Kangaroos, Snow Leopards & Steel-Cut Lines 

In the lead-up to the 2003 Rip Curl Pro at Bells Beach, Kelly Slater was busy exploring the lesser-known waves on Victoria’s southwest coast with filmmakers Chris Bryan and Tim Bonython. Along for the ride, acting as something of a guide, was photographer Steve Ryan, who’d spent a lifetime roaming the area and knew exactly what rewards were in wait at the end of every muddy track and at the edge of every scaled cliff. 

By the time the event kicked off, they’d found, they’d surfed, they’d shot. But Slater had done his homework, and there was one wave they hadn’t scored, a mysto left slab that broke like a scar-faced Teahupoo. 

When the contest was put on hold to relocate to the backup site at Johanna, Slater reached out to Ryan again. Along with Shane Dorian, they made a plan to stay the night at Ryan’s home down the coast and, if the contest was still delayed, surf the left the following morning.

“The hills were ablaze because they were back-burning,” Ryan says of the drive home from the contest with Slater and Dorian trailing in the car behind him. “Then I almost hit a big kangaroo that leapt out in front of me, and Slater was driving so close he almost rear-ended me when I hit the brakes.”

En route, they stopped off at Port Campbell for dinner at Nico’s, a pizza joint. While they ate, Slater made it apparent that Bells was far from his favorite wave. Ryan, ever the Victorian, tried to highlight its virtues, but Slater wasn’t buying it. “I remember him saying, ‘Come on, Steve, you know it never gets any good,’” Ryan says. 

That night, they received news that the event would run the following morning. With Slater set to surf in the first heat, it put the kibosh on the plan to surf the left. At dawn, with a low fog hanging over the bush, Slater and Dorian raced off to Johanna. 

Meanwhile, Ryan went to check the left slab, just in case. 

“It was pumping,” he says with conviction. “About 8 foot, sheet glass, and spitting barrels.”

The lesson, of course, was that if you want to score the secrets, you’ve got to be there—even if you’re the best surfer in the world. And “being there”—or, more accurately, “being here,” in the wider reaches of Victoria’s surf resources—defines Ryan’s life and work. 

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Speaking today from his home in Jan Juc, just down the road from Bells, Ryan—whose photographic output over the past 50 years has documented not just the waves in Victoria, but also the depths of a subculture and the rise of an industry—recalls how his career path once looked much different. 

At 17, he was an apprentice printer, working in the gritty inner-city fringes of Melbourne. It was the early 1970s. His fingers were permanently ink-stained, and the only lines stacked in front of him were those of a mind-numbing variety, like a bundle of blank withdrawal forms. 

“I used to get a sore cheekbone from leaning on the machine, watching the sheets and double-checking,” he says. “I was just daydreaming about surfing the whole time.” 

Born inland in Bendigo, northeast of Melbourne, Ryan moved to the city with his mom and five siblings at age 7. Exposure to Victoria’s rapidly evolving surf scene came courtesy of his friends’ parents, who drove them to the east or west coasts of Victoria for beach days. His first look at Winkipop proved transformative. 

“It was low tide, 4 to 5 foot, and flawless,” he says. “There were no stairs in those days. You had to slide down the hill from bush to bush, over this little cave, then across the rocks. I remember looking at all the weeds on the reef, and the waves are peeling down. I fell in love.”

Although surfing had cast its spell on Ryan with that first glimpse, his family still lived two hours away in Footscray, on the rough-and-tumble outskirts of Melbourne. Ryan talks about it as the sort of place you were more likely to be ducking right hooks than riding right-handers. Despite the tyranny of distance, it was still home to a core posse determined to call themselves surfers. Ryan wrangled a cheap board and joined the ranks of the inner-city weekend warriors. His mom didn’t have a car, so getting to the coast meant bumming a ride, usually with one of the older Melbourne crew. “I can remember a bunch of us just piling into the one little VW Beetle,” he recalls.  

When the printing apprenticeship ended, Ryan moved to Torquay and started running with a group who danced singularly to the beat of Southern Ocean swells. If Bells or Winki weren’t on, they’d roam the Victorian coast, camping out and solving its spot mysteries. Somewhere along the way, Ryan picked up a camera, the lens frequently pointed at his eclectic group of friends in an instinctive attempt to capture the halcyon days of their youth. 

Eventually, he met a girl working the register at Walker’s Supermarket—and he and Michele quickly became a team. After a stint running the Torquay Golf Club kitchen, they took on the lease for a Jan Juc milk bar, renamed it, and set about making the Bird Rock café a local institution. To top it off, one could stroll across the road, stand on top of the imperious sandstone cliffs, and watch the tail end of
Winkipop lines bend around the coast. Ryan often ducked out to take photos of Bells and Winki. In a flourish of mid-’80s-style self-marketing, he’d showcase his best shots on the café’s walls. “I used to spray them with a lacquer because we had chips and burgers and all that greasy kind of stuff,” he says.

