Shane Stedman: Father, Shaper, Ugg Boot Impresario Kicks Out At 85

“No, no, I’m not in the surfboard industry, I’m in the fun industry.”

Luke Stedman is recalling his dad explaining his career to strangers at airports.

It’s a week after his father Shane Stedman’s passing, and Luke’s been holding court (with the help of his sister Bonnie) in his ancestral home, Crescent Head, in the lead-up to the memorial paddle out at the point at the weekend. 

There’s hustle and bustle, comings and goings and kids going off in the background as we chat, and it all feels a bit LOTR in the lead up to Bilbo’s 111^th birthday. Having had the pleasure of spending some time with Steds and his dad for an article on the combined resin art/clothing exhibition that they were putting on at China Heights in Sydney circa 2014(!?), Shane struck me as having a touch of Bilbo about him.

Shane Stedman was a hook-line-and-sinker Baby Boomer demographically (1941), grew up with his brother and a single mom in Crescent Head and learnt basic economics during his first job collecting seaweed and Pippis on the beach after school to sell. From there, he studied Engineering at Sydney University for six years, before turning his back on his studies to make surfboards for a lifetime. But not only—Shane’s commercial life had many peaks, troughs and different iterations over the years, but at his core he just loved building surfboards. 

“He was the largest board manufacturer in the southern hemisphere in the ’80s,” Steds says of his Old Man’s enduring passion and business — which included an Order of Australia medal for his contributions to the surf industry — before reeling off Shane’s myriad ventures from over the years. “Then there was obvious ones like the Ugg Boots—he was the first person to register and trademark Ugg Boots in Australia and America, and he ran that business for some time—then did some unusual concepts with fibreglass. He used to do the bottoms of swimming pools and make fibreglass spaces for washers…

Steds pauses for a moment, rolling through the mental roller deck of his old man’s capers. 

“He used to do Rubber Ducky Condoms,” Steds remembers, laughing. “This company from America called and said, ‘Hey, do you want to do the distribution in Australia for coloured condoms?’ And Dad thought it was hilarious and he loved it. He’d have Bonnie and I packing them in boxes for shipping after school.

“He was just such an entrepreneur. He loved creating businesses from scratch, loved bringing ideas to life. Nothing was in the too-hard basket. Everything was a possibility, and he was very ambitious. Just loved working with people, loved being around people who were like-minded and wanted to give it a crack, and always really supportive.”

Despite the obvious cracks of grief in some of Sted’s sentences, it feels like the easiest thing in the world to talk about his old man with warmth and humour. 

I couldn’t help but smile picturing the pair of them on their adventures: Luke and Shane. Funnily enough, Luke’s a 6ft tall drink of water and his old man was a little fella. Just a tall waifey blonde and his nuggety white-haired double-act partner, checking the surf and cracking funnies for half a century up and down one of the best pieces of coastland on earth. 

“I’d run upstairs early morning as a little grom and jump in his bed; I just remember waking up and looking out the window and seeing the surf,” Steds says of his earliest memories with his Old Man. 

“He did the surf report on the radio, he’d be talking to people about surf conditions, weather conditions; you’d have people calling up from the south side, the north side, and I would just be across all the information. I’d know where all the best waves were, even though I was barely surfing.”

Growing up on the northern beaches of Sydney in the 80s with Shane as a dad is something that Steds undoubtedly counts as a blessing. However, like the aforementioned Mr. Baggins, ‘Shane’ was never averse to a bit of good-natured mischief. In fact, ‘Shane’ wasn’t even Shane’s real name. 

“We’d go to my cousin’s house, and they’d be like, ‘Hey Uncle Tony,’” Steds explains. “For ages I’d be like, ‘Tony, who’s this Tony?’ Then they’re like, ‘Tony’s your Dad,’ and I’m like, ‘No, my Dad’s name’s Shane, mate,’ and they’re like, ‘No, it’s not…’ And that was how I found out my Dad’s name wasn’t Shane. His full name was Anthony Sidney James Stedman, there was no Shane in there at all, he just thought it had a better ring to it for selling boards.’

Steds laughs.

Anyone who’s seen the viral Kooks Slams clip of Shane stacking it trying to stand on a bodyboard on a multi-kink, blue tarp slip and slide with what can only be described as a shit-eating grin on his face would’ve got the impression that the guy was an insatiable wag. But insatiable wags tend to have blind spots, so I ask Steds what his Dad’s shortcomings were.

He pauses for a moment and laughs. 

“Oh, my gosh, he was incredibly stubborn,” Steds says affectionately. “And he definitely wasn’t very good at cooking because we had a set meal every day of the week for 10 years: Monday was tuna rice, Tuesday was pasta, Wednesday was tuna bake… he could never say no to a lady either, and he was incredibly cunning too.”

One piece of cunning: for years, Shane had pre-emptively declared to friends and familty that his lungs were “full of fibreglass”, so any potential health complications would undoubtedly be from that — not from the cheeky darts that all the family knew Shane used to sneak when they weren’t looking. 

“He turned up every day as a Dad and he was always there when we needed him,” Steds says. “He was always so supportive. He was definitely my inspiration and my, you know… I just always wanted to be like my Dad.”

Vale Anthony Sidney James “Shane” Stedman.