didn't want to stuff up the drawing, because it was way before computers. So I just spent like hours doing this drawing and I'm like drew a Coles shopping bag on his head and with one eye cut out.

Speaker 1: 11:15

And when my mum saw that sticker, she's like oh, that's really weird, why did you do that?

Speaker 1: 11:20

And I told her the reason, which is what I've just told you, and she said oh, there's this really weird story where when you were in primary school, you went to school on a school bus one day with a paper bag on your head because you were so with one eye cut out because the kids on the bus teased you so much about your eye and no one was.

Speaker 1: 11:37

She said I don't know how many times you did it, but a lady who was a friend of ours got on the bus back when, like random skigging on school buses and that's still a thing, um, and she told mom and mom said, oh, you know, she took the bag off me and consoled me and I don't know how long that lasted, but somewhere in my subliminal memory was this. So when I showed that sticker to mom, she got kind of really upset, which is that, and um, but yeah, it must have been in there somewhere where I went to school and with a paper bag on my head, with one eye cut out because of the hassles I was getting, going to school.

Speaker 2: 12:10

Did it affect your ability to learn? I'm sure it did, but can you share that with people?

Speaker 1: 12:17

Oh look, doctors and optometrists you know it's not like I'm a miracle or anything, but they're really kind of confused about my capacity, because it must have been right at a time when all of the muscles and reflexes and stuff had developed and so my eye sort of still moves. I don't it's not too sort of laggy or anything like that, but I don't know any different. It's like I was nine months old. All I remember was walking into tables when I was learning to walk, just walking into the corner of tables all the time on my right hand side. I constantly went to my auntie's wedding as a page boy with this massive black eye, because I used to walk into, walk into the corner of tables all the time when I was like two and three, wow, but no, I just don't like people that say, oh, how do you drive? I don't know any different. How do you skate? I don't know any different.

Speaker 1: 13:12

Interesting when I think about it, like it would obviously be better if that wasn't the case. Obviously, yeah, we could do backside airs. For a start, I was going gonna say, like you can do backside airs, I can. But I hate them because I used to hang up all the time because I'd I'd like really struggle to know when to let go. So and I've said this to jim before I once I learned india's, I never did another backside air what about like backside 50, 50s yeah, that's a sort of a feel thing and I reckon it.

Speaker 1: 13:39

I reckon more than doing the trick. It messes with my style because I have to turn my head, like I can't stand up as square as I'd like to stand. Okay, so I've got to turn my head to see kind of where my board and the coping is, rather than look along the coping.

Speaker 2: 13:55

So your front foot comes into view more easily.

Speaker 1: 13:58

Yeah, I need to look down and see what's going on. Yeah, wow, but I think I reckon it's just a style thing more than. But academically going on, yeah, yeah, but I mean I think I reckon it's just a style thing more than but, but academically you're able to. Um, yeah, my, like, my, my good eye worked really well, my brain works really well, which is handy.

Speaker 2: 14:13

You kept up yeah, I didn't have to get the concepts I was really good at school and I didn't have any trouble.

Speaker 1: 14:18

I didn't like it so much particularly high school, but, um, but yeah, it was pretty smart.

Speaker 2: 14:24

Yeah, like fast-forwarding to now, like what prompted you to become a teacher.

Speaker 1: 14:33

I met a guy who was just trying to be a primary school teacher and he said, oh, you know, they're looking for that cliche, oh, they're looking for blokes to teach in primary schools. And I'm like, okay, well, I'm sick of doing what I'm doing, so I'll do that. And I also. My son was about to start school and I just thought the best way I can help him do what he has to do is be there on the inside and know what they're doing and know what they're not doing and help him. You know, yeah, that was my biggest motivation. That's so fucking rad. Yeah, it worked out pretty good, dude.

Speaker 2: 15:10

That's sort of like a rad dad move.

Speaker 1: 15:14

Well, you know you get. It's a good job, the conditions are good, so it's a tough job but it really paid off. Like having school holidays with your kid for their whole life is the best thing you can possibly do you know, it's not like, oh, where are we going to send the kid? You know you're just with him all the time and, yeah, made our relationship really much stronger. I think that I had all those holidays with him yeah, right.

Speaker 1: 15:39

Did you go straight from high school to university and then teaching, or did you have like a period of no, I, I went, I I dropped, dropped out of high school like I sort of got kicked out of high school in year 11 and um, famously my mom and dad just see it so differently to me, but I famously went away for a little while with gary now, and up the coast skating, um, up up to the Gold Coast, which was like the best possible thing you can do for your skateboarding is to go skateboard every day in heaps of different terrain with one of the best transition skaters the country's ever had. Like old school and he's a great guy too we surfed and skated and hung out. Would I have been 18? I don't think I would have been 18. He was like 23 or 24.

Speaker 1: 16:33

My parents just flat out said no and I said, well, I kind of got my own money and I'm not at school and this is what I want to do. And I remember very clearly my dad saying very quietly to me I don't want you to do this, but I understand that I can't stop you doing it. And it was so. It was like a real moment. It's like oh, okay, cool, okay, well, that's what I'm gonna do. Then off I went, um, so I, I went back to high school, to another high school, um, and did year 11 and 12 and then came down here to go to uni in 1985 so that was Coffs Harbour that you were in prior to coming to Newcastle.

Speaker 3: 17:05

Yeah, and what age did you move to Coffs Harbour from Sydney?

Speaker 1: 17:09

I think nine, I think it was 74. I was turning 10.

Speaker 3: 17:14

And so did you start skateboarding in Coffs Harbour. I did, yeah, okay.

Speaker 1: 17:18

Yeah, not heaps. Long after we moved there, we used to go because my grandparents lived in Sydney. We used to go because my grandparents lived in Sydney. We used to come back down all the time and my brother and I found these two skateboards of my uncle's in my grandfather's shed and they were just like literally Stone Age skateboards. They were just so old, they were 50s what they call clay wheels. They weren't.

Speaker 2: 17:42

I was going to say I think right. Yeah, they weren't clay wheels, but that's what they call clay wheels. They weren't. Yeah, they weren't clay wheels, but that's what they called clay wheels.

Speaker 1: 17:46

They weren't urethane. I don't even think urethane was invented. Then when I found them yeah, it was like it would have been. Oh, I suppose urethane was early, wasn't it like 76, I think? Was mainstream urethane, but yeah, these were from the late 50s, early 60s, these skateboards.

Speaker 2: 18:05

And these were from the late 50s, early 60s, these skateboards and what was the vibe like in Coffs? Was it just like surfers wanting to cruise around on skateboards to get to the beach and things like that?

Speaker 1: 18:13

There was a slightly older generation that were maybe two years older than us. That were like the first wave guys like Bane, superflex, surfy, you know driveway guys, and we came in sort of on the back of them, stopping so that we'd seen guys on skateboards. But by the time we were skating there wasn't anyone on a skateboard in Coffs Harbour and, yeah, my brother and I just jumped on it really quickly. After we found those skateboards and my dad bought us, we actually came down here to Ray Richards, bought a couple of like Bain-ish you know how they used to make their own decks in there and they just they were the raddest boards but they had, you know, the Chicago trucks and Cadillac wheels and open bearings and the whole on these Ray Richards Bain Superflex copy decks. We had a couple of those.

Speaker 1: 19:12

And then I started getting skateboard magazines. My dad was the coolest thing. I can't even imagine Like he worked for what was Child Welfare then DOCS, dcj. Now he worked for them for his whole life and it's not like we didn't have any money inverted commas. So for him to just go and splurge on these skateboards for us was amazing. And then he said you can get two magazines a month from the newsagents on an account. It's just like ka-ching, it's like the weirdest thing. And yes, I was just into skateboards. I think Skateboarder magazine my first copy was 1978.

Speaker 2: 19:51

Wow, just for context, how old were you? Roughly.

Speaker 1: 19:54

So 13. 13. 13 in 78,. Yeah, wow, is that right.

Speaker 3: 19:58

Yes, that's right. Do you think he saw the value? You said before that you, you know you felt like a misfit from a young age do you think he saw the value in you finding something that like, almost was meant to be and that, and that's why he was so supportive and that's why you know he wanted you to have the magazines as well, to kind of have access to that subculture it's really hard for me to objectively say that now.

Speaker 1: 20:23

I answer that objectively because I feel like that must have been it. He's an amazing guy. He's way more intuitive than he's expressive, so I think maybe he just went okay, well, you're into this stuff. You're buying them anyway. It's costing you your paper-run money. Stuff. You're buying them anyway. It's costing you your paper run money. Everyone can, everyone benefits if I just sort it out at the end of the month. Um, but yeah, like supportive is a key word. He was just absolutely incredible for um, for my skateboarding he used to. He'd take um, take my brother and I. Well, yeah, I mean we'd all go to sydney, obviously on family trips, but he'd take my brother and I after my grandmother died. Um, he'd just chuck us in the car on friday night, drive us to sydney. He'd. He'd go and see my grandfather and check on him and we'd just go skate north, ride the whole weekend, get back in the car sunday, I'd go home. It gets like a 10 hour drive. I reckon it would have been back then Surely Easily.

Speaker 2: 21:25

Yeah, 10 hours. Yeah, there's no mega freeway.

Speaker 1: 21:30

No, you had the freeway, hawkesbury River and that sort of thing, but everything else was just the Pacific High, yeah, and he used to. Every weekend he'd take us up to this really horrible little dish bowl up at Junction Hill near Grafton, and just me and my mates, and on a Sunday I'd go off to church, come back, say do you want to go up to Grafton? Yeah, sure, we'd rally a couple of mates and he'd drive us up there. That was sort of an hour and a half. We'd sit in the car and read the Herald, take some pictures, get back in the car at four in the hour, drive us home again. Wow, it's insane.

Speaker 2: 22:05

You pictures get back in the car at four and they drive us home again. It's insane. You just triggered a memory. Actually, I remember my mom it's like 19, 1989 so and uh, there was a demo on at fairfield mini ramps. It was the vert ramp in the mini ramps.

Speaker 2: 22:17

You probably remember those and I remember like all my friends caught the train up but I missed the train to go with them and I remember she drove me from Nowra and at the time it was like almost three hours, you know and just drove me all the way to Fairfield. And I got there and I'm like, oh, I'm kind of embarrassed, you're here, mum right. And she's like, okay, like I'll just leave you then, and then left me with my friends so I could catch the train back with them, and then she just drove all the way back. So she just did like six hours, just three hours, and then turned straight around. I get a little emotional actually, yeah.

Speaker 1: 22:51

I know I feel like, if you've been parented like that, it just is a blueprint for getting it right. It really is like it's good to hear.

Speaker 1: 23:00

Yeah, I feel like that. It's just like I was. There was so much support and love and just a feeling of family in our house and my dad and mum are both really into family and I think that just sets you up for really ingraining that. It's not like a conscious thing thing, but you just know how important it is when you bring your own kids up that they've got that connection you?

Speaker 3: 23:31

you mentioned your brother earlier. Um how much younger is he than you?

Speaker 3: 23:36

uh about 18 months now in a lot of stories when I ask you a lot of questions when we're hanging out, you often reference your brother. He seems like he's a really big and important part of your childhood and kind of like I don't know skateboarding for you as well. Do you think that bond was made tighter as well? I know I don't want to keep kind of going back to that misfit thing that you're talking about, but if you were having a hard time at school and you did feel like you weren't fitting in you're talking about, but if you were having a hard time at school and you did feel like you weren't fitting in, and particularly with skateboarding not being the most popular thing in the world during that period too, do you think that made yours and your brother's bond maybe stronger as well?

Speaker 1: 24:12

yeah, we had, um, we had this ditch that we used to skate over on the pacific highway and it was like a, it was just like a drain. Uh, we called it the drain and it was next to this, next to the service station. It was about it's probably about four foot deep. It was just, it was like a beautiful, like you, just it's. It was stupid. When we found it, we're like this is insane, it's like your own skate park, it actually. It had different types of surfaces, it had obstacles, it was smooth, it had a tiny little curve at the bottom where it met the flat bottom. The flat bottom wasn't dead flat, so you could sort of pump through it. It was insane.

Speaker 1: 24:49

And we skated that like every day for years until the skate park in Coffs Harbour was built, which was I don't know nine or 80 or something like that, and my brother and I like we'd come home, get on our bikes or we'd just run from our place to this ditch and we'd just session it. He sent me some photos of it, of our like little crew the other day doing this like it's like Charlie's Angels thing. We're all like standing on our tails, peace signs, you know really bad scoops and Captain Lightfoot shoes. It was a, anyway, but yeah, I think that that thing that we did because he played rugby league he was really like he was. I wouldn't say I was jealous of him because he was batshit crazy, but he just looked. My partner saw a photo of him the other day and she goes oh okay, now I get it Like. He looks like a freaking movie star. What?

Speaker 2: 25:48

do you mean movie star?

Speaker 1: 25:50

Well, he looks like Robert Redford. He's a hunk. Yeah, he was like gorgeous the cheeks, oh beautiful. Like one of my 57,000 girlfriends over the years, like this girl I went out with first time she met him. She's like this is like roundabout Thelma and Louise. She's like looks like Brad Pitt, it's like, and he does. That's it Robert Redford, brad Pitt, you know. Blue eyes, surfy hair, great cheekbones I was so jealous of that stuff. And he played rugby league, so we didn't. I played football, he played rugby league, so we didn't, I played football, he played rugby league. I wasn't allowed to play rugby league, thank goodness, because of my eye. My dad was really concerned about that. So I grew up playing football and he played rugby league, so we didn't have that connection. But once we started surfing and skating, we did that stuff right through, like probably separated a little bit, early high school. But in the late primary school, early high school days, we were just inseparable on skateboards and surfboards. Yeah, that's so cool man.

Speaker 2: 26:52

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 26:53

And he's still like. He's still like we communicate almost every day over the interweb and he lives in New Zealand. Yeah, he's just. We can get on the phone and just be like pissing ourselves, laughing almost immediately from you know, just because we have this kind of shared language that we grew up with.

Speaker 2: 27:17

Oh, there's something to be said for that.

Speaker 1: 27:18

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:19

Like is he still good looking?

Speaker 1: 27:22

Well, I don't know how to answer that question's. Uh, he's, okay, I'll reframe it are you still jealous of his looks not jealous of his looks.

Speaker 1: 27:32

He's currently running this um thing. He sent a picture. He sent a picture the other day where he's at his hair. He goes to his hairdresser he lives on, he lives on the west coast but his hairdresser's on the east coast so he goes over to see his kids, goes and gets his hair cut, does all these sort of business, and, um, he sends a picture of him getting his hair cut and I'm like I'm just replied. He missed a bit. He's growing this massive like mullet thing off the back of his head but the front of his bald, so all the front of his head's all shaved and he's just got this like cat sitting on the back.

Speaker 2: 28:05

Oh, really like a legit mullet it's so funny.

Speaker 1: 28:09

So, yeah, I know I'm not gonna, I'm not throwing myself under that bus I love him to bits.

Speaker 2: 28:14

You win, man.

Speaker 3: 28:15

You win the good looks competition did he did, he keep skating, he still has. He got older. Yeah, he still skates.

Speaker 1: 28:22

He throws himself around Like he. There's, like you know, new Zealand, like there's parks everywhere. He used to skate in Christchurch a bit. He'll always send me a video if he goes skating. But he's still got a board. It's probably still the same board. He's probably still got that old fart board. I'm not saying, oh right, yeah, got that, um old fart board. I'm not saying, all right, yeah. I'm not saying he definitely still has that board. He might, might be one of the other ones I sent him. But he, yeah, he's still got all the boards he rides are just boards that I give him, that he's, and he keeps them for decades, right so.

Speaker 2: 28:57

So if we just sort of track the chronology a little bit, if you don't mind I always like to do that, just to put things in context so obviously you found these like surfy skatey boards that may or may not have clay wheels, like, and then you found more rideable boards, the bane boards, did you say?

Speaker 1: 29:15

well, they were like that.

Speaker 2: 29:16

Yeah, we got these ones from ray richards that were like bane superflex okay, basically that fiberglass, whatever that is five so you could actually, like you could, could turn them. They rolled better.

