Mick Mock's profile on Sydney surf entrepreneur Shane Stedman ran in the Winter 1999 issue of Deep magazine. This version has been slightly edited.

His life is a strand pulled through three decades of Sydney surfing summers: from a 1960s tin-shed surfboard factory, to popout boards and Ugg boots, to a surf reporter's voice on a car radio as the sun burns away the morning haze. For many of those summers, when the word "surfer" came up, Shane Stedman—not Nat, not Midget, not MP or Fitzy—was the name that sprang to a Sydneysider's mind.

Irrepressible and enthusiastic, with a sharp head for business and a great nose for promotion, Shane picked up and rode surfing's growing popularity through some of its strangest times.

And somehow, unlikely or not, he's still here.

Anthony "Shane" Stedman is an original native of Crescent Head, New South Wales. His age today? Well, the most I got out of him on the subject of his birthdate was “a long time ago", but an educated guess is that he has tiptoed gracefully into his 50s.

We are at Shane's house on the headland between Bungan and Mona Vale beaches on Sydney's northside; a dark wood hideaway, with a slight hippie vibe that percolated through much of Shane's boardmaking at its peak. Perhaps, deep down, and despite all the wheeling and dealing and business success, Shane the country boy from Crescent understood the country soul thing better than most.

“Growing up at Crescent Head was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he bellows. “It was so simple, we didn't have electricity till I was 12 years old, we didn't have a car, ever, while I was living there, and we didn't need one either. We used to swim all the time, bird-nesting in the swamps, catching worms and pippies on the beach. You know, I bought my first guitar from selling pippies and cow shit off the reserves to the local Golf Club!

"Crescent was where I learned to love the ocean. I swam in it, fished off the rocks, had adventures. Jumping onto a surfboard from all of that was a natural progression."

Crescent in the 1950s and early '60s hadn't yet become the popular surfing stop it would be later on. "I can remember when I was still at school," he tells me, "No one had yet surfed the Point at Crescent, no one! Then a bit later, a couple of older guys came back from Newcastle with some balsa boards and they started to surf it. Sure, on the beach there were Surf-o-Planes (rubber surf mats) or those 16-foot things the clubbies used, but you could only go straight on those—no two ways about it, just straight. Now these guys on their balsa boards were suddenly up there on the Point, going sideways and riding on an angle. We thought the Point was dangerous, thought it was full of sharks, and only fishermen or fools would ever go near it!"

After finishing at Kempsey High, Stedman moved to Sydney and did six years at the University of NSW in the field of Industrial Engineering. By this time he was playing guitar in a rock band called the Trojans. Young Tony Stedman was concerned about the effects of rock-n-roll notoriety on his university scholarship, so he adopted Alan Ladd's movie gunfighter's name—and Shane was born.

Meanwhile, still making holiday trips back north, his passion to make surfboards grew and grew, and towards the end of his university days, Stedman decided to see how viable a surfboard business could be. In 1963 he made his first board. By July 1964 he was writing to Bob Evans at 

 magazine, asking for advice. "The boards have improved considerably, but they are far from perfect," Shane admits in the letter. "I know this, and I want to improve them." Then, with typical Shane chutzpah, he suggests Evans come have a look and make some suggestions.

Within months after writing that letter, Shane made the decision to take boardbuilding on as a business. He moved into a factory in a Sydney western suburb called Eastwood. "Two little old ladies—Mrs Thomas and Mrs Keene—charged me ten bob ($1) a week. Electricity was a lead from their house, and soon after they let me build another tin shed next to it. The floor was dirt, and the ceiling was only eight-feet high, so I had to dig a two-foot-deep hole just so I could move the boards around. My first boards were so rough, I used to wax them up straight away and advertise them as second-hand."

The first Shane Surfboards ad ran in the December 1965 issue of 

, and reads: "At long last the needs of the Inland Surfer can be completely satisfied." Already Shane was identifying a market.

One day he got a phone call, and remembers it something like this:

“I'm Dick van Straalen," an unfamiliar voice shouted down the line.

"Oh, that sounds pretty good, who's Dick van Straalen?"

"Now look, I know these two guys—Russell Hughes and Kevin Brennan—they want to ride your boards."

Thus began the first of many such associations between Shane and Australia's great surfers. "Russell designed the Excellor Model, Dick shaped them, and Kevin and Russell surfed them. Of course, Kevin didn't stay around very long due to his gypsy-type nature." Riding a Shane, Hughes won the Queensland Open Titles in 1967.

The ads continued to run, the surfers continued to perform—riding a Shane, Hughes won the Queensland state title in 1967—and the upstart company's reputation grew. Then Stedman did it: the move to Brookvale, the heart of the industry, Mecca, playing with the big boys. The new location, on Mitchell Road, cost $60 a week in rent, and was spacious for the time. In went shaping bays and ten glassing stands. "Scott Dillon took one look and said, 'What are you going to do with all this space, you're mad!'' Shane recalls. "And maybe I was, but it was fantastic and exciting. Then I met Peter Cornish from Dee Why, a good bloke, great surfer and fine shaper; he started with us soon after."

