Friday, 3 June, 2022
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32-page liftout Property Guide
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NOOSA
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Wearable art bees amaze By Margie Maccoll Eighteen-year-old Noosa designer Teddy McRitchie took to the catwalk at the Australian Wearable Art Festival at Bokarina on 21 May to showcase his stunning Queen Bee entry and accept the award for Best Headpiece. Teddy began designing wearable art while a high school student, entering them into the wearable art section at the Body Art Festival in Cooroy. There his designs captured the attention of representatives of the Australian Wearable Art Festival and in 2019 his design at the national festival won the best student award. However, Covid has put a stop to festivals since then with everything shutdown for the past two years. But this year the festival has again been able to go ahead with about 35 entries from across Australia, Singapore and the US although, sadly, others from South America and New Zealand were unable to make it due to Covid issues. Continued page 6
Teddy McRitchie takes to the catwalk with his Queen Bee creation modelled by Georgie Phillips. Picture: BARRY ALSOP
World title hopes By Phil Jarratt If you’re wild about Harry, you’ll already know that we shouldn’t get too excited just yet, but dare I say it, our boy is in contention for a world title again. I speak of Noosa’s Harrison Roach, not only one of the most graceful longboarders in the world, but also a wizard on any form of surfcraft, and a great bodysurfer to boot. In short, a waterman par excellence. And, although he’s often been ambivalent about competing at the highest level, preferring to surf perfect waves in remote locations anywhere from the jungles of Indonesia to the polar caps, last week at Sydney’s Manly Beach he slapped the competitor jersey back on and took out the first of three legs of the World Surf League’s longboard world tour. The WSL’s tour structure has been chaotic at best throughout the Covid period, and this year’s longboard offering is no exception, having been cobbled together as late as March this year for a May start. Harrison told Noosa Today he’d been in
two minds about competing, but, in fact, he already had skin in the game. There was unfinished business. Because of Covid cancellations, the 2021 world longboard tour was built on results that included the 2020 Noosa Pro, won by the veteran former world champ Joel Tudor, plus two events in California. After a second placing in the Surf Ranch Pro, Harrison went into the second at Malibu needing to finish second or better to take his first world title. He was on track to do exactly that when he met Britain’s Ben Skinner in the semi-finals. Skindog pulled off an unlikely win to rob Harrison of the title, which allowed Joel Tudor to become the oldest (47) world champion in surfing’s history. Tudor later went on a social media rant highly critical of the WSL and received a suspension, meaning that world number two, Harrison Roach, would be the top seed to start the 2022 tour. Last week in Manly, Harrison met Skindog
again, this time in the final. Confident and looking cocky in a spiky bottle-blond hairdo (“My partner Edie did it for a joke,” he explained), he paddled out into a difficult lineup and noticed his opponent had chosen to surf 200 metres up the beach. “I thought, this’ll do me,” he recalls. The powerful Brit was never really in the hunt. Last year, when he returned to Australia after his second at Malibu, or “first loser” as he prefers to call it, Harrison finished his literature degree while doing two weeks of quarantine in a Sydney hotel, finishing with a GPA of six plus. He’d started out doing business but found his history electives were more his style and switched gears. “As soon as I switched out of business I loved what I was studying. In a way I wish I was still studying. I learned so much about Australian history in an immersive way that you can only get through literature, because it puts you right there. And I love reading,” he said.
“Business was going to be useless to me, to be honest. Writing is something I’ve always loved, and you realise how crap you are when you study literature, but I’m still able to bring the skills I have developed into my role at Roark.” Roark is the American-founded adventure brand that produces two collections a year of “clothing, luggage and trinkets – the artifacts of adventure”. Harrison has been their key man in sales and marketing for the past three years, following a long and successful relationship with the Deus Ex Machina brand. During his time with Deus, he specialised in putting together adventure videos in remote locations, with the emphasis on excitement rather than product placement. At Roark he was able to up the ante, with the Arc of Aleutia video, surfing the most remote parts of Alaska’s freezing Aleutian Islands archipelago. This week he’s off in New Zealand, filming at little-known breaks on the South Island. Continued page 7