“A Unique Coast & A Unique People”

‘Down here you’ve got to be built for the terrain’

Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent in the world with the least fertile soil. You wouldn’t think that would be very conducive to life, but weirdly, it teems with native plants and animals. Life can be awfully persistent in unforgiving places. The native thorny devil, for example, thrives in one of the most drought-stricken regions on earth.  

“You sort of need to be a different person down here to deal with the heatwaves and the stormfronts,” laughs tour guide Josiah Schmucker genially. “It’s just desert plains that meet giant cliff lines, long white sandy beaches with no one on them, and crystal clear waters full of sharks and fun waves at the bottom.”

“Nothing’s easy, everything is just that little bit harder,” said Nikki Van Dijk who accompanied Harrison Roach, Ben Howard and Josiah Schumaker on their trip through the desert. “The roads are long, there’s so much wind and energy and power in the ocean. There’s so much going on at all times of the day”. 

New York City, 17,000kms away, is commonly referred to as ‘the city that never sleeps’. In the desert it’s not the restless bustle of people that never tires, rather, it’s the constant buzz of wildlife. Spiders, sharks, whales, birds. “Don’t get me started on the sheep. You can be walking around in the moonlight and you’ll fucken bump into some sheep. And they’ll still be eating, aye. You’re like ‘just give it a rest will ya?’” laughs Rippsy over a couple of Pacific Pale Ales. 

For ten days our surfers chased waves across the desert, waiting for waves to trickle in from the horizon. “It’s pretty funny, we just stare at it, constantly waiting for something to happen. Driving around, staring at all these different horizons but it’s the same one,” laughs six-tonne Bobcat driver and goofyfoot style lord, Benny Howard in a moment of unplanned profundity. 

When the waves came, they were quick to capitalize and scored fun tubes without a human in sight. “Surfing’s one of those pastimes that’s hard to satiate. It’s hard to be content. It’s only when the sun goes down after the waves have been epic all day that you can genuinely feel that way, and still that feeling doesn’t last for too long. You wake up the next day chasing them again,” reflected Harrison. 

Waves weren’t the only thing being followed closely though. Rippsy’s stories told over a couple of tins, held an equally captive audience. “His sense of humor and his character, I’ve never met anyone like him before. His mannerisms and his conversation flow, his experiences are so far from anyone I’ve ever met. You don’t want to turn away, you want to hear everything that comes out of his mouth,” said Nikki.

Harrison added, “The way he gets excited by the birds, he has that love of nature that shines through when he talks about it. He doesn’t take them for granted, he’s actually interested in the way they work and how they work. I think Rippsy was always documenting what was going on around him, but when he found photography it gave him the medium and the format to actually express it, outside his awesome stories. For someone like him with that mind, it makes magic happen.”

We had a ball brewing up ‘the long road home’, we hope you enjoy drinking it down just as well.