"Reach higher, take a trip to the better place, and get busted by a sensation of newness."

— Shane Surfboards ad, Surfing World, September 1967

"The psychedelic era hit, mate, and wow, didn't all hell break loose!" Shane shouts, with much laughter. Russell Hughes designed another model called the Crystal Vessel, and with that cosmic name ringing in his head, Shane set out to create a new ad campaign. Russell was photographed leaning against a tree in a bright yellow satin shirt with an embroidered polo-neck collar, looking dreamily skyward. The copy read: "Look up through a Crystal Vessel and get nailed to the wall."

Shane says: "Everyone rang up, wanting to send us twenty bucks for a Crystal Vessel—because they all thought it was the shirt we were advertising!"

It was around this time that Shane hooked up with the brilliant and enigmatic Ted Spencer, who soon became Shane Surfboards' head shaper and performance figurehead.

"Bob McTavish was doing those really wide-tail models for Keyo, and he took them to Hawaii with much confidence at the end of 1967, but they didn't work there. Ted's answer to that was the White Kite model. Ted tried a whole heap of things that didn't work, but it was obvious to everyone at the time that you had to do that, to stumble in the dark, to find real development. Surfboards were really going through an evolution. Guys like Ted, Bob, Peter, and others were working with a total blank slate. They experimented and made discoveries.

"I remember at a party once when McTavish said to me, ‘This party is so boring, I think I'll go make myself thirty quid and start a revolution or something'. He had to shape half a dozen boards to earn the money, so to save time he chopped six inches off the length on each, just to see what would happen."

Somewhere in there, Shane's business sense came together with his innate surf stoke, and the two locked irreversibly into place. “I'll never forget it, never," he says of the period. "It just started something inside of me that hasn't stopped. I was never a great surfer, but I just couldn't stop thinking about the possibility of what you could do on a wave as these boards were getting smaller and smaller—the buzz, the thrill, the expectations of what you could do on a surfboard."

By the summer of 1970, Shane Surfboards had four factories—one each at Cronulla, Brookvale, Crescent Head, and the Gold Coast. Business was growing, surfing was growing, and so did his team of surfers, shapers and production workers. The whole thing became celebrated in his ads (complete with chains, farmhouses and funny-corny Butch Cassidy references) as the Shane Gang.

Shane had amazing people on his side. The Gang was close to a who's who of Australian surfing at the time: Hughes, Spencer, Cornish, Butch and Steve Cooney, Judy Trim ("really the only girl surfer we put a lot of effort into"), Bob Kennerson, Michael Hall, Russell Spencer, Glynn Ritchie, Baddy Treloar, Richard Harvey, Tanya Binning, Jack and Gordon Knight, John Fleck, Chris Young, Chopper Fred, John Harris, John Irwin, Trevor Hewston, Tony Hardy, Josette Lagardere, Phyllis O'Donell, Terry Fitzgerald, and young Simon Anderson.

Fitzy was an absolute ball of energy, never afraid to walk into a newspaper office and tell the reporters about the latest Shane surfboard design craze. “Terry actually recruited Simon for us. Terry came in one day and said, 'You gotta get this kid and teach him how to shape, 'cause he is going to be one of the best surfers in the world."' Shane has a wry grin on his face after this little statement. And then, as only Shane can do, he goes off into a completely different tangent.

"The first real car I bought was from one of my glassers' dads. It was a Jaguar 3.8 Mark 2. It was kind of the Shane Gang team car. We used to do surf trips all over Oz it in, even used it in some ads. We did a trip to Queensland, I think for the Manufacturers Contest, with Peter Cornish, Butch Cooney, Glynn Ritchie, and me. We broke down at Noosa on the way home, worked out that it was the petrol pump sticking, so to keep going we had to click the points every few minutes just to get enough petrol to fill up the carburetor and move along a hundred yards at a time. That method didn't work too well, so me being the smallest, I had to ride in the boot of my own car, holding the lid up from Noosa to Brisbane, the other hand clicking petrol. When we were going up a hill, they'd shout, 'More petrol Shane, more petrol!' I don't know how we made it, but we did.

"Nipper had a Jag, Nat scored a Mercedes, I had my one. They were all second-hand, we were all mad and anyway, the idea was to see who could get to Bells first. I had John Witzig under the seat once when we did over 100 miles an hour down the straights to Geelong."

Shane recalls Witzig as being a big influence on his advertising style. "The Wizz was known to be quite abrupt, quite brash and the first thing he ever said to me was: 'Your ads are shithouse.' The very first thing, not 'Hello,' not 'How are you,' not anything. 'Your ads are shithouse.' Well, he got involved and the relationship lasted a very long time."

