Hot in the City - ALIA conferences - Rattray blog - Div

Sydney has been sitting in the mid-to-high 30s all week, and it sucks. No skateboarding just now - I'm not even riding my bike to work after a dizzy spell as I rode home a few days ago. I had to cancel a harbour walk on Sunday as my Scottish skin explodes into heat rash if I allow enough contact with the sun, and I haven't slept well for some time (it didn't drop below 30 celsius last night).

Yesterday I attended the ALIA  (Australian Library and Information Association) 'Information Online' conference. It was often interesting, particularly the keynote address from ABC Innovation's Chris Winters - there is so much going on in our corporation that I am unaware of, mainly because the continuous daily graft of my job doesn't allow much time to explore these things.

I have recently become aware of John Rattray's blog, A Predatory Bird. If you don't know John Rattray, he is a professional skateboarder from Banchory, near Aberdeen, in Scotland. He used to skate at the old Factory in Dundee (more of which at a later date), when he was known as 'Rat' and when I made occasional small talk with him, but now he resides in the USA and skates for Zero. Somewhere in between he got a physics degree in Glasgow, and he's a pretty admirable chap. 

In this post he has a video featuring another Scottish skater called Div. I actually trounced this sucka in a skateboard competition at Stirling skatepark. I doubt that is a fair reflection of either of our abilities, but I used to skate that horrid wee park all the time, so I had that massive advantage working for me. Check it oot: The Predatory Bird

Alternative Blog Name 2 - This Skateboarding Life

"This Skateboarding Life": it recalls This American Life and This Sporting Life (both the excellent Richard Harris film and the not-quite-so-excellent Decemberists song). But it may be a bit arsey for similar reasons.

I'm not altogether confident about 'secret shredder.' The superhero connotations are at odds with the fact that my skateboarding is neither altogether secret, nor particularly shreddy. But I persist in perceiving a ring within the phrase. Ho hum.

Alternative blog name 1

Diary of a radman.

a skateboard blog: introduction, Gogol and praise from a child

I am a 34-year-old man, and I am a skateboarder. I live in Sydney and work within the archives of ABC TV news. I am married. I have longstanding ambitions to write, hence this blog - I hope it will lubricate the creative impulse and allay the fear of crapness that hobbles my literary efforts. But mainly I want to write about skateboarding, because it is something that has been massively important to me since I was about 10 years old, and it is something that I can't share with most of my friends. It's something I have strong opinions on, but is something that is largely separate from the rest of my life.


Since I moved out to Sydney from London I haven't met any skaters like me: educated to postgraduate degree level, holding down a professional occupation, but still skating regularly. There were a lot more skaters like me in London - media types in thick-framed spectacles who have sustained a trick repertoire while advancing through university and onto their chosen career path, and who probably capitalise on the cultural cachet of being a skater within the world of media and graphic design. 

Lame as that is and lame as we are, it is nice to be among peers and encompass New Deal videos and BBC Radio 4 comedy in the same conversation. I have met some nice folk while skating in Sydney, but nobody with this kind of background. So I'm just going to sound off here and see if anyone tunes in.

Here is an example of how skateboarding fits in with my life. I went skating this Saturday morning. I like to skate early in the day because I am Scottish and the Australian sun messes me up when it reaches its peak. I also prefer it when the park is quiet; as I have implied, I have little in common with most skaters I meet. On this occasion I intended to purchase tickets for the Nicolai Gogol play 'Diary of a Madman' at the Belvoir Theatre, starring Geoffrey Rush, before I hit the skatepark. I strapped my board to my backpack and rode my bike to the theatre for 8.45 am, to queue for a pair of the limited number of tickets they release daily. I chatted with an elderly lady in the queue; we didn't mention my skateboard. At about 10.30 I left with the last 2 of the matinee tickets, and rode my bike to Waterloo skatepark.

I felt buoyant when I started skating, and was really getting into plain old ollies. If you're not having fun doing ollies you're not having a good skate (and if you can't ollie you're not a skateboarder), but on Saturday I was ollieing into banks and feeling good about jumping around. It was fun. Here are some of my standard issue tricks that I pulled off that morning: heelflips fakie on a flatbank; 540 big spins (spinning fakie off the nose and turning 360 on a back-truck pivot) on the volcano hip; and pop shove-it tail grabs with a little one-foot judo kick extension. Some kid came up and said, "you must be a pro, or at least an amateur." That's how good I am - good enough to impress a kid who has just started skating. But really I'm not very good for all the years I've been doing this.

Within 30 minutes I was knackered and rode home to get ready for the play. It was brilliant. Geoffrey Rush was intense, and I have thought about it much since. My present interpretation is that seemingly benign delusions will always become massively destructive. It opens with laughter and ends with howls of pain. It was one of my best-ever theatre experiences. Later we went to Atelier Restaurant in Glebe for a 7-course degustation to celebrate a friend's 30th birthday. It was great, but I was bitten by a mosquito on the ear that evening and my ear is presently swollen and terribly itchy. I am allergic to the mosquitos of Australia.