Speaker 1: 29:25

Yeah, it had urethane wheels, Urethane wheels, okay, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 29:28

So when was the first time you got like a proper, like, I guess, more modern day skateboard that was, you know, usable on ramps and transition?

Speaker 1: 29:41

Or the ditch yeah in my. It's just so funny when you think about it. Yeah, I know, I do remember. When you think about this stuff, it's just so weird. It's like my friends. We had a sporting supply shop in Coffs Harbour. It's the only place you could get skateboards and the only skateboards you could get were Edwards DHD. And my friends got together for probably my 13th birthday and threw in and got me one of those DHD, like you know, the taper kit kind of looking thing with the stringers through it. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1: 30:15

I think actually it was just DHD and they got me one of those and I had like Edwards trucks and some Aussie wheels and that was the first like like this is like I can drive over anything on this thing. It was the best you know getting off a fiberglass board with open bearings onto one of those. It was just like.

Speaker 2: 30:33

Where were you skating at?

Speaker 1: 30:35

In the drain, in the ditch, in the ditch, and we lived across the road from a Catholic school and they had this really cool driveway. There was a church up the road that had another really cool, like, really cool driveway. There's a church up the road that had another really cool, like, really steep driveway that went out onto this horrible, horrible road called valley street that we used to bomb and it was just most of my brother just like annihilated himself on that one day, like skinned himself, um, but yeah, you'd say you'd, you'd skate this driveway and and it was really good to to learn like tight control because if you, if you like, didn didn't hit a turn or you know, you came out of there a little bit too straight, you were out on Valley Street going faster than you wanted to be on an inappropriate skateboard and you didn't last long. If you made it to the grass, you were really really lucky. But yeah, driveways, the ditch was amazing. I feel like we just learned to skate in that ditch because, like, kick turns.

Speaker 2: 31:30

That's exactly what John Gray said. Yeah, you know like where were you getting your inspo from Well?

Speaker 1: 31:37

I don't want to jump on Johnny's coattails, as fancy as they are, but it was the same sort of thing Like it wasn't until I.

Speaker 2: 31:43

So you're saying you did the first kick turn in the world. I'm telling you right now yeah. Yeah 100%.

Speaker 1: 31:50

No, it was only when I listened to that, to Johnny saying that I'm like, yeah, how the hell did we know what to do, Like you get to the top of the thing? I reflected on it, thinking it must have been a surfing influence, because we surfed and we saw people surfing all the time. You get to the top of the wave, you turn around and come back down. You get to the bottom of the wave, you carve off the bottom, you go back up. I'm guessing that's how we knew what to do.

Speaker 2: 32:14

That's it, yeah, and if you've never seen it done before, technically it's an NBD.

Speaker 1: 32:22

You're right and it had never even occurred to me before until I listened to John say that the other day and I'm like, yeah, that's mental, like I used to ollie up onto this PMG box like street, ollie out of the ditch onto a PMG box and do a oh, like a Telstra box.

Speaker 2: 32:39

Oh, okay, sorry. Like an electrical box.

Speaker 1: 32:43

Yeah, it's like that. Sorry, I should have said Telstra box. And it sat up one end of the drain and it was probably you know that high I'm putting my hands up to show 30 centimetres out of the drain, up near the top. And so if you clipped your tail going up the bank, you'd land on a rock and roll on top of this box and rock back in. And so I invented street ollies and street rock and rolls when I was 13.

Speaker 2: 33:10

That's insane.

Speaker 1: 33:11

Well, I wanted to do a rock and roll. It was the only place in the ditch that you could rock your board out.

Speaker 2: 33:16

But you'd heard of it or you'd seen it. No, I'd seen pictures of rock and rolls. You'd seen a picture of rock and roll. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you just improvised it.

Speaker 1: 33:23

Yeah, because I was like probably two years into Skateboarder magazine by then.

Speaker 1: 33:29

so I was like you know, doug Saladino and Board Slides were already a thing. Eddie Gilker is doing Frontside Rocks already, you know. So I knew what a rock and roll looked like in a still photo. But yeah, so you just like clip your tail going up the wall, land on top of this box, do a rock and roll, rock back in, shuffle, you know, shuffle your feet, shoulder charges bottom 57 000 times on your way. But that, yeah, it was just when I thought about um, when I thought about what john said the other day. I'm like, yep, that's really really weird. How did we know what to do? You just improvise, you adapt.

Speaker 1: 34:06

Your terrain is what it is and that's skateboarding. It's always been skateboarding. Your terrain is what it is Like. It's hard for kids, young people, even you kids, to understand. He says, looking at Jim, I'm 41. Yeah, it's hard to understand. Yeah, right, so it's hard to understand, yeah, right. So it's hard to understand that skateboarding was just skateboarding, like it didn't have subgroups or it was just skateboarding. You had a skateboard and you were a skateboarder. And if you rode to the shops, if you rode in a ditch, if you rode on a ramp or whatever it was, you were just skateboarding, and that's how I grew up.

Speaker 2: 34:43

Wow, that creativity man. You know where else in your life has it been manifested? Or whatever it was. You were just skateboarding and that's how I grew up. Wow, that creativity man. You know where else in your life has it been manifested? Sorry, jim, you were going to say something. Yeah, look, I mean, it nurtures creativity. You know, it really did Like I want to do this, I've got to improvise this and whatever. So where else in your life has that creativity manifested?

Speaker 1: 35:08

Absolutely everywhere. It gives an example. Life has that creativity manifested absolutely everywhere it's, and I feel this is why it started. Um well, you like, again, through skateboarder magazine 79, 80, the punk thing started to happen. And so you had the santa cruz guys, like olsen, um duane, pet Alba, those guys you know slightly later, like all the Bones Brigade guys not so much Tommy Guerrero, probably, but you know, cab Hawk Hawk's got exactly the same taste in music as me. All those guys were into punk and it just I found that through Skateboarder magazine and I'd watch Olsen and Dwayne Peters particularly just build their own, do their own thing, do their own shit, and I started making shirts and doing things to my shoes.

Speaker 1: 35:58

I wasn't really allowed to do too much with my hair, which is a shame. I got right into that when I came to newcastle, when I went to uni, I was getting, I just like dyed it and got my war semi immediately. But yeah, I reckon it was just. I think it was in me and it just needed some sort of little flame to flicker and go you, this is your thing, you can do this. This is these people and I was. I don't remember ever. I don't remember ever getting really badly hassled apart from the cops one night in Coffs Harbour. But when I was growing up, when I first started doing my own sort of punk thing I mean it was a pretty piss-weak version, but I don't remember really getting hassled. I was just Sean the skateboarder who did his own thing and wore weird clothes and like I'd wear pyjama skating and odd socks. You know it sounds so weird and like so watered down now, but in Coffs Harbour in 1978, you know a guy with half a pyjama shirt, screen printed with checkers and the back of it saying Devo, and odd socks, and you know they would have been like what is going on here? Where is our world going? What's going to happen with the youth?

Speaker 1: 37:16

You know, and I had a very, very close, who's still a very close friend I call her my oldest friend. I don't mean that she's older, but my mum's best friend's daughter and she was really into music and really into punk and I'd go to Sydney and hang out with her. It was so random, I don't know why my parents let me do it, but I'd go to Sydney and just stay with her and her dad for like a week and we were like 15 years old going to pubs in Neutral Bay in Mossman watching punk music. Like first band I ever saw was Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums, which was Tex Perkins and half of the Johnnies in a pub in Mossman.

Speaker 1: 38:01

Actually, my brother was there that night and we all got in, we were all dressed up and he was like surfy and he looked about 12 because he was about 12 and they said you guys are fine, he can't come in. Oh, can we get him something to drink? Sure, you can get him something to drink, but he has to drink outside. He's probably 14. We would have been nearly 16, I reckon, but yeah, and so I just sort of got into that feeling of being connected to that punk world that I saw in the skateboard magazines Dude this is interesting.

Speaker 2: 38:34

How old were you when you? What was your first band you played in?

Speaker 1: 38:39

First band I played in was called the Boneless Ones, with my mate, mike Cosatini, and his brother Paul, and they had a mate called Wayne who lived in their street, so they were like this three-piece that played U2 songs quite well actually, considering their age, and they just wanted someone to be a singer. And Cos said oh you know, why don't you be a singer? You can be the front guy. Surely I couldn't sing for shit, like actually, but I could front man. Once I got over that feeling of holy shit, this is terrifying, the first, I reckon, three gigs I did, which were all in just now house in Cameron Street in Hamilton. I wore this like camouflage mesh hat thing like Mick Jones wears in the Rock, the Casbah clip, and that was just so that I was like, so no one could see how extremely terrified I was. Dude, that was the boneless one. That was like 1985 85.

Speaker 1: 39:48

Wow, like as a front man and yet who felt like they couldn't sing oh no, I can't sing like I still sing it must have improved over the years I reckon probably, um yeah, oh yes, I I'm sure I did Like, yes, I'm sure I've improved. I think about what I'm doing now, whereas before it was just a performance and it was like didn't really matter so much what I was singing.

Speaker 2: 40:14

You're screaming a lot A lot of screaming.

Speaker 1: 40:16

Yeah, yeah, the next band we're. So that band that I was in called the Boneless Ones. They transitioned into a band called Bark and it was the same three guys and they had a guy called Carl Richardson who sang like incredibly, like really he was even more terrified of singing than me. They'd organise busking gigs Just him and Mike would go and busk to build up his confidence and he wouldn't even show up at that. But they turned into quite a successful like Newcastle 80s band. They had a few singles and stuff, dude, yeah. And then Cos got me into this sort of little unit he was working with some guys from high school called Dissection Committee and I was in that band for I don know, maybe three or four years.

Speaker 3: 41:05

Yeah, rad yeah, that was sick. Had some interviews in skateboarding magazines as dissection committee apparently yeah yeah, what do you mean?

Speaker 1: 41:12

apparently, well, jim jim said, no, I'm straight edge man are you really no?

Speaker 2: 41:19

no, I mean I've got the physical evidence of these interviews yeah, if jim says it's there, it's like, but you just don't remember.

Speaker 1: 41:25

No, I do.

Speaker 3: 41:26

He just keeps telling me this stuff and I go oh really, okay, if you say so, he plays it. He's too chilled out, he doesn't want to play into his own mythos Interesting, so I've got to do it for him.

Speaker 2: 41:40

That's why we need you, Jim.

Speaker 3: 41:46

That's Jim. That's why we need Jim Mythos. Is that something you like order? Is that food? Yeah, it's kind of kebab, great question.

Speaker 2: 41:51

Actually, how did you two meet?

Speaker 3: 41:55

Can I go back to before we met right?

Speaker 2: 41:57

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 41:58

At Newcastle Skate Park when the halfpipe went in in 1996. It was that ramp. I don't know if you ever saw it. The flat bottom wasn't very long For its height. The one on the beach, yeah.

Speaker 2: 42:10

Yeah, I remember it.

Speaker 3: 42:11

The ratio of transition to flat bottom. You know it's kind of scary to skate. So it was a short flat bottom. Yeah yeah, it was really fast, especially when it had the original like coating on it before it had various surfaces.

Speaker 3: 42:30

But, um, I would have been in year eight and, uh, this guy turned up that my friends and I would call undie head and undie head. We thought undie head was like like now, this wasn't a diss, we thought he was really cool, but we also thought he was a little bit unapproachable and we thought he was like 40 or something, he was probably 28. But it was just that age thing back then. So you know, I remember this guy at the skate park telling me he was 23 and I was thinking, wow, how can this guy skate Like an old man? Yeah, but this guy turned up in a bandana kind of like, maybe just like a tank top, not dressed full 80s like not mid-80s, maybe 1990, punk look and he was just ripping that ramp, skating super fast, and we'd just be skating the ledge or something like or the wedge or something at the newcastle park and uh, we'd say, oh, undie Head's up on the ramp, let's go watch. And it was Sean.

Speaker 3: 43:28

But I didn't know Sean had been a sponsored skateboarder. We knew some of his friends had been, so Anthony Simmons, for example. Simo, he used to work at PD's Pacific Dreams, a surf shop, and we all kind of knew that he used to get stuff from like Cooter Lions and Universal and things. So we kind of knew that he used to get stuff from like um, cooter lions and universal and things. So we kind of assumed that sean had that background. But we didn't know because of the people he was with. But a lot of the time he was also by himself. Um, but there was kind of a bit of yeah, myth about under your head and um, because the bandana, the bandana looked like he had no one wore. In 1996 no one was wearing a bandana. This is is before the Tony Trujillo thing of like the early 2000s, yeah.

Speaker 2: 44:07

Well, he wore more like a headband, but I know like the look With a pulled back, with a pulled back Almost like Peter Andre would have been running at the time, kind of thing. Yeah, like a pirate vibe.

Speaker 3: 44:16

Yeah, yeah, he's getting a photo. I love it, and I think it was even the same pattern as the undies.

Speaker 2: 44:25

Like you know, the Can I just clarify you weren't saying this to his face because you were scared. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 3: 44:32

You were low-key, scared of him as well. Not scared in, like as in. He seemed scary, as in.

Speaker 2: 44:37

Oh, that's a sick. Look, that's a sick photo.

Speaker 3: 44:39

Yeah, totally, he looked like he rode for Alva.

Speaker 2: 44:41

Yeah, he does Totally. He looked like he rode for Alva. Yeah, he does. Like actually that photo, he kind of looks like a slightly taller Alva.

Speaker 3: 44:46

And like that's what we would even say. We would be like man. I wonder if that guy like rode for Alva or something back in the day you know, back in the day would have been four years beforehand as well, but time seemed a lot like a lot longer back then.

Speaker 2: 44:57

I want that photo.

Speaker 3: 44:58

So fast forward into the 2000s and we used some older guys started coming and setting up like slalom, like cones, and I don't mean like as in just mucking around, like learning how to do really good slalom, as in like good style, being able to pump from the hips, building momentum like what tic-tac is supposed to be, but not when little kids do it Without ticking or tacking, just carving it.

Speaker 3: 45:29

Just generating speed from your hips, essentially, and going really fast and good tight turns. And one of them was Sean and we started. I put two and two together Like that's honey, honey, honey, honey, honey, still skating, still ripping. This is now like 10 years later, but it seems like you know, it seems like 20 years.

Speaker 2: 45:50

Honey, it's back. What Honey? It is back and you've been in contact for 10,.

Speaker 3: 45:51

You'd Seems like 20 years. So what have you been? Aunty had his back. What Aunty had his back?

Speaker 2: 45:53

And you've been in contact for 10. You'd seen him around for 10 years Before you actually met, but I hadn't made contact.

Speaker 3: 45:59

Alright, even then I said hello to him a couple of times, but not proper contact. Yeah, then I started when I started working at a library. This woman, lisa, who's a really good friend of mine, that I worked with and she's Sean's age, her and her husband were friends with Sean and she said my friend Sean used to be a sponsored skateboarder. Now I was in my mid-20s at this stage and he's my age and I straight away knew who she was talking about, because by then I'd figured out that his name was Sean, I'd figured out that he had been sponsored and all that stuff. I'd done a bit of stalking and yeah, and then I think, did she? I don't know, I think she said something to you, maybe that she worked with a guy that was a skateboarder, but somehow then the next time we saw each other I think I just started talking to you, right.

Speaker 1: 46:49

No, I already had a crush on you talking to you, right?

Speaker 3: 46:54

I already had a crush on you. Oh, yeah, for sure, because I, yeah, I know, I just saw all these things just happen and then so one day, we just started talking right.

Speaker 1: 46:58

Yeah, like it was like I think that was. That was um kind of around about the time I started going out with my lisa yeah, with also also a very good friend of yours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that connection was I'd be like oh, that guy's so cool, I love that guy. She goes oh, barney, and I'm like what, you know, that guy, yeah that's right.

Speaker 1: 47:19

Yeah, yeah, barney. And I'm like why do you call him Barney, isn't his name Jim? And he's like, yeah, blah, blah, blah, barney, rubblehat, yep, and yeah, very, very soon sitting in Suspension one day before it was called Slingtown. Let's cut to the chase.