Ted Spencer was a man of his time, his cosmic nature tracking along with the hippie vibe that Shane was using to his great advantage. An amazing competition surfer at times (Bells Beach champion in 1968 and '69), and even more devastating outside of that frustrating arena, Ted, handsome and mysterious, was also something of an Aussie surf world rock star. His White Kite is often described as the most successful single model in Australian surfing history.

Always a seeker and a spiritualist, Teddy wrote a bit of verse for a 1970 White Kite ad, as follows:

Shane recalls: "Ted could never see the necessity for the commercialism, the money, the media, the contests, and I understood and respected that view. He really knew about responsibility and loyalty, particularly when it involved his work and the business end of surfing. One year at Bells before the final, he was sitting on the beach, didn't want to go in the final, couldn't care less, he'd had enough. After a lot of talking and persuading, he paddled out, surfed, and won."

One of Shane's key attributes—the thing that set him apart from so many boardmakers of the time—was his complete and undying willingness to promote himself and his products. This drive has been tempered slightly by middle age, but during the early 1970s, as he developed Shane Surfboards into one of Australia's leading brands, he was nearly unstoppable. Shane engineered dozens of surfboard giveaways and promos, turned up at more or less any event that would bring attention to the company, and was glad to field calls for newspaper and magazine writers, one of whom later nicknamed him "The Summer Millionaire."

It was while riding this wave of enthusiasm that Shane was condemned as a sellout, and this came about after he introduced a cut-price range of chubby little boards that sold mainly through sports and department stores, and were aimed at kids just learning to surf. These boards could be cranked out by the high-velocity Shane production line at the rate of 200 a week. Soon they'd earned a derogatory nickname: popouts.

When I asked about those boards, Shane chose his words carefully; he wanted to explain, and didn't want to be misunderstood.

"I was trained in production engineering. I thought at the time it was the right thing to do; sell to Waltons [department stores] and everyone else. Eventually what it did was make people 

 want them. There were too many surfboards out there.

“I didn't know at the time, and I feel not too many others knew or understood, the basic philosophy behind surfing—that it was personal to people, it wasn't about mass production. I was naive, we all were. There weren't many surf shops back then, everyone came to the factory. There wasn't a retail structure like there is today, and the margins were small. To keep going, to keep up with the demand, I thought, you had to either increase prices at the retail level or decrease the cost of making surfboards so you could sell them wholesale. Thus you had to mass-produce the boards, keep the costs down, don't put a stringer in them, just place a piece of cotton down the center of them so it looked like a stringer. And it was wrong, it was really wrong. But at the same time, who knew it was wrong? We were at the first stages of real growth. The industry was learning from its own mistakes."

The cool surfers despised the popout, with its stumpy profile and direct connection to mass marketing. But the popout—a product of Shane's immense, uncritical enthusiasm—had consequences the cool crowd did not foresee. It was under the feet of half the best Sydney surfers of the next generation. Tom Carroll, for instance, spent his first six months of surfing crouched on a popout. Like the bodyboard of the late 1980s, it filled a design and market niche other boardmakers chose not to engage with.

Another classic early-'70s Shane product was the Ugg Boot, which he helped turn into an international fashion sensation. He tells me how it all started.

"Nat Young came into our factory with good mate Russell Hughes and declared, 'Shane, you gotta get a pair of these boots, look at them, they keep your feet warm after a surf. Just put your foot on this bit of cardboard and I'll trace around your foot. Now, you'll get them in a couple of weeks, I gotta send the order to this little old bloke I met in South Australia and he needs to get a half dozen pairs before he will even start them and you were the last one.'

“So that's the story about the first Ugg boot. And yes, it is short for ugly.”

In the early ‘80s, surf skis arrived and surfers hated them. But surfboard sales were backing off, and the Shane label was no longer flavour of the month. He had a young wife, Lynne, two kids, and was paying off and renovating a house. He dived into the ski market. "I knew it wasn't a credible thing," he says, "but I did have to survive, not only business-wise, but for the sake of everything I had worked for. (Team rider) Mike Petrie was Australia's best, and we did a mind-blowing movie in Hawaii of him at Pipeline and Waimea. During this period I met a lot of fun, good people and experimented with styrofoam materials which also led to serious possibilities in the design and manufacture of surfboards."

Shane's nose for publicity and extroverted approach to life found its ultimate expression in the medium of radio, when 2SM hired him to replace the late Bob Evans as the station's official surf reporter. "First they passed on the job to Peter Drouyn, but he was in Queensland which obviously proved of little value to Sydney listeners. I had a short stint at 2UW and soon afterward 2SM rang me and offered me $80 a week. That was huge, it was like a month's wages!"