The café soon became the unlikely launchpad for Ryan’s career in surf photography. And while the transition was a slow burn, it was aided by a few factors. 

First, the area provided a steady stream of world-class surfers to shoot. The pros descended every Easter for the annual Bells contest, and a clutch of dedicated locals had the coast dialed. Mick and Tony Ray, Mark Phipps, Greg Brown, Glen Casey, Andrew Flitton, and Andrew Egan were all major players in the ’80s and ’90s, while Wayne Lynch was still the proverbial snow leopard of Victoria. “He was around, but pretty elusive,” says Ryan. 

Next, the magazines were in full stride. In 1983, Peter “Joli” Wilson, then the photo editor of Tracks, wandered  into the café and asked Ryan to submit some images to the magazine, beginning Ryan’s long-standing relationship with surf media. Pre-2000, Tracks was still printed in black-and-white, so the Victorian gray didn’t matter as long as the steel-cut swell lines streaked across an image in hypnotic definition.

And finally, while Torquay may have maintained the veneer of a sleepy surf village, it was at that time the engine room for the burgeoning global surf machine. Living around the corner from Rip Curl and Quiksilver’s headquarters ensured Ryan got tossed the occasional industry assignment. For a number of years, he and Michele were the ultimate double act at the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach: Michele would handle the catering for event staff or a corporate grandstand, while Ryan captured the contest action. “I’d be carrying crates of food out to Bells in the morning,” Ryan says, “and shooting the contest all day. The other photographers used to get jealous when Michele would walk down the stairs and hand-deliver a plate loaded with food.”

Ryan’s defining moment of this period came on a blue-sky day in 1991. It was midway through the Bells event, and several of the surfers who didn’t have heats took one glance at the conditions and bolted down the coast. As luck would have it, Ryan was tipped off that a car full of celebrated pros was making a cannonball run for a big offshore right that had a rep for snatching thick Southern Ocean swells and bending them into reeling 15-foot barrels. Ryan had never shot the wave before, but by the time he had his Nikon 600-millimeter lens set up on the cliffs, Martin Potter, Derek Ho, Tom Carroll, and Ross Clarke-Jones were paddling out into a 12- to 15-foot lineup with the odd 20-foot set.

 “I was the only photographer there,” Ryan says. “It was big, and there were world champions out. It was unexpected.”

Ryan’s images revealed sun-dappled, ruler-edged, roaring giants, the allure of perfection goading would-be challengers into a drag race with a lip that savagely conveyed the full force of the Southern Ocean. The shots proved Australia could lay claim to a wave that might rival Maui’s Honolua Bay or Kauai’s Hanalei Bay for big-wave quality, and received top billing in surf mags in Australia and abroad. 

Ryan took plenty of heat from certain quarters for dispatching the photos of that memorable day—some mags ran cover shots—but the session solidified his status as a nimble lensman who could use his intimate knowledge of a wild, swell-pounded coastline to capture its raw romance. This was no Pipeline tripod party. Ryan was the lone lensman on the cliffs with gnawing March flies for company, giving audiences the big-picture view as titans jousted in an epic, underground setting—the difference between big-wave mythology and documented history. 

It was also in this period that Ryan found himself training his lens on locales outside his home environs—the Gold Coast, Mainland Mexico, and Indonesia, among others. But it was a particular tropical destination where he produced some of his most lasting images. 

In 1986, Ryan and Michele honeymooned in Tahiti. He’d brought along his camera gear and almost lucked into an early era Teahupoo score when a local friend suggested their version of Pipeline had been 12 foot a day earlier and volunteered to take Ryan out to the spot “at the end of the road.” When Ryan showed up the following morning, however, his friend was already pouring beers, and the mission was abandoned. 

Ryan didn’t return for another decade, but was still in time to take part in the first wave of photographers to frame up Teahupoo’s atomic-blue snarl. “It was amazing,” he recalls. “Just so blue.” He made regular visits for nine years straight, usually a month-long stint that included the annual WCT event, frequently sharing a boat with shooters Brian Bielmann and Tom Servais. 

In a pre-digital era, mags and brands still paid big sums for all that ocean muscle. Invariably, competition for a dry-hair spot on the sidelines was often fierce. “Sometimes there’d almost be fights over the boat spots,” recalls Ryan. “But then one shot could just about pay for your whole trip.” 