Speaker 2: 47:34

Suspension, suspension Cafe. Okay, and now it's called Slingtown, all right, just for those that aren't familiar.

Speaker 1: 47:40

Yeah yeah, and you guys were all sitting in the window with Marcel and there was you and Nash, and you were the ones I remember and a couple of other guys, your guys sitting at the front like shooting the shit, laughing, just covered in tattoos, and I just said to Marcel, that's the cool crew, those are the cool guys I wish. No, you guys are. But he said, oh, do you know them? I said, oh, I know that guy because I knew Nash, because he was Jeffrey and Lisa, anyway, blah, blah. But I said I want to know Jim. He's like the coolest guy, he's so funny, jim, that is not true Anyway so anyway, then one day we started talking.

Speaker 3: 48:22

Yeah, I think we got numbers and we met up for like a date. We went and hung out.

Speaker 2: 48:26

We went to a suspension and had a coffee.

Speaker 3: 48:28

But I can remember one day seeing you, not a beer, no, I went and had a coffee. It was really civilized, but yeah, we went and had a.

Speaker 2: 48:37

It's the first time anyone's ever done a sound effect on this podcast. That's right.

Speaker 3: 48:41

He's creative, so you asked him about that before.

Speaker 2: 48:43

I can tell man it's manifesting everywhere.

Speaker 3: 48:46

But I'll tell you this and we need to go back to Sean, but I will tell you this that I remember, when I became friends with him, messaging one of my friends in Sydney that I grew up skating with and saying you'll never guess who I went and hung out with today. And I said I went and hung out with Andy Head. Andy Head, his real name's Sean.

Speaker 2: 49:05

Is it his real name or is it something else?

Speaker 3: 49:07

It could be Gravel Burns and I said, yeah, and I had all this inside goss. You know, I confirmed heaps of things. I was like, yeah, he was getting stuff from like Universal for a while and I could kind of confirm all these things. He was running for PDs and I think he was getting Aussie boards at one stage, like really early on, and I could confirm all these things that we'd I kind of hypothesized, we'd made up a little bit of a lore about him because the other guys we knew because they'd been around, like Simo and then John Bogarts I suppose was part of their crew All those guys kind of had Sean had been in magazines a lot as well during the 80s as well, but I suppose people remembered John's board or Simo worked at the surf shop.

Speaker 3: 49:49

So people kind of knew a bit of his lore like L-O-R-E. But Sean was a bit more mysterious In the early 90s too. I think he'd been in the UK for a while. So when we all came on the scene he wasn't there as much, whereas we knew who Bogarts was, we knew who Kenny Gibbons was, we knew who all those guys were, whereas Sean maybe had stepped out of the spotlight for a couple of years before reappearing as Undie Head.

Speaker 2: 50:13

Undie Head.

Speaker 3: 50:13

In my mind.

Speaker 2: 50:15

How do you feel about Undie that?

Speaker 3: 50:16

name. There's only four people that call him. That probably like not.

Speaker 1: 50:19

One of those people now is like a 12-year-old girl. Hey, undie Head, it's so cute, no when he first told me. I'm like, oh, and he goes. No, no, we meant it like respectfully and affectionately. It's like, yeah, I get it like. Whatever, I was a person with a mythos called underhead. We're like how cool is that? Guys, younger skaters look at you and go well, where is that guy from? Man, look at that guy. He's underhead. He just comes out of nowhere and then goes as quick as he can.

Speaker 1: 50:50

You know how funny is that?

Speaker 3: 50:51

I thought he was Spanish or something for real because his hair was so jet black as well. I was like can he even speak English?

Speaker 1: 50:57

Yeah, I practice my words.

Speaker 2: 51:01

Yeah, it was like. I mean, yeah, that photo, like it was a lot darker, surprisingly.

Speaker 1: 51:07

That's crazy. Surprisingly, 30 years ago, how much darker was it?

Speaker 3: 51:13

But he did. He looked like he rode for Alba or something. I think that's the best context to put it so sick.

Speaker 2: 51:17

Yeah, when skating started to get a bit more serious, like you got out of the ditch and started skating ramps, where was your first actual ramp? You skated?

Speaker 1: 51:27

Do you remember that day we used to go to again?

Speaker 1: 51:31

my dad would take us to Sydney and we skated Skate City, which is just like it just blew my mind when was that that was at Manly Okay, and it was all the fiberglass Wazmel stuff, the two quarters, the bowl and the half pipe, and nothing had flat bottom. Well, there was flat bottom between the quarter pipes but they were offset. They were like a weird unit. They weren't like a half pipe, they were two quarter pipes that were at weird angles and it was right in the walkway so you couldn't really get anything going. But anyway, and I was like 13 or 12 or something, but that was in magazines like Wedge and Adrian Jones, johnny McGrath, they were there all the time. I don't remember ever going there and not seeing if not all three of those guys. If I was there on the weekend, at least one of them. I mean.

Speaker 1: 52:22

Sure, speaking of law, I'm sure Johnny McGrath lived underneath the halfpipe for a while or under the bowl. I'm sure Wedge has told me that and he was like 16. He just hitchhiked with Wedge, just jumped in wedge's car. Basically wedge says, oh, skateboarding's happening in sydney, not melbourne, uh, so I'm gonna move to sydney. And johnny's like, yeah, cool, uh, hang on, I'll just get my bag. And they just jumped in. He just jumped in, he, he's like a kid, it's like I'm sure that's like you'll go into jail these days if something like that happens in your life. So raw, yeah, really, really cool. But Wedge is like if you're going to jump in anyone's car, he's the guy you know, he's just so sensible and intelligent, and not to mention like Wedge.

Speaker 1: 53:11

I've said this to people over the years Wedge and Adrian and Johnny are like the holy trinity not that I'm religious, but the holy trinity of Australian skateboarding. They're the people that I remember being the guys.

Speaker 2: 53:24

Because that was one of my questions, like who were some crew back then that were just, you know, the ones that were blowing your mind and you were looking up to? So it was those.

Speaker 1: 53:35

Well, because I lived in Coffs Harbour, the ones that were blowing your mind and you were looking up to. So it was those.

Speaker 2: 53:37

Well, because I lived in Coffs Harbour the only guys I saw were in the magazines, and that was those three guys.

Speaker 1: 53:37

Yeah, like that, like AJ, johnny and yeah Well, adrian Ariel Jones and Wedge Francis and Johnny McGrath, and there's just classic photos etched into my brain of those guys skating, like Johnny's tail tap with his hair flying over at Albany, and Wedge just frontside airing across the bowl in Manly and Errol doing or Biff, even actually Biff doing backside ollies. Yeah, and like those were the guys and they were what? Are they four years older than me, ish, um, four or five years older than me, and they were just the crew like, and some of them were assholes, like I'm not not throwing, I'm not gonna throw fox under the bus, but john fox, yeah but some of them were just under the bus yeah, some of them were, um, that were just so nasty to the little kid, like I was just a little kid, I was like 12 or 13.

Speaker 1: 54:32

I just wanted to skate and you just couldn't get a go. And then Wedger would just sort of say, oh, you want to go, kid? Yeah, yeah, thanks. And then he'd just stand in the way while you rolled into the halfpipe.

Speaker 2: 54:44

But, dude, I still think there's something to be said for that grom abuse Like I sustained it as well. I remember turning up to Alloa Bowl and I was like 11 and getting. And I was tiny when I was 11. I'm still a short guy and I got some dude just yell, screaming get off the fucking island. And then some dude was calling me a slimer. He's like get off the island, you slimer. And all these years later I still remember it clear as day. But I swear it builds resilience. I feel like kids are too soft these days. Well, yeah soft.

Speaker 1: 55:19

Maybe adult or more adult-y people are a little bit more respectful, I don't know. But yeah, absolutely Didn't do me any harm at all because they were gods you know, like you, don't get in front of them. You don't ride there Exactly, you know you earn that go.

Speaker 2: 55:38

Now we get yawed up by scooters to get out of the way.

Speaker 1: 55:41

Were you on your DHD, then no, I was really lucky around about that time. My DHD broke. It was sad, but it must have been like it would have been a birthday of christmas, probably birthday and um my, my dhd broke. So dad took me to um skateboard world in burwood and adrian was there. So that was like god. I walked up and adrian jones is like he's just a kid. What was? He would have been 17 years old or something like, maybe not even, but he was Adrian Jones. The magazines were already calling him Adrian Ariel Jones and I'd seen him skating at Skate City and he just happened to be the guy that served me and he sold me my first American Pro deck, which was a Santa Cruz cruz red dot steve olsen, which is just the most like it was. Like the fact that it was just sitting on the wall was too crazy. Like how is that just sitting on the wall? That's like it's life-size, it's made of wood. What's what's going? What weird world this is. And that was your dream board oh so my dream board?

Speaker 1: 56:50

yeah, like I would have if, if I'd have mean, I went in just wanting a skateboard, yeah. So, but the fact that that board was there on the wall and I could just say, can I get that one, can I actually get that? Can you get that skateboard down and I buy it and take it home and yeah.

Speaker 3: 57:08

Would he have been writing for Ace at the time?

Speaker 1: 57:10

Yeah, jim, I guess. Skateboard world, yeah, I actually don't know. You would know better than me. You've trailed the magazine world.

Speaker 3: 57:27

I was just wondering if you know if there was any kind of temptation to buy something local.

Speaker 1: 57:31

Oh, yeah, I know what you mean.

Speaker 3: 57:33

Yeah, and the DHT too, I did.

Speaker 1: 57:38

He, I think, because the deck would have cost I don't know like a lot of money. He steered me towards ramp rippers which were DHT pink, which was fine. Pink was punk, yeah. And Errol said, oh, these are a bit cheaper and they're really good wheels. So he steered me towards those and they were really good wheels, like great quality urethane. It lasted forever. I've still got them, but they lasted forever. They were really good wheels. But yeah, like, all that product and who wrote all of that stuff was just beyond me. You know, like even I didn't really even pay attention in the magazines who's who was like obviously alva rode for alva and the santa cruz guys were my santa. You know they were the punk guys, but it was just was more about the. It was more about the, the type of skater you wanted to be. You know, like if you you weren't going to ride, even even back then I wasn't going to get a veriflex deck yeah, that was a tribal thing too, wasn't it kind of was?

Speaker 2: 58:41

yeah yeah, yeah, like which tribe you align? With yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned john fox's name, which to me is a very interesting character in australian skate history because he was the editor of a very prolific magazine, skate and Life. Back in the day. Did you have a building desire to get in that magazine and be on the right side of him?

Speaker 1: 59:07

I was always on the right side of Fox, apart from when the punk element design, the Ped Boys, were at Skate City. Yeah, that was like, and it was just them being punk. Yeah, you know, if you just like it's, dissing little kids is the same as spitting at a band. You know it's just sort of pointless and dumb, but it's what you did. But I never, ever had a problem with Fox. He was a rad guy right through the 80s and 90s and when I sort of used to see him at Bondi in the Bola Rama days, he's a really, really nice guy. Yeah, that's why I said I'm just taking the piss. They were just narky. You know, punk kids just marking their territory.

Speaker 2: 59:49

But it was also very reflective of Australian society and culture in that time. Anyway, I just think it was translated in skateboarding it was happening in the surf. It was happening at the footy ground. Yeah, I don't know. Would you agree?

Speaker 1: 1:00:02

yeah, absolutely, and I, like I said before, I've I've always felt like wary of that sort of thing. You know what sort of thing, you know what sort of thing, just where kids are nasty and aggressive. And you know, I got, like I said, I got bullied in primary school until I got some friends. Then we moved to Coffs Harbour and the whole thing started all over again.

Speaker 2: 1:00:27

So I was always really wary of Even being in a punk band, you didn't want to like live up to the persona of the front in a punk band.

Speaker 1: 1:00:35

You didn't want to like live up to the persona of the front man punk. No, I, I just no. I was much more theatrical. I was more I don't know what who, like jello biafra, like you know, I'm just theatrical giving putting on a show. Not I wasn't angry or violent or I just used to like to say you know, I had a microphone and I liked to say funny things and make the crowd laugh and just entertain. It was like I wasn't an angry punk guy. It was way more theatre than that. You know, like New York Dolls or something you know it was like. Well, we did drag a bit, but way more New York dolls than exploited, if you know what I mean.

Speaker 2: 1:01:18

Yeah, gotcha, Wow man.

Speaker 3: 1:01:21

But by the time Skate and Life would have hit the shelves. That's 88,. You were kind of pretty well established, like you were already pretty well established in the Australian scene. Anyway, what was? If we go back a little bit, bit what was, and sorry if I keep dragging it back, but okay, I just did I. There is one thing that I wanted to bring up because it's pretty unique and it's a sign of the times and stuff too. So you started getting you're being flowed aussie boards pretty early on through tim door, is that correct?

Speaker 1: 1:01:50

yeah, no, it's funny when I was listening again listening to john's thing the other day, um, that we so, coughs, coughs, got a commercial skate park. I was in high school, definitely in high school, maybe year eight, so say 14 um, and it had, you know, it had the Pro Shop and had higher boards and stuff. And Tim came up and stocked the Pro Shop with Aussie boards and they were our higher boards. And then he came back, I don't know some amount of time later, like later that year, with the aussie team and did a demo and that was like danny van duane, hecadar, um, chris briggs, the four of them, I can't remember who. The other one was off top anyway, but you know, danny van stuck in my mind, um, because I'm still really friends with Danny, but yeah, and then Tim, who I, you know, like I wouldn't have known Tim, he looked like a professor. He still does look a bit.

Speaker 1: 1:03:01

Anyway, he just said to the guy because I was working at the skate shop, and he said to the guy, roger, who ran the place, he said, oh, who's your local guy? And Roger said, oh, sean's our kind kind of, he's probably the best skater here. And he said, oh, I want to hook him up with some t-shirts and and and a board and stuff and he can be like your, our advertisement for aussie, and that's so that I kind of it. Just that's just what happened and didn't really dawn on me until ages later that that was like pretty cool getting free skateboards. Like I don't know how long it lasted, but maybe you know, I got a couple of free skateboards and I wore their T-shirt and it was a nice kind of feeling of someone saying, oh yeah, sean's our best skater that kind of thing and you're sponsored now.

Speaker 2: 1:03:55

Well, yeah, that was a big thing, man Like I'm sponsored. Everyone wanted to be sponsored, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:04:08

I reckon at that point I just didn't even understand the concept of that. Like it just didn't even dawn on me that that was a thing Like guys wrote for certain teams and it was more like a team thing. I just didn't really understand that that's kind of and it's not sponsored Like they gave me. Sponsored to me is you know you're getting your travel expenses paid and you're getting all your boards and you're getting all you know, you're kitted out all of that stuff. And this is like I got a couple of boards floating in a T-shirt and I had to. When I was skating I wore the T-shirt and that was like what inverted commas sponsorship looked like in whenever. That was 1980.

Speaker 2: 1:04:49

So, like because I want to build up to, I want to slowly build up to the point where skateboarding went from vert and then vert died in the early 90s and then it became heavily street and you probably remember that big change. It's a pretty monumental change in the history of the art. What vert ramps were you mainly skating on the regular, whether it be in Sydney or Newcastle or Coffs?

Speaker 1: 1:05:21

Yeah, when I moved, I moved down here in 85 and I met my mate Mike down at the old Bar Beach Quarter Pipe and they were about to build a ramp in this guy's backyard in cook's hill, um, and they took me he cause just took me there straight away and said, oh, this is what's happening and it's like, oh, and it's like, man, it was this funny little ramp with all just the most you know, it's like everyone's first back out half pipe was just like johnny was saying the other day, it's like you just steal whatever you could get and like I don't remember if ours had street signs on it, but it was that sort of thing. Um, but it never really got going. I don't even remember, I don't even think it ever got skated. It's just one of those like a pipe dream.

Speaker 1: 1:06:06

But then, um, the there was this east, that 80, 1985, there was like an Easter get-together at Port Macquarie, peppermint Park and I didn't go because I went back to Coffs to see my parents, but pretty much everybody else did. There were so many guys went up because the park was going to get closed, so many guys went up and skated and it just fuelled. It was like the first like flame of skateboarding, of our age group skateboarders just going. Actually this shit is real. There's heaps of us, let's get it going.