So there's Shane with a wage, a little four-wheel drive plastered with the coveted denim and zipper logo of the then-cool 2SM, giving us the surf report, as well as predictions for the afternoon and the coming days. On top of that, Shane did live commentary and reporting on Australia's most prestigious contest, the Coke Surfabout.

Many a grommet of the day will remember the blistering voice, the over-defined syllables of surf-speak roaring from the car radio and into their ears and minds as pro surfing began to take off in the latter half of the '70s. This was pro surfing at an amazing time, the infancy of the then-IPS elite, and Shane's furious enthusiasm fit the scene perfectly. That voice bellowed, screamed, and laughed through the airwaves and across the beaches with raw energy and excitement—well and truly different to many of the too-cool commentators who soon followed him down the track.

Shane's stint with 2SM lasted about as long as the station stayed relatively cool—until the early '80s, when he shifted to 2WS before eventually parting ways with radio in 1995. "The funny thing was," he recalls, "the last few years I wasn't doing a surf report, I was doing a weather report. But still people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I heard your surf report this morning!'"

The radio gig, the surf contests, the public events—Shane's surfing life was one of fun, involvement, and publicity, but the business always came first, and always commanded his utmost attention. In the early '70s, he signed up two legendary team riders.

"We were in need of a surf star and Michael (Peterson) was firing, but he did live in Queensland and it was a little difficult for effective communication. Regardless, we had some MP models; I am not sure who shaped them, but Michael helped do some, and the design theory was certainly his. But the real value was in having Michael ride the boards and just being out there, surfing the way he did, and winning just about every contest he entered. It kept us in the minds and eyes of people as being a surfboard brand that was connected with the best surfers, and I think that is very important."

Shane soon hooked up with another great Aussie surfer—Newcastle's Colin Smith, a connection made through the enigmatic designer Jim Pollard, also from Newcastle. "I have no idea how Jim came into my life, whether he just knocked on the door one day and said, 'I’m here to change your life,' which he certainly did," says Shane. "He was supposedly the first bloke to make channel-bottom boards. Maybe he really did invent the concept; I don't know. But he was definitely one of the first to promote and push the design to where it got a lot of attention."

Pollard made a pair of boards for Col to take to Hawaii, in 1978, where the hot young goofyfooter blew minds with his free-surfing and won the Pro Class Trials—Hawaii's big event for undergrounders and up-and-coming pros. The boards were built under Pollard's label, Fluid Foils, and an arrangement between Shane and Jim was struck so that Fluid Foils could be made and distributed in Sydney by Shane Surfboards. "Good shaper and good surfer," says Shane, speaking of Pollard and Smith. "A hard team to beat. Col was dedicated to Jim’s work and designs, and rightly so."

Shane has always carried with him an old Australian attitude—work hard and you will make it. But the work ethic is coupled with the lesson many of us have learned from surfing; that it's about balance. Thirty-five years after launching Shane Surfboards, Stedman has gained a clear perspective on the game, and if others in the surf industry made many millions of dollars more than he did, he doesn't appear to be stressing about it.

Today, Shane makes modern boards under the Spyder label and covers the nostalgia side of things with a modern version of Ted Spencer's White Kite, Shane sticker and all. His brother Dave — a roaring laugh and down to earth as they come—is Shane's right hand in the business, as he's been almost since the beginning. Shane is amicably divorced from Lynne, their son Luke has grown into a young pro surfing talent, and daughter Bonnie is focusing on business administration, computers, and clothing production.

"Surfing has got to remain fun," he says. "Not just for its own sake, but to remain a viable industry. That is what it is all about. If I wasn't having fun, I wouldn't do it. I’ve only got thirty or forty years of good work left in me, I gotta fill it in somehow, and I can't think of a better way than the way I started. I'm stoked we're back into making boards—just surfboards. A lot of people feel that making surfboards is a rich man's hobby, there's no real money in it. You've got to be either rich or stupid to do it and I've never been able to work out which one I am (laughs)—probably a bit of both! Yes, I am rich in the fact that I have a beautiful place to live, two great kids, no dramas in my life, and in good health. Making boards for the rest of my working life will suit me down to the ground.

"Looking back, even the failures, and there's been a few of them, doesn't bother me. You learn humility from failure and that's really important. There's nothing worse than being some stuck-up twit who's had nothing but successes, that would be detrimental to your progress. Failures are necessary and I have had more than my fair share"—Shane emits a great burst of laughter—"but I am still here, still smiling! People reckon I'm a super optimist and I suppose you could say I'm living in a fool's paradise at times—but I don't care what sort of paradise it is, as long as I'm living it!"

[Russell Hughes color surf photo by John Witzig. Russell Hughes b/w surf photo by Dick Graham. Ted Spencer surf photo by Witzig.]

“THE SUMMER MILLIONAIRE” – SHANE STEDMAN PROFILE BY MICK MOCK

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos