SURF’S UP Steve’s Place is arguably one of the most iconic businesses in the South East and in 2016 this famous surf shop is celebrating 50 years. Founder Steve Woolston started a trend in coastal surf shops back in 1966 even before big name surf brands like Billabong and Quiksilver were on the scene. A shearer from Keith, Steve seems like the unlikely salty surfer those in Robe and surrounds have come to know him as. “I knew this bird in Adelaide, and one of her friends had a boyfriend who was a surfer,” Steve said. “We went down to Moana beach to watch these surfers on long boards and I thought it sounded like a good idea at the time. I started off learning to surf, came back to Keith and one of the blokes, Bob Lowe, who worked for Westpac at the time, had an old FJ Panel Van and he surfed. He asked where the nearest surf was, and I didn’t know but said maybe Kingston, Robe or somewhere near there.” Steve and Bob took off for the weekend and found surf in Robe at the other end of Long Beach. “It was called Black Fellows then, at Boatswains Point, and we had a bit of a surf there, and that’s my first experience of surfing in Robe,” he said. “Off the point there is a bit of a reef and on a good wind and that you get some good waves, but that was
BY KATE FOREMAN back then.” Steve was hooked, and so started to become more involved with the surf scene in Adelaide and at Moana. While still living and shearing in Keith, Steve and a group of “four or five” formed the Green Desert Surf Riders. The group would come to Robe on a Friday night to go surfing at what is known as Third Ramp. “That was before the car park was cut in… that went on for about two years I suppose, with old Eddy and Gladdy Pascoe, there was a group of us,” said Steve. The road out to Third Ramp is now named after Steve, perhaps a homage to days gone by. “After the shearing season one year, I came down just before summer and there seemed to be a lot of people around,” said Steve. “At this point I had an association with Geoff’s Surf Shop in Adelaide, so I rang the owner Ronnie Smith and said there are a lot of people down this way we might be able to flog some surfboards off too. So I got a job with David Stanhope as an electricians off-sider, and I would work for him and sell surf gear out the back of my station wagon, I’d flog off surfboards to the locals.” From here Steve would live and work out of the Junction House, making his first surf shop an extension of Geoff’s Surf Shop based in Robe. “We had a few board
shorts and surfboards, we had none of the gear they have now,” he said. Steve would spend the off season shearing in Keith, and then would return to Robe in the summer to spend days at the beach and sell surf gear. As Robe became busier, Steve saw an opportunity to open another shop, one which would become his own. “I spoke to Ronnie Smith and asked if I could open another shop in Robe, he said yeah so we brought a corrugated iron single car garage, you know the one you assemble yourself,” he said. “At that time a guy called Doug Stewart was building the roadhouse and I said why don’t we put the tin shed there where the hardware store is now, but the council objected so we moved it to the other side. I had this tin shed with all this gear, we had a good summer that year - the place became more popular, and there was plenty of guys hanging around, it was a great summer I remember. I went back shearing, and the shed just stood there empty. I came down one weekend and the shed was gone, someone had stolen the bloody shed, the whole shed.” Steve’s surf shop wasn’t gone for long, soon after Steve was in touch with “old Jock Barrows” who owned the Caledonian Hotel (known as the Temperance Hotel then) and Jock had a vacant building attached to the hotel which Steve soon turned into Steve’s Place. The building, which is now the Cally’s bottle shop had a freezer in the back where Steve would sleep and when he wasn’t surfing, he was selling surf gear. “We had that shop there for oh… I don’t know how long, quite a few years off and on,” he said. “We would come down for the summer, stay until after Easter, and then I would shoot through to go shearing and old Jock would hold the premises for us until the next year.” It wasn’t long before Steve met himself a local girl, her family owned the building next to the Guichen Bay Motel, and for years Steve used a room out the back of the property for his shop. Steve’s Place became a 12 monthly thing, except for two to three months of the year when Steve would head to Queensland or overseas surfing. “It went on and on, and after time it (the shop) got out of control because it wasn’t big enough,” said Steve. Popularity was growing in not only the seaside town of Robe, but in the sport of surfing and people were travelling from Adelaide and all over the South East to get in on the prices Steve had in his shop. After a night with the lads, Steve said he and fellow surfer David (the Hawk) Curkpatrick, a super spreader, who now lives in Kingston, were talking about a vacant lot where he would leave his trucks. The building, an old fish factory at the time, was getting a bit derelict and the Hawk suggested he would go down to the real estate to find out the price. “David came back and I said how much do they want for it and he said we’re going halves,” said Steve. “I’ve lifestyle1.net | 28
brought half and you’ve brought half. So it was the two of us in it for a while, at that time junk and stuff was being sold out of it. When I first moved in here we would sell jocks and socks, wetsuits, surfboards, ladies make-up, you name it we sold it, we had RM Williams cowboy boots, this was the shop in town where you could get anything from.” The vision for Steve was that eventually he would turn this old building into his surf shop, and after 12 months his vision started to become a reality. “Hawk came to me and said he wanted to get out for what he got in, so I had to dig up the money,” Steve said. “So I went flat out sorting the thing out, moved out of the room I was selling surf gear from and opened up down here. It just went from strength to strength, while the place was firing we started extending (to other areas of the building).” Before it was Steve’s Place, it was a hairdresser, then a Fisheries Department
and even the ANZ Bank was held in part of the building. It was also Barney Sneath’s Café, where local and visiting surfers would hang out for breakfast, before heading out in search for waves. “It would cost us $1 for Weetbix, toast with vegemite, a banana and a cup of coffee,” said Steve. “And one day old Barney and I were talking about surfing and surf contests, and stuff like that and somebody said why don’t we have a surfing contest and old Barney said oh yeah we can do that, “I’ll give you 10 pound to start it off” and he did and that’s how the Easter Classic started.” The Easter Classic is now in its 48th year, and is one of the longest running surf contests in Australia. “It was a free for all really, up until now we’ve always stuck to the same rules and it never changed even under all sorts of pressure from different organisations that run surfing programs,” said Steve. “We always stayed local. And there’s always been a