Speaker 1: 1:06:47

You know, the Bones Brigade video had just hit and that was just insanely important in our generation of skating because for the first time ever apart from the occasional clip in a surfing movie or whatever the first time ever you saw guys in motion and you could understand the kinetics of what they were doing and you just went and it was just so incredible. I could still send shivers up my spine thinking about sitting at johnny bogart's parents place in the little rumpus room downstairs just going. Stop, pause, rewind, stop, pause, rewind. You know like watching those parts of tony hall, just like how the fuck, are we talking like future primitive?

Speaker 1: 1:07:34

no, yeah, this this was the first this was the Bones Brigade video show yeah, yeah and and like I, like I know I mean it's such a cliche, but I I just so gelled with Lance Lance's part in that because he was it, it was so approachable like he just he was goofy but he was like it was so approachable Like he just he was goofy but he was like I was watching something yesterday of like one of the 80s Texas comps and he is so rad, like there's just so many parts, flip parts of his own thing over the last decade. He's such a good skater and he puts himself down so much. But he's like the velvet skater and he puts himself down so much. But he, he, he's like, um, he's like the velvet underground of 80s skateboarding. He like everybody who saw lance bought a skateboard. It's like the hardly anyone bought the velvet underground album but everyone who did started a band and that's what lance did for skateboarding in the 80s.

Speaker 1: 1:08:29

He was like, uh, he just everyone went man, I can do that, I can tube right under a tree, I can do a board slide on a train, rail. You know, it's like I don't know if I want to jump off a roof, but I probably could, and so yeah, it just. And then you've got Hawk, like you think about that. That's the first Bones Brigade in 84, 85. The stuff he did in that bowl in his part, like you'd win a comp. You did that run now you'd still win a comp. It hasn't not a single 540 or spin. It was just insane and like that's way beyond us. But I can do what cab's doing, I can do what lance is doing, um, you know, and and it just got us going, really really got us going. We went okay, build a ramp. We've got to get ourselves off the ground and build a ramp.

Speaker 2: 1:09:20

So it was Lance Mountain, it's his fault, it was Lance Mountain.

Speaker 1: 1:09:24

It was bloody Lance Mountain's fault.

Speaker 2: 1:09:26

He was the spark man. Yeah, he ignited that.

Speaker 1: 1:09:29

Yeah, I think so, and so, yeah, we built the ramp in Ridge Street in 86.

Speaker 3: 1:09:33

That's neat, and we could just finish now and say and the rest is history, that ramp is like, of that era of 1986 in Australian skateboarding culture.

Speaker 3: 1:09:47

I mean, every magazine from that period has mention of the Merriweather ramp at least, or if there's ever like a kind of a scene check in the beginning any magazine and photos and little mentions of it were being mentioned right up until 1989 as well. In all of the. You know there's about five or six magazines during that period by that time coming and going and you see mentions of them like I think there's even like a blurb that says some stage in about the end of 88 that says a word on the street is that the Merriweather ramp is going to be back up and running again soon and you know that's it was two and a half years beforehand, wow.

Speaker 3: 1:10:23

And yeah that was the Velodrome that was the Cockroach ramp. It was the same ramp.

Speaker 1: 1:10:28

It was the same transitions, new timber, but the same transitions and the same.

Speaker 3: 1:10:40

Do you want to tell?

Speaker 1: 1:10:41

people about the 1988 Steel City Ramp Rage and what that was. Yeah, it was like the real, the nuts and bolts of it. Like, completely selfishly, the nuts and bolts of it was we just wanted to have a vert ramp again. And so to do that we organised this contest. We had this like a youth worker set up who sort of had some kind of connection to the council. She seemed legit. She got us forming an association. We used to have these meetings and the whole thing was quite tragic and horrible and in a smoke-filled room in her place in Hamilton South. But we organized ourselves together and decided let's have a contest. It's the bicentenary, we'll call it. You know, and that's how you get it through council, you make this big deal about it being connected to something, blah, blah, blah. But basically we just wanted to build a ramp again. So we still had the transition pieces I'm pretty sure they must have been at Coz's dad's concrete place and so my mate Andrew Gordon and I I just remember it you might remember when the contest was, but I just remember it being really freaking cold.

Speaker 1: 1:11:52

We used to get up every morning about six. He was just like a boss. I ditched my whole life for like a month and I didn't go to uni. My girlfriend didn't know where I was, I just slept on his lounge and he'd get me up at six in the morning and we'd go to the Velodrome, which he lived in Broadmeadows, so it was like just down the road and we'd work every single minute of the light of day building this ramp pretty much just the two of us and Roy Lee from Pacific Dreams. He gave us trucks and trailers and money for wood and just like it was the most. He was just so incredibly generous and it was all on the back of this contest we actually had almost no interest in at all.

Speaker 1: 1:12:37

In running the contest. We wanted our friends to come skate with us. So it ended up being the 1988 bicentennial ramp rage and it was a big deal like it. Actually. Heaps and heaps of skaters came, lots of younger skaters came. There are a couple of different divisions. Um, and it was a really, really cool experience um, cockroach ruined some money and we painted the ramp blue and spray painted cockroaches all over it, which was sort of yeah, it was so cool it was it looked, looked amazing.

Speaker 1: 1:13:06

It was slippery. It was just like glass for the first few days, until the till the paint start stopped flaking I wish I had my skateboard here, because I've just got some cockroach wheels.

Speaker 2: 1:13:15

How good are they.

Speaker 1: 1:13:16

Yeah, and they've got the cockroaches back all over them like the old days Back in the day.

Speaker 2: 1:13:20

Yeah, but yeah anyway, keep going, because I'm envisioning exactly what you're saying with that ramp.

Speaker 1: 1:13:26

Yeah, and we ran the contest without really knowing what we were doing. I'm talking guys from everywhere, Like they just came from everywhere Gold Coast, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, and so everyone who was a skater. I've got no idea how we got the word out. Like I guess we called friends and sent letters, I don't know, really got no idea. Like I guess there was an ad in sent letters. I don't know, really got no idea. Like I guess there was an ad in the magazine, I don't know because, Skateboard Australia was up and running then.

Speaker 1: 1:14:02

Anyway, heaps of people turned up. It was a contest. It was rad. The lady who was connected to the council, who was our kind of I don't know the person who galvanised us. We assume it was her who nicked all the money. Oh, no shit.

Speaker 2: 1:14:19

Full extortion? No shit.

Speaker 1: 1:14:23

It's just one minute we had hundreds and hundreds of dollars in a box and the next minute we don't have a box of hundreds and hundreds. It was just the weirdest thing. And then at the end of the day we had this gig in Merriweather High School Hall, which is just like. My son went to Merriweather High and when I tell him he's seen pictures and he's just like that's just insane. Like I've been up there on the stage shaking principal's hands and you were up there being a punk on the same stage when your guitarist was banging his guitar on the ground of the place where the principal was standing. It's so funny.

Speaker 3: 1:14:54

There's skateboarders from all over the country as well. I mean that competition, to put it into perspective, probably made up, without exaggeration, probably 15% of every magazine for the rest of the year. As far as either, whether it's I mean there's obviously just the coverage of the comps wasn't that big. But then in every little photo gallery, because we're talking there's during the period, there's Skateboard Australia, skate and Life Slam, perfect Transition, still a thing, 540 is still. So there's a lot of Australian magazines that you know on magazines like on the newsagent shelves at the time, and all of them had coverage. Oh, speedwheels as well, sorry to go back, the one Chad Ford edited, great magazine, in my opinion kind of under, not given the respect that it was, because maybe people thought it was corny, but it had some great photos of the rampage as well.

Speaker 2: 1:15:48

Do you think it was just the timing? The timing was just so spot on as what everyone needed at the time.

Speaker 1: 1:15:54

Yeah, I reckon it was just the timing. The timing was just so spot on as whatever needed at the time yeah, I reckon it was pre the council's getting on board with facilities. So, like I said, it literally was just so we had somewhere to skate, yeah, and we skated that. Right, we skated it, I don't know, maybe a month, I don't know how long it was up for, and, um, of course, you know, some guys got in that weren't skaters and graffitied around the velodrome and the velodrome people who were happy to have the ramp there because it was just in the middle of the velodrome where there's just blank space.

Speaker 1: 1:16:20

Yeah, they didn't want people coming in and messing with their shit. So they just said oh sorry, boys, you're going to have to pull that down. So you know it was. But by then, like we were going to Mona Vale, kell Park, bell, rose, they were really good Sort of you know it's a hassle. I used to go to Andrew and come around on his motorbike again, I've got memories of it just being cold all the time. But he'd come around on his motorbike and we'd just chuck bags and stuff on the back of this I don't know 550 Honda and drive to Sydney in the freezing cold.

Speaker 2: 1:16:52

No shit, we get there like seriously, like double, getting doubled.

Speaker 1: 1:16:55

Yeah, doubled on a motorbike with two skateboards and two like pad bags From Newcastle to Sydney like two and a half two hours.

Speaker 1: 1:17:02

And we do that three times a week and I just I remember one day we were coming back and it started raining and we'd been skating like all day, all day, and we'd come back in the back and it started raining and we'd been skating like all day, all day, and we'd come back in the dark and it started raining so we pulled up under an overpass and I couldn't get off. He needed to get off and do a piece and I could not. My legs would not move, I was just locked. It was just freezing and I was cramped and it was just like I was locked on the back of this motorbike and he ended up just throwing himself on the ground because otherwise it's going to fit my pants, and I sort of rolled off like Commando, rolled off the bike, and I was just picturing myself lying, you know, like an evil carnival character from like Action Figure, where you can't actually change the shape of their knees and hips.

Speaker 3: 1:17:53

They're stuck in motorbike riding position. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:17:56

That was me. I was just like on the ground in motorbike riding position. It was, oh yeah. My knees and hips have always been so bad, just full of arthritis, from a really early age. I just remember just getting stuck and he's like you've got to get off my man, dude, I can't move.

Speaker 2: 1:18:12

It's just me, oh my god anyway.

Speaker 1: 1:18:17

So yeah, that that was um, so it was. It was just yeah, it was just one of those um perfect storm moments and um, and it just got that crew together and then it then it was sort of like, you know, again, way before phones and internet, everyone was just connected again and so we we'd go to the places and you know, like we, we had pretty good um connection with johnny gray and finn and danny van um. They used to come up and skate ridge street and like they were just that was like I knew all of those guys, I knew of all of those guys. But that was, we used to spend weekend after weekend. They'd come up, they'd go to all our parties, they'd steal our girlfriends, drink all our beer, tear our ramp to shreds. Absolutely, just like incredible.

Speaker 1: 1:19:10

They are mythological figures those guys, and Finn in particular. But we got really close with that particular crew, errol, he'd come up, someone had like a camper van or something and it was literally like the proverbial busload of skate punks just turned up at this house in Merriweather pile out. They were the funniest guys too. They'd pile out, they'd come in, they wouldn't pad up, they'd just skate for like half an hour because it was sort of you know, by the time they got up it was probably close to midday. They'd skate for half an hour, warm their legs up.

Speaker 1: 1:19:38

Then they'd all skate down the beaches, pound fin particularly, just pound like four schooners yeah and come back and just just absolutely go off just like, rip that ramp a new one. And you're just like we were and they weren't much older, a couple years older. But I was like you can't ride a skateboard after drinking beer. That's just who does that. We don't do that at newcastle anyway. It was kind of funny. But, um, yeah, finn, finn was just a lunatic. He. I've got so many, so many funny memories of him.

Speaker 1: 1:20:10

We went on a road trip with finn um to darren burford's comp up the gold coast and um, we were in a we're in. We used to hire because we travel it, we we'd always. You'd have to hire a car to go to melbourne for the comps down there. You'd go to sydney, darren burford's comp, easter comp. Um, who holds a contest at easter. It always rains. Anyway, we went up, we hired this Falcon.

Speaker 1: 1:20:34

Finn turned up at the train station while I was living in Hamilton. He turned up, we jumped in the car. There were four or five of us in this Falcon and we broke down at Kew and I can't remember what happened. I didn't know anything about cars at the time, but we broke down at Kew anyway. We pull in the servo. There's a pub across the road. That's Finn. He's just gone. So I'm like shit, I better go with Finn because he looked. He was like an ad for Mambo. He just looked like a skate punk. He was like do you know where Kew is, up near Port Macquarie on the highway? Yeah, there's a pub. Yeah, it's Friday night and there's game footy on and he walks in. He's already drunk, I don't know. Half a slab of beer between Newcastle and Kew walks in loud, as loud as a bomb, just goes. All right, who are you fucking going for? And they all look at him and he goes because I'm going for the other team and I'm like dude, you can't, they will kill you and us and our car and all of the things.

Speaker 1: 1:21:37

And anyway, we got to the Gold Coast and it just pissed down rain the whole weekend and we skated where we could skate and we went to a skate shop. Finn bought these knee pads and he wanted to test his knee pads and there was this poor, unwitting family trying to have a picnic in the rain. You know, a couple of kids and like just mum and dad and wanted to have a picnic under this picnic shelter across the road from our hotel room. And Finn. It's just terrible to think about it now. He ran across the road straight at this table and knee slid across their picnic, dropped his legs off the other side and just ran away. And it's just like it was so funny at the time, it was just so fucking punk. But I think about it now and I just go oh, that was so unkind.

Speaker 1: 1:22:29

And then that night one of our friends was epileptic. He had an epileptic fit because he'd forgotten to take his medications. Finn's like he's literally doing those ones on the ground and Finn jams a board onto his feet and he's going ride it down, wayne, ride it down. And then, sunday, the sun comes out. We go over to Darren Burford's ramp. He hasn't slept. I mean, I was. So I was very innocent and naive in terms of, um, street drugs and stuff. But he was probably just like charging on on gear and pills and stuff and beer and I, like I knew he was drinking beer.

Speaker 1: 1:23:06

We get over to Darren Burford's, sun came out. We, we had like two hours to skate before we had to drive back and he learned backside airs, like he learned late grab backside airs that day and he hadn't slept, he hadn't been sober for 48 hours. And I just remember he was on this like fluoro green Hozoi board and I'm sure there's photos of it. But he just started popping his backside airs and it's a foot out and it's two foot out and then he's doing six foot backside airs on this, like I think it was about eight foot transition ramp, darren burford's ramp, and they were just like, oh, like we'd seen lee ralph by that point, but it was like that. It was just like he just went.

Speaker 1: 1:23:46

Oh, okay, I've just figured out how to do backside airs and we're're like what, like none of us, I could hardly even stand up. I was so tired, I was so broken. Wow, and yeah, anyway, that's Finn he was, and so that was our connection with those Sydney guys. They came up all the time skated Ridge Street, then we sort of they introduced us to more of the other crew of Sydney, guys like Springy and, you know, warren Archer. There was just so many guys, so many lucks, yeah. And then we'd go to… McMull, yeah, mcmull, yeah, what no?

Speaker 2: 1:24:29

Sorry, keep going.

Speaker 1: 1:24:31

Yeah, and then we'd go to the Melbourne comps and we'd meet, like Tony Hallam and Johnny McGrath were another level, like they were pro skaters, like the rest of us were skateboarders. You know, like even to respect, in respect for everyone from that generation, in Sydney no one could do what Johnny McGrath did, and really close behind him was Tony Hallam, and I don't know what that was about, whether it was just the drive they had or the facilities they had or the kind of competitiveness of who you know, like the hillbilly, combined with some natural talent.

Speaker 1: 1:25:08

Yeah, and I mean, johnny McGrath was just, he was just a freak of nature. He is still. He's just the most he's. You know, when you see those weird movies where you look into someone's mind and it's all everything's mathematical algorithms, I'm sure that's how he sees, yeah. I'm sure that's how he sees life. He just sees the pattern in everything and he just skates so incredibly beautifully and he always has been able to do that.

Speaker 2: 1:25:35

Yeah, there's a few of them in skateboarding.

Speaker 1: 1:25:37

Yeah, yeah, I love it.

Speaker 2: 1:25:39

Can I ask you about Ramp Riot? We talked about that earlier. You skated in Ramp Riot as well.

