Slam Skateboarding 232 Summer 2021

2021 has come to an end, and as we knock another strange year on the head, it’s become more evident how reliant the human race is on digital technology. We freak out if we can’t find our phones; we’re told to scan QR codes and tap EFTPOS terminals everywhere we go; and now the world’s big tech-heads are hoping to step up our digital addictions by merging this reality into a virtual “Metaverse”. That’s Zuckerberg’s grand plan for turning the Internet as we know it into a virtual reality world. It paints a dystopian image: people glued to their couches with headsets on, “Bedding Taylor Swift every night inside the Oculus Rift”, to quote Father John Misty’s pessimistic, yet possibly prophetic lyrics of “Total Entertainment Forever”. It’s a scary thought…

Asking me who my favourite skateboarder is, is like asking me what my favourite song is. If I want to keep things mellow, I might listen to some Cass McCombs or Bob Dylan, and if I’m bummed out it might be some depressing rainy-day music like Elliott Smith or The Verve. Similarly, my favourite skater at any given time changes regularly, depending on my mood. When I was a young kid, I loved skaters that would hurl themselves off stuff (mostly because I loved jumping off stuff). I’d regularly watch skaters like Ryan Sheckler and Andrew Reynolds, and I thought Ali Boulala was a god for attempting the Lyon 25-stair. Then, as I grew older, my taste in skaters changed. Trick selection, style and fluidity came onto my radar as metrics…

Max Couling and Neihana Tonkin have come out with a new product called Polly Repair, which is a gap-filling compound specifically formulated for fixing street spots. You’ll know Max as a Melbourne-dwelling street skater from NZ, who rides for Lovesick, Nike and RVCA, and Neihana as the filmer who made Bread & Butter, along with endless clips in all sorts of international skate videos. The pair came up with the idea of Polly about a year ago, after using Knead It and other generic Bunnings compounds to fix up spots they were trying to skate. Part of the idea behind Polly was to make the product more accessible to skaters and to encourage more people to get out there and take the initiative to patch up their local ledge, backyard…

Canberra I grew up in Canberra and started skating in 2006. I was 12 when I met Tom O’Reilly at Tuggeranong Skatepark and we’ve been best mates ever since. We both got a job at our local skate shop, Trilogy, around the same time and ended up riding for them shortly after. At this point, Woden and Belco Skateparks had just been upgraded thanks to Luke Brown. That significantly changed the Canberra scene. A couple of our mates were filming VX and we would spend our weekends stacking clips – as most groms do. Dropping Out At 16 I decided to drop out of high school to pursue art and began studying at TAFE. I was working part time at Trilogy and after completing the course I began volunteering at an autism unit…

By the middle of his 20s, Tommy had set his sights on Los Angeles, and went on to establish himself as a Street League-worthy contest crusher and an insanely consistent street skater. After five years soaking up all the glitz, glamour and grit that LA had to offer, he decided to return to Brissy and put down roots. Freshly married and feeling healthy, Tommy is now diligently filming for his part in a new full-length Plan B video. It was a hot day in Brissy when I called Tommy for his interview. He was having a rest day, setting up a fresh board and doing some stretches, committing himself to attack the streets like a beast over the weekend. Hey, Tommy. How’s it going? What have you been up to today? Hey,…

Even at the best of times, a lot of what we skateboarders do exists in a legal grey area. This means that street skateboarders are, by necessity, a resourceful breed. But as the beginning of 2020 saw the COVID-19 pandemic sweep across the globe, public health orders aiming to control the spread of the virus suddenly and severely shifted many of the realities about skateboarding that we had always taken for granted. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Melbourne, where harsh restrictions were in place for over 260 days. While skateboarding was never explicitly outlawed, for many of us, it was rendered completely unrecognisable by bans on gatherings and restrictions on travel. Uncertain and isolated, Melbourne’s skateboarders slunk back to the car parks where they’d taken their first push, compensated for…