This Is How You Do Raglan

Supported by Roxy.

Sage Goldsbury, 22, was raised by surfer parents on Phillip Island, Victoria.

She covered a lot of familiar ground on the conveyor belt of competitive surfing — boardriders, juniors, nationals, and the QS — before eventually deciding to step off it.

“When you’re in the thick of competition surfing, you’re kinda always on someone else’s schedule,” Sage told Stab. “There are always a billion QS warriors out in the freesurfs, and I’m not gonna lie, I can’t hassle at all! I hate crowds.”

“There just came a point where I thought, ‘Nah, I just don’t want this enough. I wanna go where I wanna go. Surf when I want to surf.'”

Freesurfers need to make a buck too, and this Roxy trip was initially leaning a little more tropical, which was met with some resistance from Sage, who opted instead to pack up her quiver, comfiest wetties, and fly across the Tasman with friend/photographer/filmmaker Clementine Bourke.

“It just felt like the right excuse to finally do it,” she said. “The whole road trip side of it was a big draw too. There’s something pretty fun about cold mornings and chasing waves around.”

The pair picked up a campervan each and parked them in front of unobstructed views of the latest location cursed by the arrival of the WSL — The Land of the Long Peeling Left, aka Raglan.

“We did a fair bit of driving. We hit Piha, Raglan, then up to the Coromandel.”

The seven-day trip was eventually edited down to something like seven minutes of tearing into clean, cool water walls (almost exclusively lefts), escapist flirtations with van life, and postcard-perfect North Island sights.

“We’d always just see something on the side of the road, like a big running river, a flock of geese, horses, long rolling hills… and radio to each other, ‘Pull over, pull over! That looks so cool!'”

They’d be waking up early most mornings for dawn surfs, then cooking breakfast out the back of the van by the water at Manu Bay.

“We’d sus a waterfall or anything we could find, then hit the water again for a lunchtime wave, and again at dusk,” Sage said. “Then it was pesto pasta for dinner, or a pub feed. We became regulars at the Harbour View Hotel.”

The sketches, watercolours, and polaroids that occupy a good chunk of Sage’s time on land add an extra layer to the film, and try to ground something destined to be circulated through the digital ether with elements that make it a little more tangible, and will eventually endure as a personal archive and lived history, offsetting the bits that will get optimised for the vertical display.

“I’d been drawing heaps in the lead-up to the trip, and then even more after,” she said of the artwork. “Clem and I sat down and picked out a few scenes to turn into full freeze-frame mixed-media animations. We printed every individual frame from the clips we wanted to use, and I basically spent a weekend drawing over each one by hand.”

This was Sage’s first crack at mixed-media animation. “Figuring out the timing between frames was way harder than I expected,” she said. “But I was so stoked with how it turned out. If I ever got the chance again, I reckon I’d go all out and try to make the whole film like that.”

The surfing’s good too, though she plays it down a bit.

“My surfing is certainly not to the standard of the supergrom prodigies that grace our IG reels nowadays. Nor am I as stylish as that of a Craig-Anderson-spec freesurfer.”

Manu Bay’s long walls suit Sage’s style, which at times flashes hints of Jaleesa Vincent, another surfer who’s resisted being flattened into a traditional industry mould and has instead kept fostering creative pursuits outside surfing itself, to impressive effect.

“I have a lot of close friends that don’t surf, and I guess I just got thinking about how I could create something entertaining for both a surfer and someone who’s never picked up a surfboard in their life,” Sage said.

“My hope for the film was that it could become something you didn’t have to be a surfer to enjoy. Just fun. As simple as it is. ‘Fun’ is the word.”

Clean Canvas gives a great excuse to temporarily disconnect from the demands of adult life and return to the most elementary version of a surf trip: pick a coastline, get some wheels, pack it up, and hope it cranks (the surf, not the van).

And you’d be a goose not to steal Sage’s egg sambo recipe for post-surf munchies.