Speaker 1: 1:25:44

Yeah, the first one.

Speaker 2: 1:25:46

I remember the one in Melbourne. It was on TV even, I think.

Speaker 1: 1:25:49

Yeah, I don't know how many they had TV even I think, yeah, I don't know how many they had, definitely two. But, we went down for the first one and it was just like it was again. It was one of those like we didn't want to skate a vert ramp.

Speaker 2: 1:26:01

So, everyone.

Speaker 1: 1:26:01

Getting these hired Falcons again drives a human away.

Speaker 2: 1:26:05

I think it was big for me, because I would have been like 12 or something like that and it was on mainstream TV. I've actually covered it, yeah right. And I just remember going, oh my God, like skateboarding's on TV, like real TV, because this is when we only had like three channels three to five channels.

Speaker 1: 1:26:20

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:26:22

It's like on Channel 9.

Speaker 1: 1:26:24

Yeah, well, those hardcore guys were hardcore Like they were in it for.

Speaker 2: 1:26:29

In terms of promoting it.

Speaker 1: 1:26:36

Yeah, just building a business, building an industry and globe turned out all right. You know they make a buck out, um, but that you know they got it. They were, they were our age and they just knew how to do that stuff. They got pros out from america, they, they were in with all the distributors.

Speaker 2: 1:26:48

They had sponsorships you know, um unbelievable, like hill brothers, yeah, yeah, and sponsorships you know Entrepreneurs?

Speaker 1: 1:26:55

eh, Unbelievable.

Speaker 2: 1:26:56

The Hill Brothers. Yeah, yeah, hills Hoist, you know that now?

Speaker 1: 1:26:59

Yeah, I do. Their dad created the Hills Hoist. It's insane. When I did find that out, it did start making a bit more sense that they probably had a bit of business acumen behind them before they became skateboarders. But for whatever you know, whatever you want to say about them, they bought 87, 88, 89, whatever it was. They bought pro skateboarding to Australia and we got to see that stuff and they took it around the country and good on them for that.

Speaker 2: 1:27:26

Yeah, did you go to one of the Sydney Opera House.

Speaker 1: 1:27:29

Yeah, I went. I'm sure I would have. I can't think of any reason why I didn't go to any demos or um, but it like 80, was that?

Speaker 2: 1:27:39

was that a ramp ride at sydney opera house? I can't remember I don't remember if you're out there, the one where christian hosway skated, and like it's in front of the opera house, yeah, that I'm.

Speaker 1: 1:27:47

I think that was just a demo, but I couldn't yeah probably was memories gone.

Speaker 1: 1:27:51

Yeah, yeah, but um, again, it's like nothing. You know, I just I just wanted to skateboard ride and all of that stuff is so like I just don't, I don't have that um, I don't have that circus mentality for it. I was just a skater. I just went to where the skateboarding was and if something was happening then good, you know, if I was allowed to skate even better, yeah, um, so that's kind of my approach to those things. I do remember being on the platform at torquay, like with craig johnson and, uh, lee, you know, lee was there.

Speaker 2: 1:28:27

See, that was funny because tony hawk was there too yeah, maybe not maybe not. No, was that at Bynes? Christian was, I don't think Tony was in the first one.

Speaker 1: 1:28:33

No, christian was yeah there were some amazing skaters. But we were kind of accepted as part of the crew because Lee basically lived in my lounge room for six or eight months when he was up here living with Colin Brown. Him and Gregor used to come over and play Cozza's guitar Gregor Rankin, gregor Rankin, yeah. And they'd come drink tea, play guitar, watch our videos, have their little funny in-jokes and just be at our house all the time. So when we got to Torquay and you can just walk up and shake Lee's hand and give him a hug and the other guys see you doing that. You're just part of the crew and it's kind of my.

Speaker 1: 1:29:20

I feel like it's my way of getting through life in general is just to be, just to assimilate with that thing and then you're instantly accepted. I don't know whether it's a camouflage I have so that I don't feel out of place or something, but it's just like I've got no, like everyone to me, to me everyone's on the same plane and heaps of people don't see it that way, like, um, a lot of people see like put people on the pedestal, and I don't see that. I don't. It's just, you know, I don't. I don't think very many people in skateboarding would look back and think of themselves as worthy of being on a pedestal and if they did, I think they'd be called on it pretty quick and I think I think being able to access the rock stars of skateboarding yeah on a one-to-one.

Speaker 1: 1:30:10

You know, like I skated that rent with lee every day for months and months, and months and he became one of the hugest southern hemisphere exports to skateboarding but to you it's just.

Speaker 2: 1:30:22

This is just. He's a funny guy, he does he does a rad skateboarding.

Speaker 1: 1:30:26

He's funny.

Speaker 3: 1:30:27

He's pretty good on the guitar yeah, do you do you think you have a little bit of um, and I mean most of us do? But do you think you have a little bit of um, and I mean most of us do? But do you think you have a little bit of, maybe imposter syndrome as well? Because during that period I mean when you talk about people being on different levels and you feeling like that you needed to assimilate to fit in during that period you were um. You know, al tindall started skateboard australia, which you know you helped out with.

Speaker 3: 1:30:52

You did a lot of the graphic design for design logos, for you designed graphics for skateboarding companies. You're doing your own art, studying art, performing in punk bands. You're skateboarding and your skateboarding photos were ending up in skateboarding magazines as well. Do you think, looking back on it, if you were to step outside of yourself for a moment, that you were one of those people anyway and you didn't need to assimilate? That was you feeling that you were already one of those people. You were already there. I mean you did. You designed john bogart's graphic, which is, you know, his pro model for bonza, which is, you know, one of really iconic board. There's all these little things that people might not know about you, that are actually these kind of like treasured little facts about our subculture. That kind of help tie it all together as well.

Speaker 1: 1:31:43

And so it's always funny when I hear you say, oh, you know, trying to fit in, because to me and take all my bias out of it as far as being one of your friends, you were one of those people yeah, when you, when you put it like that, it's, I don't see it from there because it's like it's you're in your own life and you, I, I did it like I just wanted to be skateboarding and the you know, it's just it's. I don't know, is it dumb luck? Is it? Is that you, you put yourself in a place where, where things can happen, and then they happen. So you don't, it's not like, oh man, that was lucky, wasn't it?

Speaker 1: 1:32:27

No, well, I put myself in that place, um, and I with, I was with these people and I was part of that thing and I put the effort in to do those things. So, yeah, when you, but yeah, again, it's like you. I reckon you could ask that question of Lance and he might say the same thing. You know, like I feel like it's just one of those things where it just it's just your life and you're living it and these things happen.

Speaker 2: 1:32:55

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:32:59

And then you move on to the next thing, and the next thing happens.

Speaker 2: 1:33:02

It's interesting you keep saying that because I watched the Heath Kurchart interview on the Tony Hawk podcast. Did you see that? Yeah, I mean for me. I know Heath Kurchart's a completely different era to what we're discussing, but he is iconic really, let's face it in terms of street skating. But he was just dumbfounded that he was even asked to be on the show, that anyone even references him as someone that was actually good at skateboarding. He just still could not believe it because it was just for him, just innate, just I just want to skate but never considered that he was actually good at it.

Speaker 2: 1:33:37

And I really believe that it wasn't coming from that sort of semi-narcissistic sort of angle of like oh, I'm just being humble about it, but I know I am. But he was just, I could see he was just like no, I was average at best. Like why do you even want to talk to me? I just got lucky. I could see it was like no, I was average at best. Like, why do you want to talk to me? You know, I just got lucky, I was in the right place at the right time. That's why I got sponsored and things like that.

Speaker 1: 1:33:57

So anyway, and yeah, I think a lot of people would. I mean, I really think that you're you know there are people who skate and there are skateboarders, and that's, I think, the people that do Quiet city, the people that are still skateboarding. When you're my age, you know you can't stop, you're not going to stop. It's not even a choice, it's not even something you contemplate. That's what.

Speaker 2: 1:34:26

John Gray said he still does inverts at 60. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:34:30

Well, and that's it. Like I go down there and skate that bowl three times a week. What is it? 10-foot, 11-foot, concrete bowl yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:34:38

Scary Dan.

Speaker 1: 1:34:38

And I feel like I can see it from here, but I can't.

Speaker 2: 1:34:41

Nearly can't Almost.

Speaker 1: 1:34:42

Yeah, it's just there and I can't imagine not doing it. Like I can't imagine sometimes, if I'm running late to go meet my kid, I'll ride my skateboard down the street. It's just the thought of not doing it is like it's not even a thing. It's like forgetting to breathe. You know, you don't even think about breathing you just breathe.

Speaker 1: 1:35:02

And so it's the same with skateboarding. I don't even think about stopping, it's just not even a thing. I'm a skateboarder and it's so interesting when you see went. I really don't want to talk too much about the olympics, but it's a. It's like the difference between um going like being at belco just recently and watching those. There's kids down there and there's kids that are. There's kids that are skating to and they are phenomenal, but they're not skateboarders, they're athletes Stunning. Yeah, almost almost. I used to think that you know the I don't want to say anything about names, but you know that kid that used to come to Bar Beach and like train and was a phenomenal skateboarder but just seemed to me that she just didn't know what skateboarding was.

Speaker 3: 1:36:02

Like you, know what I mean it's like. Was that a parental influence, do you think?

Speaker 1: 1:36:06

oh, maybe yeah, it could be. Um, it could be that it's like there was a certain mindset and look, don't get me wrong, just probably at a certain point there, for a really small amount of time, was the best girl skateboarder in the world.

Speaker 3: 1:36:22

Yeah, a complete phenomenon.

Speaker 1: 1:36:23

Yeah, but I just felt like just was doing tricks, didn't seem to know about what skateboarding was and that sort of led into what I saw in the olympics and there were people who were skateboarders, like poppy's a skateboarder, and heaps of those, heaps of those girls, it's heaps of those people that I've skated with that were in the olympics escape. They're just skateboarders who are so good that they get onto that stage and there's some that will not be skateboarders when they're too old to be in the Olympics.

Speaker 1: 1:37:00

I feel, like that's a thing. It's in the future, I feel like that's a thing.

Speaker 2: 1:37:04

I'm stoked to get that perspective on the notice, the change in the culture shift that you've noticed over the years, because I often think about Naja Houston, like I mean, he's just so phenomenal, you know, he really is, there's no questioning that. But I was really surprised when he didn't win Skater of the Year. You know, and it's just, I've never been able to put my finger on why, like, he does have a lot of haters and things like that, but literally maybe one of the best people to ever stand on a skateboard in the streets anyway, and and I think maybe what you're saying is kind of summing it up but I think he genuinely that guy generally does love skating as well, but something, is just not hitting people like lance mountain did when he first got on a skateboard, and so's something so authentic and pure about it.

Speaker 2: 1:37:54

And I was the exact same with Lance Mountain. My first ever skateboard was a Bonite Powerwall, peralta, lance Mountain, and that's the reissue. Yeah, because I wish I kept the original, like everyone wishes yeah, right. But you know what I mean. So it's just sort of summarising everything you were just saying. It's cool.

Speaker 1: 1:38:11

Yeah, it's a tricky one and we won't know. We won't know until the future, but that's art, right.

Speaker 2: 1:38:19

It's subjective to everyone, Like there may be people that do look at those skaters that we're mentioning and have a completely different you know perspective on it, and that's okay too, right.

Speaker 1: 1:38:28

Of course it is, and it's you know. But if you're skating, you're a skater, but there's skateboarders and there's people who skate but is it motives.

Speaker 2: 1:38:36

Like does it come down to motives?

Speaker 1: 1:38:38

It could be that.

Speaker 2: 1:38:38

It could be that yeah like you were saying, like you just wanted to be where the session was, didn't care if it was a ramp ride or a skate comp, you just wanted to skate. So I don't know, or is so I don't know, or is there people going? They have been training the same line for the last month leading up to that.

Speaker 1: 1:38:58

Yeah, yeah, and I find it really interesting when I go to um, I go to comps, but particularly bowl comps. I do a lot of commentating and stuff. And I see kids, they get three, you get three runs, best run counts and they do the same run three times and I just like, why would you do that? Like, yeah, okay, you might get, okay, you're doing it, but you're in that bowl. Surely you've got other ways of doing that thing. And the judges notice that you've changed it up, you've done something different, you've put yourself in a different place. And that's not a great example of what I'm talking about, but I just find that really odd. Maybe it's because I probably couldn't do the same run three times in a row. I don't know, because this is just where I find myself in the bowl at any given time, sort of a little bit haphazard. But yeah, when I'm watching and I'm commentating on it, I'm like, yeah, you just did that run, why don't you do a different run, put? I'm commentating on them like, yeah, you just did that run, why don't you do a different run? Put that trick somewhere else in the bowl. Judges notice that stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:40:00

And I was talking to Jed McKenzie the other day and it's that thing about like anti-judging where you're not judging what they're doing. You're judging what they're not doing and where they're not doing it Like he's a bit burned out on that sort of skating and he's a phenomenal again phenomenal skateboarder, like those kids that grew up in Bar Beach George Richards, you know, marley Ray's still rad, he's only a kid, he's just amazing. Jed McKenzie, jackson Bogarts, those guys that grew up in that bowl and it's a big concrete bowl and they've turned into insane skateboarders yeah, but they've also. They're Newcastle skateboarders. They're not just skateboarders, they're Newcastle skateboarders, so they've got this thing in their DNA. That just goes a bit sideways with contests, you know just subvert.

Speaker 1: 1:40:59

We just don't do that really it's not really our thing. We're not competitive skateboarders, we're just skateboardvert. We just don't do that really it's not really our thing. We're not competitive skateboarders, we're just skateboarders. Great community, Bring you know your kids grow up in a really good community. When you're in Newcastle Skateboarder Skating in our parks, You're not going to. It's going to be pretty hard for you to be a competitive, like an actual competitive skateboarder. I mean Jed could do it, but he doesn't want to do it, Dude.

Speaker 2: 1:41:25

his cover shot may be one of my favorite slam cover shots.

Speaker 1: 1:41:28

That's. How good is that? That's amazing. Am I going to my favorite cover? I mean?

Speaker 2: 1:41:31

you've skated Pizzy Bowl, obviously, but I know they've resurfaced it.

Speaker 1: 1:41:35

Even with the resurface.

Speaker 2: 1:41:36

That hip is fucking gnarly.

Speaker 1: 1:41:37

Yeah, you can't go anywhere near that.

Speaker 2: 1:41:39

So like yeah, he's ridiculous, he's ridiculous. Shout out to that yeah, yeah, that was a sick cover shot.

Speaker 1: 1:41:44

Yeah, and he's getting like, he's going about it. He's going about, he's called it a career, for want of a better word. He's going about being a skateboarder in exactly the right way. He's hanging out with the right people, he's skating the right places. He does it. He's such a humble guy.

Speaker 2: 1:42:01

More sustainable approach.

Speaker 1: 1:42:03

I feel like that.

Speaker 2: 1:42:04

Yeah absolutely.

Speaker 1: 1:42:05

You're not going to be this month's flavor. You're just going to be a really rad skateboarder that people appreciate and respect. Yeah, and that's kind of. I just feel like that's a newie thing.

Speaker 3: 1:42:16

And there's longevity in that as well. Yeah, sure, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:42:19

I was just thinking about kieran woolley his, because I'm from the south coast and so so is kieran. But did you guys recently see um his independent trucks part where he ollied off the roof into the tree trunk? Yeah I mean to me that's pure skateboarder. Like that's just as creative as it comes like you know that he heard about it or he drove past, went. I wonder if there's a bit of a transition on that tree trunk. That's skatable. How do you do that so sick?

Speaker 1: 1:42:45

Yeah, and Kieran's, another really good example. He used to come up here and skate. I mean he still skates. He skated all the ABCs and lots of our local comps. He just had sort of an attachment, an affinity with our bowl. I've heard that and he's just turned into an absolutely incredible skateboarder, but he's still the raddest guy. He's just so in touch with skateboarding and the people he's around and the people he's with are the right kind of skateboarders. You know what I mean.

Speaker 2: 1:43:21

But don't you reckon he's one. I mean, he's doing it all, though, like Olympics as well.