Ryan had his fair share of jaw-dropping moments, but his best-known image from that period features the flotilla caught somewhere between awe and panic as a 15-foot set looms with hypnotic majesty. He gave the photo a simple but succinct tagline: Impact Zone. Billabong secured a two-year buyout on the shot after a Torquay-based executive saw it hanging in Ryan’s café. “It went on T-shirts, billboards, everything,” explains Ryan.

Back home, as Ryan and Michele raised their two kids, Mathew and Ali, the Jan Juc house in Torquay remained their base. The Ryans eventually sold the café, however. The long winters were quiet, and they figured they could do better from catering gigs and photos. They also fell hard for the rugged, untamed coast of Victoria’s western districts, where they’d spent their youth roaming, and purchased land in Port Campbell, later relocating an old soldier-settler’s house onto the empty plot. 

Having a fixed address down the coast gave Ryan more opportunity to explore and document the potential of its myriad swell-exposed reefs and coves, including a particularly fearsome left at the base of a long hill that he and his friends had stumbled across in the mid-’70s. “A guy we nicknamed ‘Gnome’ wanted to surf it,” Ryan explains. “But we talked him out of it. We were scared he’d get hurt and we’d have to carry him all the way up.” 

By the time Ryan had bought the new property, a crew of brazen bodyboarders were regularly riding the wave, which offers a marginal entry point before it folds juice into liquid cement. As the “slab” subgenre exploded in the aughts, stand-up surfers began showing up to have a go. According to Ryan, Jason Polakow was an early taker and “did really well out there.” Ryan also was on hand when tube aficionado Anthony Walsh successfully paddled the beast. 

Now in his late sixties, Ryan still loves a dash down the coast. But you’re more likely to find him elbow-deep in his garden, pulling up spuds or snatching peaches off the trees before the resident rosella parrots beat him to it. From the yard, he can still keep an eye on the weather, waiting for that moment when all the elements align for the rapturous Bells or Winkipop shot he’s forever chasing. 

 “I never used to concentrate on the scenic, because there was a lot of other stuff going on, but I’m much better at it now,” he says. “I can always get a better lineup shot.”  

The ink-stained teenager who surf-dreamed through his apprenticeship has also made a reappearance, though the present-day subject matter is far more engaging than the reams of forms he once churned out: Ryan has two professional-standard Epson Stylus Pro 9900 printers in the garage and can produce an array of archival standard prints on a grand scale. Stretching across the walls of his home are examples of his work—testaments to his life behind the lens along this coastline. 

The interplay of light and color are a perpetual riddle for anyone pulling focus, but Ryan’s hard-won appreciation for the nuances of both saturation and his lifelong muse have cultivated definitive results in his photography.  It’s there in his predawn sniping from the Winkipop cliffs, waiting for the optimal moment of pastel pyrotechnics, or the way he frames up the sentinel 12 apostles drenched in brilliant lemon light. He’s still that inland boy, beguiled by the Victorian coastline.

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Back in 2003, shortly after checking the left slab, Ryan pulled up to the austere corner shop at nearby Lavers Hill. There, he found his two overnight houseguests looking rattled as they stood over a small Nissan 4WD, its bonnet caved in and headlights bent sideways. They explained that, shortly after leaving Ryan’s place, Slater had collided with a kangaroo. 

Dressed in his fur-trimmed jacket and shorts, Slater was a good-enough sport to pose for a photo with his beat-up ride. The shop didn’t take credit cards, so Slater asked Ryan if he could borrow 10 bucks to get some breakfast. “When he came back, he tried to give me the change, and I waved it away,” Ryan says. The car was still driveable, so Slater and Dorian got back on the road to Johanna with a story to tell the rest of the tour surfers. 

As it transpired, the contest was put on hold because the low-lying fog obscured the lineup. With the delay, Slater would’ve had time to pit his skills against the mysto left, but by the time Ryan reached Johanna, the sting had gone out of the quest. “It was a missed opportunity,” Ryan laments. 

In true low-key Victorian character, Ryan declined to tell him it was all-time. “I didn’t want to get in his head before he surfed a heat,” he says. No one ever found out what happened to the kangaroo that got the jump on Slater, either.

[Feature image: My first trip to King Island, with Tony Ringrose, Simon McShane, and Derek Hynd, late ’90s. The light plane ride was bumpy and spooky, but the guys were hooting as we landed, watching how good the waves were from the window. Derek lost a filling while duck diving during the first session. After the surf, he suggested a shortcut to save a bit of time. We went down long, puddled tracks and through muddy, plowed paddocks. Eventually, it became too hard to go back. We had to lift a few wire fences to drive under. I thought we were never going to get out of there and was waiting for a farmer to come out and blow up at us.]