Speaker 1: 1:43:25

You know what I mean so he's like one of the. He's like a rare gem who has been able to juggle all of that and be super competitive, but then roar as they come.

Speaker 2: 1:43:35

Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 1:43:37

He crosses boundaries, yeah and I think a lot of that is just absolutely incredible talent. Like he's just such a good skateboarder and he can put himself in all of those places. You know what I mean. Like he can perform in the Olympics and Keegan's again. Keegan won the gold medal, but he's not Kieran you know what I mean it's embarrassing yeah yeah, keegan's not Kieran.

Speaker 1: 1:44:03

You know what I mean? It's a comparison athlete. Yeah, yeah, keegan's a competitive athlete. He's always been that kid Like from being the tiniest little kid. You just can't even imagine how tiny he was the first time I saw him skate, and now he's a gold medalist. But he's not Kieran.

Speaker 2: 1:44:19

But can I ask you though, when you were skating, say like the you know the Merriweather ramp back in the day, was there ever conversations on the platform of like oh, imagine if skating was in the Olympics one day? Come on, you must've. You didn't ever, not even once, not even once.

Speaker 1: 1:44:33

And it's I just like I got. I was asked this a few years ago and it's just like I love it. If it brings, if it brings more skateboarders to skateboarding and more facilities to skate on it has, then bring it on For me. That's what it's about. It's about exposing the money, people to skateboarding and then getting more facilities.

Speaker 1: 1:45:02

You know I saw a feed today where Cessnox nearly finished, the park at Cessnox nearly finished and we've got how many parks Like. It's just insane, the number of parks that we've got within 20 minutes of here.

Speaker 2: 1:45:15

Did you ever think you'd see that in your lifetime, though? I would not even dream of it.

Speaker 1: 1:45:20

I was in Sydney, not even dreamed of it.

Speaker 2: 1:45:22

Because I'm in Sydney a lot and I was a few months ago. I had this one day where I skated like Sydney Park and then Glebe and then what's that other park? Something Park. It's not Moor Park, I'm having a mental blank and it's got that epic ball with the marble coping Anyway. So I just skated like three of the most amazing parks, all in one day, yeah, yeah. And I remember just stopping going like I never thought I'd see this in my lifetime.

Speaker 1: 1:45:49

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:45:50

But you know, and then I was like well, how much of this can we thank the Olympics? Because it's now on the council's radar and they're happy to put money in the budget for it.

Speaker 1: 1:45:58

Yeah, like it must be. Yeah, well, it's it, it's, it's in the mainstream, you know it's like they're funding.

Speaker 1: 1:46:05

And it's also and I reckon jim will please, jim will cut in on this because we were talking about it a couple of a couple of weeks ago about the kids just aren't into team sport. That's just not the same. You know, parent, I know what is it, what is it? Parents aren't into it, kids aren't into it. It's not the. It's not our culture anymore, so much. It's particularly in newcastle, particularly like in, not in newcastle, but on the coast. You know you're surfing, you're skating, you're you're mountain biking. It's kind of like a, they're a solitary kind. It's not a team sport, but it's a community that you're living in and I think councils are like oh, hang on a minute, we've got less people bugging us to build an oval, but we've got heaps of people bugging us to build a skate park.

Speaker 1: 1:46:54

And so they weigh that. You know, that's politics, that's what happens.

Speaker 3: 1:46:58

Yeah, yeah, we were talking about it the other day, I do think at some stage and not that it's a competition, because everybody's pastime has its place. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not anti-team sport necessarily or anything like that. It wasn't for me and it wasn't something I was interested in or gravitated towards at all. But at some stage, when it becomes harder to fill spots on the cricket team or on the rugby league team because every kid is either out in the surf or up at Glenrock on a mountain bike or down at the bowl or down at civic on a skateboard or roller skating or whatever it is, kickboxing, MMA, any of that stuff, you know, any of the kind of solitary things.

Speaker 3: 1:47:37

I'm not the. I mean you need a competitor for those things, but there's still kind of like, there's a lot of intrinsic motivation. It's like a solo thing when you're actually doing it. At some stage, the way it's going now, it seems like those pastimes are going to outweigh the team sports. And then the kind of allocation of the budgets, particularly in local council and stuff. Stuff is going to have to shift where, instead of the skate parks every now and then get a little bit of a budget for an upgrade or something like that. It will be well, oh yeah, every eight years we're going to have to get a new greenkeeper in at the you know in the oval, because there's 12 people that have decided to get a six on six like rugby league team.

Speaker 1: 1:48:20

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:48:24

Somehow, you know, they've managed to scrounge 12 people together out of, you know, population of 400 000.

Speaker 3: 1:48:28

All right, man, we're finally, finally coming up can I or you spoke about the um generational shift before shan with the olympics and stuff. Um, but, sean, you and I had a conversation once where you were talking about you went to the uk correct me if I'm wrong, if I get the dates wrong um, in, is it 89, 1990, 1991, 1991? And you, you were skating the whole time while you're in the uk. But you said you kind of had your blinkers on your own, your own little world doing your art and stuff, can you? You? You kind of gave me this fantastic description of of being in sydney when you you came back and describe your setup and what you were rocking and what you saw as contemporary skateboarders and how you felt, because when you said it to me it really struck me.

Speaker 1: 1:49:14

I'd have to put myself back in that place. But it started when I was in South Sea and we were skating at that park in South Sea, which is a really old iconic park, and there was a younger generation of kids skating and they all had the. They were doing that kind of rave. Look, you know the baggy pants, the goofy boy. Well, I don't, you know, it's like a. Probably what I how I feel about that is that I did, I was out of my element, but I was still skateboarding the way that I skateboard and I was really lucky because I ran into a community of guys that lived and breathed that park and they were local guys and some of them lived in London and they came back for the weekends and stuff, but I was skating with guys my own age who'd skated that park, their whole sort of skateboard life. And then, also, because I was there in the summer, they had one of those um, they had the shut up and skate comp, and so there were guys from the states, like heaps of the um, zolat guys and you know, like craig johnson, I remember, and steve schneer, a few guys that came out. They had that shut up and skate comp and so it was. It was really kind of still my skateboarding was still relevant.

Speaker 1: 1:50:24

But what I was watching the kids skating in the park like that weren't. They were skating this, these weird little obstacles and this little street dish and stuff, and they all had their baggy pants on and their 45 mil wheels and they used to joke and say they were just urethane covered bearings and and I just could, I was like hang on a minute, what's going on here that they, you can't even that skateboard doesn't even go. And then, yeah, and then I came back and, um, just with me being a vert skater and I was trying to like I'd go to skate vert ramps and there's no one there. I go to monavale and I can't the hours I kind of got like, kind of got bullied a bit by maybe some guys who were shit-hot guys, local guys at the time, but I didn't know because they were a fair bit younger than me and I just didn't get what was going on. I couldn't really hook into it.

Speaker 1: 1:51:15

And then I came back to Newcastle. I came back from overseas, moved in with mum and dad because I had zero money, I had minus money actually I owed them a fair bit of money, moved in with mom and dad in port macquarie for a year and then I um bravely ran away from there to go back to uni, because that was the only sort of way I could escape was to have a plan. So I decided to go back to uni and I did that, um, and I moved back here. In 93. When I came back here here there was no one skateboarding in my kind of realm Like you guys were all like. Was the park at the beach then?

Speaker 3: 1:51:49

No, that wasn't until 1996. Yeah, 1995, sorry.

Speaker 1: 1:51:53

So I'd go skating. I'd skate Izzo Bowl, sometimes Ellermore Vale Bowl, which was smoother but way scarier scene, um, but I'd mostly skate is a bowl, mostly on my own. Um, I'd I'd skate around but, like my, none of my mates were skating. There was no like guys my age weren't skating johnny, I don't even know where john was, maybe he was still in melbourne, I don't know but there. But there weren't people around skating. And then, yeah, when the park down at the beach got built and that ramp got built, it sort of slowly started to make sense again. But there was a long time where I just couldn't find my. You guys were skating, like obviously you guys were street skating and doing your thing where you did it, but I didn't know anyone who was skating.

Speaker 3: 1:52:44

I think you told me a story about trying to go to get new trucks when you first got back to Sydney or something. It's kind of funny.

Speaker 1: 1:52:50

Yeah, and I couldn't get anything. What was it like? One, three ones, one four ones? You just couldn't get anything to fit a deck. And that's how I ended up with that old fart board, because it was the only board that I considered to be big enough to ride transition on. Was that an Acme?

Speaker 3: 1:53:08

Yep. It was probably only like nine inches wide right.

Speaker 1: 1:53:11

It even wasn't that big comparatively, no and it was still a paddle pop shape, but it was literally called the old fart like an ironic name for this big board, and that was the only board I could find in a skate shop that looked anything like what I wanted to write.

Speaker 3: 1:53:26

Old fart with an E on the end right, yeah, like fart, like as in like ye olde time, yeah, ye olde farty, yeah yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:53:33

And what was I like? We went in 91, 93. What was I like? 30, nearly that's so funny.

Speaker 3: 1:53:45

It's outrageous, right? You found some guys in the suburbs when you're skating around, though you told me you've run into captain and ted and yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:53:49

So yeah, that was really cool because um captain was living with his grandmother, aunt, grandmother uh, his grandmother over at ties hill and so him and ted used to come over and skate, um, skate his own bowl, and that was rad because they were a bit younger than me and they had new tricks, but they they still like my skating and I really like their skating like they were so and they're funny kids and I had a car at this point. So, um, yeah, we used to go to down to wrath mines and all the weird places out to out to. I think we skated the bowl at Beresfield one day behind the pool there. So, yeah, john knew places to go and I had a car, so we kind of hooked up. For probably a year or so we used to do that.

Speaker 3: 1:54:36

That's fantastic.

Speaker 1: 1:54:37

It was good fun, yeah, yeah yeah, but again it's like how old is this captain? Like your age? No, no, he's nine years older than me. Yeah, yeah, but again it's like how old is.

Speaker 3: 1:54:42

Captain, like your age? No, no, he's nine years older than me.

Speaker 1: 1:54:45

Yeah right. So what's that make him 10 years younger than me?

Speaker 3: 1:54:49

Yeah, no, he's not even nine years, he's probably seven years older. He's probably 48 this year, I think.

Speaker 1: 1:54:53

Yeah, so about 10 years younger than me, and they were just little kids. Like Ted was actually a little kid, they were tiny, they were just young kids, but they were really into skateboarding and they were both really good skateboarders and they were the only people I could find to skate with.

Speaker 3: 1:55:07

Yeah, was Gordo around at that time? Did you ever skate with Gordo? No, no, he was here when he was at uni.

Speaker 1: 1:55:10

Yeah, he was around, but I didn't know him. And when the beach park opened up, I'd see him skating around and um, and then that's when I started seeing you guys again. Um, you know that that sort of reintroduced me to the to newie skating and like I think it was saying

Speaker 2: 1:55:35

the other day, like fletch used to skate that brad pierce and um yeah yeah, yeah, oh, he man, he oh I still love him yeah, he's skate.

Speaker 1: 1:55:40

He used to skate that ramp. Just it just blew me away because I hadn't seen, hadn't seen skating like that for years and then I got back into it and then he was like the one of the first transition skaters I saw after I'd been away that just had all the new tricks, like the stuff he was doing. I didn't even, I didn't even know like tony hawk, pro skater, wasn't around then, but it was like that. I was like, yeah, you can't do that on a skateboard, on a transition ramp, what it's crazy.

Speaker 3: 1:56:06

Did you remember Jamie Fletcher from before you left to go overseas? Yeah, do you remember him from like Caves Beach and stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:56:13

Yeah, he skated Caves Beach and he used to come up and skate Cams Wharf when we had the ramp at Cams Wharf, and so I knew who he was. He'd aged like what, was that four years? He'd aged 10 years in four years. Yeah, he lived really.

Speaker 3: 1:56:27

He did. Yeah, he lived hard and fast.

Speaker 1: 1:56:28

But at the end of the day. He was an insane skateboarder, brad, and like the Cox's who were unrelated, those guys were insane. Yeah, they were just some really good and I was so gosh. Yeah, how were you feeling? Oh, it just gives me goosebumps thinking about it. It's like, oh, thank God, I thought skateboarding had died. Oh right, yeah, there was like nobody skateboarding and yeah, it was just such a relief, nobody skateboarding, and yeah, it was just such a relief. Really early, like when I first came back, say 93, we used to go down to what's that? Is it Slam? Was it down at Tugra?

Speaker 2: 1:57:15

Yep, yeah, the first thing, level two. Or was it Vertex? Was it a Vertex?

Speaker 3: 1:57:20

Vertex Was it. Tarrant Point was at Tarrant Point, it was.

Speaker 2: 1:57:23

Tarrant Point, but didn't they open the second?

Speaker 3: 1:57:24

one at Tarrant Point, or was that called something different? No, it was.

Speaker 1: 1:57:26

Level 2.

Speaker 2: 1:57:27

Oh okay, yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:57:34

There were two different locations, but they weren't like 200 metres apart. Yeah, they were the two Level 2s. Yeah, yeah, it was two different Level 2s and then it became Slam Factory.

Speaker 2: 1:57:39

Yeah right, Padstow was the other one.

Speaker 3: 1:57:40

Yeah, vertex was at Padstow. That's my old hood out that way, is it Panania? Yeah, I remember Padstow, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:57:46

Yeah, when I found out about Level 2, we'll call it, I always called it Slam and Andrew and I used to go down there and skate that and that was just like, oh, thank goodness there, Thank goodness there's a scene, there's facilities. You know, you've got to pay, you've got to go, you've got to bloody travel again.

Speaker 2: 1:58:03

Yeah, so you were skating the vert ramp there. Was there a?

Speaker 1: 1:58:07

vert ramp. No, there was a kind of a what was it like? A seven-foot bowl, yeah, and a couple of different minis, okay and so funny. I was only talking to was like, oh, it's the weirdest thing, andrew and I we'd skated the bowl for a couple of hours and we got into this mini and we just started skating. It was when, like, switch was coming in.

Speaker 3: 1:58:30

It was just.

Speaker 1: 1:58:30

Early 90s yeah it was so massive, like it was just everything was called Switch this and Switch that and, like you know, whatever this one, we'd skated the bowl for a couple of years, a couple of years, a couple of hours, and we just we didn't want to go. So we ended up skating one, what like a three or four foot mini they had there, and we just skated it for like two hours, completely backwards, like we did all our tricks. We're both goofy. We did all our tricks for two hours, natural foot, like dropped in backwards to rock everything, like you, 50, 50, the whole thing, the thought of it now, just like what was I thinking? Anyway, I got back in the car and I kept looking at my left hand to see what time and I couldn't put my seatbelt on. I'm like reaching across the wrong side and I went the wind up.

Speaker 1: 1:59:16

No, this is honestly I crossed the midline.

Speaker 3: 1:59:20

You confused your brain. He recalibrated. I crossed the midline. You confused your brain, he recalibrated.

Speaker 1: 1:59:22

I crossed the midline of my brain and everything had just gotten messed up. We did it. We were concentrating so hard I couldn't wind the window down in his VW. I was so glad I wasn't driving because I reckon I would have crashed.

Speaker 3: 1:59:34

I feel like.

Speaker 1: 1:59:43

And so from that day, a couple of days, I got sick of looking at my empty left wrist so I changed hands and put my watch and I've been wearing it on. But it's so funny because the next, the next time I went up to um, the next time I went to newy park, I dropped in backwards, just didn't even think about it, just put the board there, dropped in back, like dropped in as a natural footer, and I went, have kept doing that, I know, and that's the thing, isn't? It's like I should have kept doing inverts and I should have kept doing that, I know, and that's the thing, isn't it? It's like I should have kept doing inverts and I should have kept doing lean-to-tails and, like John Gray said, it was so inspiring. I'm going to go down and skate with those guys one Sunday.

Speaker 2: 2:00:09

You're going to skate John's vert, right? Yeah, yeah, real soon, dude, I want to come On a Sunday. Yeah, I want to come. Just do fake yolly on vert.

Speaker 1: 2:00:25

There you go. I just want to do fake yolly.

Speaker 2: 2:00:26

Stale fish grabs over the coping stale fish pop tart.

Speaker 1: 2:00:27

Stale fish pop tart. Yeah, kind of, yeah, you grab the other way. Yeah, could you do that? I could do a pop tart.

Speaker 2: 2:00:31

I couldn't do it like a fakie pop tart yeah like a pop tart.

Speaker 1: 2:00:35

Like you sick drop fakie, grab it like a front side air, okay, and then just let go and drop back in again. So that was called a pop-tart, okay, yeah, anyway, I got to Newey Ramp and just dropped in backwards and it wasn't until I went up to whatever I was going to do. The next trick, axel Stoller of rock and roll or something.

Speaker 2: 2:00:56

I'm like man, I'm going backwards.

Speaker 1: 2:00:59

It did not even occur to me. Hadn't worked out how you're going to get there.

Speaker 2: 2:01:01

Yeah, Because I know this is a bit of a darkening to bring up, but it came up the other day because that era when you know Vert died and there's a lot of pro-Vert skaters struggling with that, you know, for lack of a better term, transition to the new era it came up on my feed the other day that Gator is due to be released from prison. I was only thinking about that. Yeah, I mean, I remember the day I remember when, like the news, like, oh, like it.

Speaker 2: 2:01:28

Just like I remember when I was standing I was at my friends, as my friends shed, he had a little mini ramp in his shed, it's like a little three-foot mini built. He's like did you hear? Like gator killed his girlfriend, you know, and I'll never forget like it was, like the first time as a kid, like something like that was actually interesting to me because he was a skateboarder, you know, and I used to worship him, like before those other crew, and I must admit, ever since. Which is what now, almost 30 years later, is that right?

Speaker 1: 2:01:56

It has to be.

Speaker 2: 2:01:56

Well, because he got a 25-year sentence, but then when he was due to get out, they appealed to keep him in longer. Yeah, and I was always like I wonder how he's going.

Speaker 1: 2:02:07

You know what I mean, yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:02:09

He served his time. It's really heavy. It's a thing.

Speaker 1: 2:02:15

How did it impact you guys? Well, it's so weird because I was only thinking about it this afternoon, because every year we have a chaos jam here in.

Speaker 1: 2:02:19

July and I do a graphic for a shirt and I just thought, oh, it'd be so rad to do the gator graphic because it's just so iconic that you know whatever you call that thing, the void thing, yeah, but I just can't go there. You know what? You can't go there? No, you can't. It's just I can't support. I don't want to remind people.

Speaker 1: 2:02:44

It's really weird timing that you say he's going to get out of jail, because I thought man, he must be. He's like my age, he's in jail and he's 60 and he's never seen anything of what's happened in the last 30 years. And it's like, well, you know you did a crime, you've gone to jail. It's that you know. All of that stuff's horrible. It's horrid to even contemplate it. But for you to say that he's coming out, it was kind of what was it? It was a physical incarnation of what happened in that little moment in time in skateboarding and we didn't feel that because we were just kicking off. Those guys went from kings of the world, like Gator was the king of the world. He had the whole thing. You know, he was Tony and Christian joined together in a single person. Christian joined together in a single person. He had the rock star thing of Christian and the incredible technical ability and style. He was just such a rad skater and I think it just sort of that moment in time. You know, it's like the Altamont and the Rolling Stones. It's just like Hells angels have killed a hippie kid. You know gator's killed his girlfriend. It's just like this is the death of something. It's him. Something really important's just happened and and and if you watch that gator documentary, you can see him spiraling into or out of what where was, and we didn't feel that. You know, I remember you saying that to John the other day and it's like I didn't feel.

Speaker 1: 2:04:31

I'd always struggled to have facilities, have places to skate. Vert was my thing, transition was my thing. I never had it. You know, we had this skate park in Coffs Harbour for 14 seconds and I broke my knee. We had the Ridge Street ramp here for a while. We had Quakers Hill. No, we didn't. We had Cairns Wharf, but we never had our own facility. It was just like not until the bowl got built down at Bar Beach did we have something that I thought like nobody can take this away from us. You know, when was that? It was like 2020 or something.

Speaker 2: 2:05:06

Yeah, no, it wasn't 2010.

Speaker 1: 2:05:09

Yeah, it was like 14, 15 years ago or something.

Speaker 3: 2:05:12

It's interesting. What year is this? Hang on a minute. What year is this? It's 2024. Yeah, thanks. It's interesting to think that. So he's been in jail for 30 years and so much has changed, obviously in the world with skateboarding and stuff. And then when you think about his crime and you think about when you look at the news every single day women are still being killed by weird jealous men every single fucking day you look at like I mean I'm not pinpointing a location or saying that it's rife there more than anywhere else, but you look at Ballarat in the last three months you know what I mean, when three women killed I don't watch the news man.

Speaker 2: 2:05:58

That's why I don't watch the news either.

Speaker 3: 2:06:00

That's why I don't know what you're talking about. You know, senseless violence against women, it's like still absolutely rife. Like you cannot read the news without seeing a guy and people saying women perpetrate domestic violence too well, yeah, I mean sure, 0.02% of it. No one's saying that doesn't happen. But you cannot, you almost cannot, read the newspaper you cannot read and a local news website without seeing that that that little thing happened in our community. Then you know 30 in the skateboarding community 30 years ago. But you look at the broader it's still happening well, let's look at it from a solution-based approach.

Speaker 2: 2:06:40

Like as men sitting around having a chat. What can men do to like what's going on, then? Like why is this occurring and how can it be, I guess, rectified?

Speaker 1: 2:06:58

Bring your kids up with respect for like, not like, it's not just women, it's not sexist or racist or religiousist or anything. Just don't be a dick, you know. Bring your kids up, just don't be a dick. And to anyone ever your grandparents, your aunties and uncles, your teachers, the person who parks you in at the shops, you know, just chill out, you know, and don't be a dick. It's not, they're just so. Everyone's got a. You know, it's not any different. But like we haven't had a Vietnam, we haven't had a Second World War, we haven't had a First World War, we haven't had a First World War, we have nothing to complain about.

Speaker 3: 2:07:46

The frail ego thing though, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 2:07:48

It is, yeah, oh my trauma and my this and my that.

Speaker 3: 2:07:53

You know it's like well, I don't know go outside, and the idea that women are men is something I think that's a big thing too.

Speaker 1: 2:08:00

There's this thing where guys are kind of like yeah, I can't get my head, I just don't.

Speaker 3: 2:08:05

I'm furious that they can't. Yeah, and it's like it always spins me out when you look at social media and stuff and there's something, if something, I don't know, any kind of combats or anything, and as soon as there's a woman involved, there'll be guys commenting in there and it's like the weird mental gymnastics that guys will do to want to be able to like hit a woman or something.

Speaker 1: 2:08:27

It's insane.

Speaker 3: 2:08:28

It's like one of the reasons I don't go on social media much these days is just like that's an illness why? Are you even thinking about that?

Speaker 1: 2:08:35

Yeah, I can't, I can't. I just don't know where that comes from.

Speaker 2: 2:08:41

I can't speak about it Is it a knock-on from the generations beforehand where it was much more like sexist and misogynist. You know like the fathers and the grandfathers grew up in that era of. You know where the man was, the, you know the man that went out and worked and the woman stayed home and it was more like it wasn't spoken about and it was more not acceptable but just more rife. I guess.

Speaker 2: 2:09:11

And then those behaviors are then passed on to the children, and maybe it's going to take generations to kind of like I don't know like breed out or something. I'm just thinking about that. Am I explaining myself? Well, no, I know.

Speaker 1: 2:09:24

It's exactly. My son said to me something about you know just, we've only spoken a couple of times about it in the last few months, but when the yes vote didn't get up, we talked about it and like, for us it's a no-brainer, we're like you know, thankfully our little electorate was one of the few in Australia that had a yes majority. But he said, like it's just one of those things, it's just going to be. There has to be a couple of generations of people still to pass on before it's watered down enough, before that entrenched bigotry and colonialism and that stuff. That's really. It's not teaching. It's not like a dogma, like teaching religion or something like that. It's just these insidious little things that get done and said around children that they just grow up with and they become beliefs and then when push comes to shove, those beliefs come out and it will take another couple of generations for it to water down so much. I definitely think we're moving the right way. You think, yeah, I do. I definitely think we're moving the right way.

Speaker 1: 2:10:40

I work in a school with kids between year five and year eight behaviour school kids like the kids that can't really work anywhere in mainstream. And if we'd have had a kid even remotely like on a gendered, like diverse spectrum, even remotely looking or behaving like that 15 years ago when I first started, they would not have survived. Like, literally, the demographic of those kids they just would have, just they probably wouldn't have even got to school, gotcha, those kids they just would have, just they probably wouldn't have even got to school, gotcha. Now it's like just it's part of their dialogue, it's part of their language, it's accepted, it's supported. Yeah, it's supported in a way, I guess, like they just, you know, I get asked by every I've got a Teachers' Federation rainbow lanyard for my keys, I wear on my pants, and every new batch of kids go, are you gay? And I'm like I don't know.

Speaker 1: 2:11:48

I say sometimes and that just confounds them, but like it just wouldn't have happened 15 years ago, people wouldn't have been kids, wouldn't have had that. So what I'm saying is you're talking about lower hunter, some of the, some of the areas where these kids come from, where there's just generational like poverty and and and lack of education and and it's. You know, that's a whole nother. That's a whole nother conversation. But those are the kids that are coming into our school and they're changing. They're different, you know, and that's only a decade and a half. So I believe and I see my son and his friends. They're in their early 20s and they're the blueprint for the next generation. They're not motivated to get into changing the world, politics and stuff, but they would have friends that are.

Speaker 2: 2:12:46

But they're aware.

Speaker 1: 2:12:47

They are, oh, they are so aware, they're really switched on and they can have those conversations with each other. We couldn't Like I don't know about you growing up with your mates, but we just didn't have big conversations.

Speaker 2: 2:13:00

You know it's like who'd nick my beer?

Speaker 1: 2:13:02

That's a better way.

Speaker 2: 2:13:03

Yeah, I mean, it took me to my late 30s, early 40s before I started not caring and opening up. Yeah, right, and it's become so important to me.

Speaker 1: 2:13:15

Yeah, Obviously yeah it really has.

Speaker 2: 2:13:18

It really has. It's amazing I mean, I feel a deep sense of purpose with it, but it's, I think, too, when you've been, I guess, touched by suicide as well, and then that's when my eyes really became open and went oh man, it's the conversations that aren't being had that are killing people.

Speaker 2: 2:13:39

Yeah, yeah, but empathetic conversations you know, just like trying to put yourself in someone else's shoes. It can just make all the difference and it's not that hard and I know everyone's talking about it. But, like I love what you're saying about the culture is improving. It is changing. You know it's just going to be slow.

Speaker 2: 2:13:59

It is, and one thing I do want to add on the back of the yes and no vote. I think what a lot of working in the public education system, where we are presented with the full spectrum of our society and its diversity and in a position where we have to be empathetic and supportive to meet these students' best interests. I think a lot of people don't realize that the children we're teaching aren't too far removed from the stolen generation. You know, and it's this intergenerational trauma you see it Like. I mean you would have as well. I've taught kids whose grandparents were stolen children. Now, what do you think the conversations are? Have been in their family gatherings, over dinner, yeah, and then they're passing on the pain and the hurt and the suffering that they endured, and the removal and the and. And there's those little children that hear these conversations and feel that pain or absorb it through domestic abuse that's perpetuated by alcoholism, that's numbing the pain that they're suffering. It's passed on into their genes.

Speaker 1: 2:15:07

As far as I'm concerned, and that's just going to take time. It will.

Speaker 2: 2:15:11

And that's why people are like, oh, why can't we just move forward and just get on with it? Fuck, that's what we are, that's what we're doing.

Speaker 1: 2:15:17

We are doing that. This is. What it takes is to keep talking about it. Well, it took.

Speaker 2: 2:15:21

Anyway, there's my rant for the day.

Speaker 1: 2:15:23

No, it's a good one, and it's. I put myself in this weird position. I had this massive paradigm shift the other day. I was teaching some kids like the timeline of Australian Aboriginal. You know the Australian Aboriginal culture in Australia and I did a timeline on the board and I did it as to scale as I could and you've got 80,000 years ago for want of a better date Aboriginal people came here and then nothing else happened at all for like 60,000, you know, like 5,000 years ago, as pyramids, 2,000 years ago, jesus Christ. You know what I mean.

Speaker 2: 2:16:04

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:16:05

In our culture and then in the next little bit and on the timeline, you can't, there's no, you couldn't make. Well, you could. Okay, it would be like the length of Beaumont Street. If you wanted to be able to measure from the colonial first fleet to today, that's how long the scale would have to be for you to measure the distance on that timeline. Gotcha, Aboriginal people have been here forever and you can't measure on the timeline from when the first fleet got here, and that's all we know. That's all we know. Our colonial life in this place is immeasurably small.

Speaker 1: 2:16:50

Now what? I sat here and I was having these really good conversations with some Aboriginal kids and we were talking about it. That's why I was having this lesson. I have this I go up into the New England and I have this connection because my mum came from the New England area and I go anywhere where there's mountains, I go inland to the, you know, the southern highlands. I have a connection. I've only, my family, have only been here, I don't know a hundred years at best say. It would be pretty much exactly a hundred years. My grandfather's family came out here and I feel this funny, like connection to this place. How do you can't even comprehend how connected those people feel to this place. They've been here 80,000 years. 80,000 years, yeah, yeah, like they saw Sydney Harbour fill up with water.

Speaker 2: 2:17:48

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:17:50

And so when I had this epiphany, it's like I feel this really strong bond to my mother's country town and her family's been here 100 years, so you can't describe that to people.

Speaker 2: 2:18:03

It's like no wonder.

Speaker 1: 2:18:05

And what you're saying. I see it, I see the effects of it every day and it's so, so difficult to talk to people and to try and explain intergenerational trauma. It's so difficult to If you it. Just, I know it's there. I know it's there, I know it's there, I see it every single day.

Speaker 1: 2:18:25

Oh, why aren't your kids attending school? Because their parents grew up in a place where, if you sent your kids to school, they might not come home again because someone will come and rip them out of their seat and take them somewhere. That's why their kids don't go to school, because they're terrified of sending them anywhere where they can't see them. And 80,000 years of their culture they learned in those groups. You know, and and we had a really, really lovely guy called joey came and did some stuff at our school and he used to come in every thursday and he would do aboriginal pedagogy and you would, you would do craft activities and you would do kinetic stuff and you'd play sport and you'd tell stories. And that's education, yeah, and it works. Why did 15 behaviour school kids sit and listen to him, all in a group, do the activities, listen to his? Why? Because that's what education looks like. It's diverse, you're adapting to the needs of the kids, you're changing activities, you're doing physical things, you're telling stories.

Speaker 1: 2:19:32

There's integrated into the whole thing was an Aboriginal pedagogy, and it worked really well with the most marginalised students that we have in our system. So you know, it's not just about why do we have bushfires every three years. Aboriginal people have been getting it right in this setting for 80,000 years. Stop and think about why they don't fit in, why they feel marginalised. What can we learn from them? It's not one size fits all. You can't do what we do. That's just not their culture. It's 80,000 years of something. They've been doing it that way and we've tried to fix it, change it, bang it into them and, if you can, it's not just Aboriginal kids. If you develop an education system that works like that, it works for everyone, absolutely everyone.

Speaker 2: 2:20:33

Well, man, the proof is in the pudding, because I mean, even on the podcast, I don't know how many people I've said to oh, how do you reflect on your school years? And every single one oh, I hated school. It's very rare I hear someone I love my school years like every now and then I do, but most of the time and we're just kids, aren't designed to be in four walls no education should be unstructured and messy. Yeah, like you were saying. Yeah, like less structure, more mess.

Speaker 1: 2:20:59

Yeah, you know, particularly in those early years. And and you, it's getting to the point where my son's mates you know if they went to university they dropped out. I mean, covid was obviously a big factor in their little world. Heaps of positive stuff came out of COVID. Like kids don't have to go to school, they'll still. You can teach a kid the curriculum an hour a day on the internet.

Speaker 2: 2:21:28

Homeschool that's good.

Speaker 1: 2:21:29

Yeah, and I like the. I think kids get a lot out of being at school. But it's that social stuff that you learn to be in a group, learn to get along with other people, learn to problem solve, learn to be curious. You do that in a group. Learn to get along with other people, learn to problem solve, learn to be curious. You do that in a group. You do that in a group. But the actual curriculum you can deliver that to a kid an hour a day from anywhere in the world and they'll get the same information and learn the same stuff. Bring it to school, ask a teacher or an advisor or whatever you call that person that runs. That facilitates that thing. But yeah, kids need to be at school, kids need to be in groups to develop social skills, because that's what we are, we're a society. Yeah, so you can't not have school and I think kids that are only homeschooled.

Speaker 2: 2:22:24

So you think you can't not have school.

Speaker 1: 2:22:25

I think kids, that kids that are only homeschooled, um, so you think you can't not have school? I think you can't? Well, I think I just know I shouldn't say it's because school's such a loaded word. You can't not have a place where kids go and and get. But I think they can. They can figure that out for themselves, how that looks and how that operates and who is in what you know. The kids are great at that. Humans are good at that. We look at who we want to be around and we join that group, whatever it is, an interest or, you know, a style, a fashion, whatever it is. But if you let them do that, they'll get more out of it and it'll be heaps easier for you to manage. But they're social things, they're like arty things, they're problem-solving things. They're not. You know we don't need to. It's not chalk and talking. We do not have all the information. Teachers do not have all the information. Teachers do not have all the information, the information that this, that phone has, all the information exactly in gym.

Speaker 2: 2:23:30

Gym survey has also has all the information.

Speaker 3: 2:23:32

There's google, there's youtube and there's gym about a very small, unimportant subsection of the earth.

Speaker 2: 2:23:40

No, but I love that, like I, like I've often said it like teachers are obsolete these days, like the kids can literally find everything they want and then they can get the assignment done with chat, gpt, let's face it yeah. So what are we teaching them? We need to be teaching them how to learn. Like a lot of teachers know this, but do you find like to actually implement that in the structures that we're placed under? It's really uninspiring and challenging when you've still got to. You know meet like syllabus, outcomes and things like that.

Speaker 1: 2:24:14

I'm absolutely. Yeah. It's really hard for me to answer that properly because of the context I'm in. I spent 15 years under a boss that just thought so far outside the square that you couldn't even see the square. That's epic, yeah, 100%. It was like there was not even a square, like we were so far out of the box. It was ridiculous.

Speaker 1: 2:24:38

So I grew up as a teacher in that kind of framework where I just what do you call that? Outside the box? But I was in a framework. That's funny, um, but I grew up in that, in learning to be a teacher in a place where there was no boundaries, where I was just told you have to engage these children. They, they don't.

Speaker 1: 2:24:59

She used to say they don't care what you know until they know that you care. And that's how I teach. If I build a relationship, when the kids are curious and they want to, actually, when they respect you enough to listen to what you say, that might take term one, yes, then you start teaching and then term three, you might get bang as much curriculum into them as you can. You build their skill base, because that's what it's about. It's like you need to be able to read, you need to be able to do social level maths, regardless of where you come from or where you're going. That's what you need to be able to do. But you can re-engage kids with education without doing anything like that for two terms I've done it over and over again and you get kids that leave you and go on back to mainstream, back to high school, and they go. Yeah, I can do this.

Speaker 2: 2:25:49

Yeah, but also like you've nurtured the individual and you've given them the opportunity to discover who they are.

Speaker 2: 2:25:56

And that's, in my opinion, after doing this for a while and also teaching at a progressive high school for a while. After doing this for a while and also teaching at a progressive high school for a while, that was kind of adhered to somewhat of like a Steiner approach. I really do believe the most important outcome is that individual leaving with self-confidence, self-belief and a good understanding of who they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are. And I always reflect on my experience over high school. I left feeling low self-esteem because I was and thought I was dumb, because I didn't get the grades, you know, and yeah, it took me years to rebuild that self-confidence, like years, Like I lost years because of it.

Speaker 3: 2:26:39

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:26:40

So that should be, and I just think, like from 12 to 18, oh God, they must be the most important years of a human's life, like, so developmental in terms of like, not just physically but emotionally as well, you know. But what you said, the system is changing, but we're just beating the confidence out of so many kids.

Speaker 1: 2:27:04

Yeah, and it's just so on a day-to-day get up, go to school, spend six hours a day at school and come home thing. It's just not giving them what they need yeah right.

Speaker 1: 2:27:18

And it's filling in time. It's like getting kids back to school from COVID was like, oh man, this is so. It's such a. It's kind of really inconvenient having these kids at home, because you know, that's what it's about. It's the industrial world can't have kids, just there's no aunties and uncles to. You know Kids, just there's no aunties and uncles. You know, before the Industrial Revolution you learnt your thing out in the field or out in wherever you were, with your family and your family members and your community and your village. That was education, and then everyone had to go off to work in a factory. What are we going to do with all these kids? I don't know. Chuck them into school.

Speaker 2: 2:28:03

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 2:28:04

And it's you know. Come on guys, that's 200 years ago.

Speaker 2: 2:28:08

That's what's happening now.

Speaker 1: 2:28:10

It is what's happening now. That's what I'm saying and I think COVID taught us that. You know they were challenging times, you know, being at home with your kids, but home with your kids, but but it worked. We were there, we we got through it. So I'm just saying you can, there's, there's other ways of doing it than what we're doing now and it was proven by by months and months and months of homeschool.

Speaker 2: 2:28:35

Yeah, exactly my friend, his daughter's in homeschool and he said that they've got a little community of homeschoolers. So you know, you know they share the load with the other parents and you know like one parent will take them for the morning and another parent will take them for the afternoon and they rotate it, and so the kids are still getting that socialization, you know, because what I always find interesting is like we're entrusting strangers with our most precious resource or our most precious thing our children.

Speaker 2: 2:29:02

And we're just leaving them with a stranger for six hours a day. And they're having the predominant influence on them.

Speaker 1: 2:29:07

They are.

Speaker 2: 2:29:09

And the longer I'm a teacher, like you, I actually take my role more and more seriously. When I was fresh out of uni I was like, yeah, I'm going to be a teacher, and I was really motivated. But as I get older I'm like this shit's actually pretty serious like I'm like I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna, uh, take any time with these children for granted, and I owe it to their parents and I owe it to the kid, like every single time I'm with them yeah, I don't know it's, it's very heavy.

Speaker 1: 2:29:35

Yeah, it's, I feel the same way we can talk all night.

Speaker 3: 2:29:37

You can, it's uh, I feel the same way.

Speaker 2: 2:29:38

We can talk all night about it.

Speaker 1: 2:29:39

You can. It's a weird place to be. There's, you know, more people like you need to be in teaching Likewise, bro. Well, you know what I mean, though it's just when you see every kid as a person that needs what you've got. That your experience is. They're the things. We have life experiences, we have stories, we have stuff that you can tell kids, and they will accept that if you treat them with respect, if you treat them like a human being that's in your care, and you think about it at that At the end of the day. That's sort of think to myself every single day at work. It's not about you, it's about them. Stop with your I don't know how many slices of cheese. It's about them. You're here, you're getting paid to do a really important job. You get paid for this, so don't worry, it's not about you, it's's about them. So take their needs on board. They're the person that's coming in and you have to treat every single one of them like something that, if you drop it, it will break.

Speaker 2: 2:30:51

Oh bro Jim.

Speaker 3: 2:30:55

What do you think?

Speaker 2: 2:30:55

of this Jim. How's this guy man?

Speaker 3: 2:30:57

Sitting here as somebody that obviously isn't an educator.

Speaker 1: 2:31:01

Well, you are.

Speaker 3: 2:31:04

I mean mean, you know, I taught creative writing at uni for a semester, um, but you know, um, yeah, and I work in a library, but, no, listening to the two of you talk, just then. If there's one thing that I love more than researching old skateboarding stuff, it's honestly listening just to the way that that people work and the and the way that, like, our community works and, and especially you know, being a fairly new father as well, listening to the two of you talk about this kind of thing is really, really inspiring and it's really important to me, so it's cool. So, like, thank you for letting me, like, sit in on it as well, but we need more skaters as teachers.

Speaker 2: 2:31:41

Right, that's the key, you know that's the key, yeah anyway, anyway, listen, it's been so. Epic sean, how you feeling man?

Speaker 1: 2:31:53

it's a long conversation. Yeah, I'm two-thirds of my mind's down four different rabbit holes. That's what happens. It is. Yeah, it's amazing how you can you you start, you start somewhere and then you're somewhere else all together and you can't even remember where you started and it's it. Um, but, yeah, it's, it's been fabulous, I was like yeah, what a what a wonderful experience to sit and talk about this stuff but listen, there'll be.

Speaker 2: 2:32:20

I've said, I said this gym as well. It's like there's what you want to say and then there's what you actually say, and then afterwards there'll be what you wish, you said and uh but it just comes out how it's meant to come out.

Speaker 1: 2:32:31

Yeah, there's not enough days in a week, is there?

Speaker 3: 2:32:33

you can't sit and do a four-day podcast I think the important thing of going into any kind of interview or discussion or anything like that, when it's open, like this, is not having too much of an agenda, unless obviously you want to be like when I say agenda, you want to be positive, you want to speak the truth or your truth, because everybody's truth is different, but like not going into it with this kind of like a manifesto or anything like that. I think sometimes when you interview somebody and they have this kind of you know that they've almost rehearsed in their head too much. Some of those interviews are really awkward. But sitting back just then and listening to you two talk, that's just genuine conversation. And to me that stuff is.

Speaker 3: 2:33:14

Any kind of interviewer will always say I think that's some of the best stuff. And I tell shan all the time since we've met that he's, as far as I'm concerned, he's a journalist. He didn't think he was when we first met. But they're the kind of best conversations you get out of people is when you just let it flow like that, because you do get those kind of intrinsic truths. I think.

Speaker 2: 2:33:37

Thanks, man. Actually, how do you feel about independent media? Because I mean, with the advent of all these amazing podcasts out there, there's so many. You know this is like the new media. I really believe it. Like you know, a podcast like Joe Rogan is now mainstream media. It's not commercial media.

Speaker 3: 2:33:56

I think it goes back to the word that we used before an agenda. So if you're going into something with, say, like a right-wing bias and that's your agenda to spread that, then you're almost kind of no matter what side of politics you're leaning on. If you're going into that with that agenda, you can never speak the absolute truth because you're already going into it skewing something to suit your wants and your needs and the way that you think society should be. That's where I think the danger is.

Speaker 3: 2:34:26

But everyone's going to do that in some way, of course, and everybody already does, and there's already always been a media bias as well, do you think?

Speaker 2: 2:34:33

people can do it, though they have to be really conscious in not doing that. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 3: 2:34:38

Is that the?

Speaker 2: 2:34:38

markings of a good independent media.

Speaker 3: 2:34:41

No, I think, necessarily it goes back to the consumer as well knowing how to take something and also, you know, as far as being a consumer, knowing the level of what, the quality of what you're consuming. For a long time I know, say, with my parents' generation, you know my mum's a really, really smart woman, but I know when I was younger there'd be certain things, oh, it was in the paper. Now, of course, anything that's in the paper is not an objective truth, but because that was the only platform that was available to anybody and that was the only thing. Well, you know, aside from television, print media and televised media were really the two main streams of you know, news sources. They were just kind of like it was a given. Yeah, now we can't avoid it.

Speaker 3: 2:35:29

You turn on your phone, you log in to get the spam in your emails in. You can't even get essentially checking your mail. Now, you know there was leaflets before, but it's different now and they can be disguised as other things. So it's being able to, I think, a true like the, the real skill, and I think this is a really important skill for all humans moving forward into the next stage that we're going into now with everything the you know, the progress of technology is having the ability to filter those things and understanding what is real, what is subjective and what's objective. I think that's a really, really important skill, and I think it's a skill I don't know Look, I'm not the one out of the three of us that's in education at the moment but I think that's something that's really important to teach the next generation is to how to discern what's objective and what's objective in the news.

Speaker 2: 2:36:22

I agree, but I think people are too lazy. They want everything fed to them. They can get everything fed to them in terms of the information they consume and they don't want to have to be proactive in discerning whether it's, you know, real, objective, subjective you know, Like you said, it is a skill to be developed, but I just feel like people are too lazy these days to do it. That sounds pessimistic.

Speaker 3: 2:36:49

No, it doesn't sound, it doesn't necessarily. Do you know what I mean? No, I reckon.

Speaker 2: 2:36:52

I just feel like, and you're right, I agree with what you're saying, so.

Speaker 1: 2:36:55

And I think our parents grew up in an age where media was honest and respected and trusted and it's, you know, I think the really early decades of print media and TV media did their best, you know, especially government channels that didn't have to sell advertising. They're trying to give you the news because, uh, you know, that was how information was spread around and I think they, I really think, like 50 years ago, media was honest and professional and respected and trusted. And so the next few generations and it's only, I reckon, your kid, my kid, you know the last, say someone who's 30, it's only that generation of people who have grown up in this world where they actually need to be taught do not trust that. Don't trust that Like it's not even, don't even think about thinking that it's real. Because, like I said this, I think recently to you, if I haven't seen it myself and it hasn't directly affected me, and I haven't actually seen it, I just don't believe it. If someone tells me something, I go cool, that's cool.

Speaker 1: 2:38:16

Well, good on you for knowing that, or feeling that, or seeing that, or thinking that or whatever, because I did a.

Speaker 3: 2:38:20

McTwist at Bar Beach yesterday, but there was no one there. No one there. I hate it when that happens. It was insane.

Speaker 1: 2:38:26

I hate it when that happens.

Speaker 3: 2:38:27

Yeah, and I grabbed Indy too, yeah, and I never grabbed backside. It's weird. Yeah, I actually never skated at all when anybody else is around. It's really weird yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:38:46

But and it's like if you can't, you cannot trust, you cannot trust any form of disseminated information. These days it's like this is a conversation, but I mean, I don't know, I might leave here and you might turn everything backwards and I end up saying Seriously like AI.

Speaker 2: 2:38:57

I could generate an AI co-host yeah, Like Jim doesn't even need to be here, yeah, but then I could say Jim was here, yeah yeah. And that's seriously what the fuck's happening.

Speaker 1: 2:39:07

Yeah, and here I am. I'm seeing this, so I know it happened and if I hear it back I'll go. Oh yeah.

Speaker 3: 2:39:12

That actually happened, unless the pizza had LSD in it. No, no, just.

Speaker 2: 2:39:17

Psilocybin, those mushrooms. Anyway, Listen it's been heavy. Is there anything else you want to say? Have you got everything out? Have I missed anything?

Speaker 1: 2:39:28

I've been asking everyone that lately because I've had a few people go oh, I should have talked about this person or that person and I just want to shout out someone.

Speaker 1: 2:39:38

Yeah, I think really I could have started with don't be a dick and finished with don't be a dick, and that would have been all I needed to say. I'm honestly. You know, the opportunity to do this and have this heard be with someone like intelligent people talking about stuff, particularly skateboarding, which I love, and it is who I am and it's taken us down some. It's taken us from drainage ditches in Coffs Harbour to dead girlfriends in surfboard bags. You know that's a dark that's a dark highway.

Speaker 1: 2:40:09

But you know they're good conversations to have, they're important things, they are important things and your life is it's. I'm just about experiences, I think, and I think you people get so trapped in possessions and money and status and I just think it's like it's just a hard place. I just don't understand it. It's just about experiences and then you die, literally Like you're just here for a bit and you do this thing and then you die. Then literally like you're just here for a bit and you do this thing and then you die. So, while you're here, be positive, have great experiences. The people that you love love them completely. You know, if you have children, bring them up to be better than you are not any other way than that. And yeah, I think now I feel like I've said too much, but at the end of the day, that's it. That's, you know, the life of a random one-eyed skateboarder. I feel like Just don't be a dick.

Speaker 2: 2:41:15

That's beautiful, bro. Thank you, mr Gravel Burns, everybody, sean Mossett.