“I think it’s better to go when you’re ripping rather than rippling.”

-Mick Lawrence 1947-2024

I’m trying to piece the dates together and the best I can come up with is 2005. That’s the year Mick Lawrence ‘retired’ from surfing. Took his pick from the set of the day at Boneyard, got a couple of barrels, and rode it to the beach one last time.

Retirement. It sounds like a gloomy thing, doesn’t it?

Yet rather than accept his fate with head bowed, Mick and his best mate Leigh Stevens, friends since teenagers, had planned their combined surfing retirement. Made a celebration of it. After all, they’d both led full and adventurous surfing lives and had no regrets. The two went out together, tied a bow on their half-century of surfing, and then bade it farewell.

“Some get struck out by injury, some should have been, some iron men sob like wimps, and some go out laughing and holding the premiership cup. Each to his own, but I like the guy who knows when it’s time, and moves onto the next thing to spend his passion on.”

It says a lot about Mick, and I guess also about surfing itself, its ability to permanently infect the host body, that Mick kept seeing himself as a surfer even as his surfboards gathered dust. He took up sea kayaking, exploring the distant inlets and harbours of southern Tasmania, paddling by day, camping by night.

“As a form, [kayaks] remind me of classic big wave boards - long graceful curves and a fine nose that spelt speed.”

Mick also assumed venerable elder status among Tassie surfers. He reconnected with Surfing Tasmania fifty years after becoming State Champion, first working with South Arm Boardriders, mentoring the younger kids at the beach, and eventually working in the role as President of Surfing Tasmania.

For Mick, contest surfing was less about victories and more about another kind of celebration: the gathering of the tribe, the opportunity to travel, the chance to pit yourself against both nature and your peers. Contests were the introduction to a surfing life.

“I decided I wanted to give something back, so I thought I'd do that through the younger kids at the beach,” Mick told the ABC in 2019.

Most recently, Mick dived headlong into environmental activism. A filmmaker by profession he collaborated with Matty Hannon on ‘Southern Blast’, a film about mining companies subjecting whales to deafening sonic tests, and the issue closest to his heart, foreign companies infiltrating his beloved waterways with toxic salmon farms. The circular pens he snidely called “crap circles”.

Swapping board for kayak, Mick kept exploring (Mick Lawrence)

Yes, Mick was ripping to the end. But also, I'd only gotten to know him near the end. The fact that someone could walk away from surfing so philosophically struck me as powerful. The existentialist applying self-determination, self-control. I liked talking to him about it. Wondered if I ever could. Mick, I finally deduced, had a secure sense of self. Not in an entitled way, more so that he knew exactly who he was - what he stood for, what he valued.

I also realised surfing meant far more to Mick than merely riding waves. Mick committed himself in full. He lived the surfing life deeply. So much so that when he could no longer surf waves, he still remained a surfer. He "surfed in other dimensions", continued seeing things the way surfers do, looked for the lightness and nimbleness. A trait he never lost even when faced with the greatest tragedy.

Surfing in speedos is almost excusable when you learn it's Padang Padang (Mick Lawrence)

Born in Hobart in 1947, Mick’s life took a sudden change of direction in 1964 when John Witzig visited the state capital. Having made it to the trials for the Tokyo Olympics backstroke swimming squad, Mick saw surfing for the first time, on the big screen no less, and sixty minutes later ordered a board.

“My mum was mortified when I informed her that my swimming career had just ended. Her dream of an Olympic torchbearer living in the back room had been snuffed out by something worse than a Hell’s Angel. Her son was now a surfer!”

Proving himself adept at surfing - he became State Champ just two years after he began - Mick dived headlong into the surfing lifestyle, though his version was somewhat different than his mainland counterparts. Surfing in Tasmania meant coming to terms with isolation and exposure, handing yourself over to it, allowing it to leave an imprint on your being, so the distance between person and place reduces.

Mick claimed the 1967 state surfing title at Eaglehawk Neck (Mick Lawrence)

“Since the geology is different, the surf setups are different and the water takes on the menacing dark green tone of the Southern Ocean. It also happens to be colder.”

Mick travelled, a lot, to destinations including Indonesia (many times), New Zealand, Mexico, Hawaii, and mainland USA, however he always called Tassie home. He made regular forays to Tasmania’s isolated corners, its offshore islands (“it’s not the island state, it’s the islands state”), and the region with perhaps the most magnetic draw, the southeast wilderness.

“The surf culture down here is not asphalt-based, never has been, never will be. Rather, the call of wilderness waves is the core of its being. Those who answer the call usually become addicted; you can tell from the glint in their eyes.”

When it came time to get serious about work Mick took stock of his natural skills, the fella loved to tell a story, and also of his surroundings, piecing them together to become, at various times, a documentary filmmaker, location scout, author, plus advertising and marketing whiz. He told Tasmanian stories, used the island state as a backdrop for ad campaigns, and it became his muse whenever creativity was called upon.

In 1994, Mick was trekking the Tasman Peninsula, leading an advertising film crew with a specific brief: “...show a rock-solid location under siege from the elements.” The resultant ad was surely a success, though people can no longer remember who it was for, yet from such inauspicious beginnings did Tasmania’s greatest wave make its public reveal.

Mick didn’t even consider the wave a surf spot, though a few years later he saw footage of Andrew Campbell surfing a wave called Fluffytonkas and he instantly knew where it was. The pseudonym didn’t last, and before long Shipsterns Bluff burst into surfing’s consciousness. The slab to crush all other slabs.

A now familiar view (Craig Brokensha)

Shortly after Mick retired from surfing doctors discovered a 12cm split in his aorta. High blood pressure was the cause, specifically a touch too much salt on his fish and chips. Surgery and hospital time followed, and after that his watery rebirth as a sea kayaker.

When Mick retired, he did so in the knowledge that he’d passed on important lessons to his son Tim. The pathway was lit, it was time for the next generation to take the walk. Cruelly, in 2017 the light was extinguished when Tim was killed in a jet ski accident.

Moments can never define a lifetime, yet how Mick, and also his wife Robyn, carried themselves after the death of their only son spoke of strength and quiet dignity. Immediately afterwards Mick split for the wilderness, thinking the southwest would have the answers for him.

"It was awful, there was no answer there for me," Mick told the ABC.

"I suddenly felt betrayed, as if the thing that gave me solace was no longer interested. In hindsight I was in shock, I was having an out of body experience, I was looking down on Mick Lawrence, I wasn't Mick Lawrence."

Yet rather than allowing the bitterness in, Mick returned home and wholly embraced the Tasmanian surfing community, and in turn they embraced him.

Tim’s death was the motivation for Mick’s film opus, 'Rogue Waves'. "It's still a story,” Mick told the ABC. “It's my story to my son, just covering a different subject now — his loss." Fittingly, Rogue Waves, premiered at the State Cinema in Hobart.

Following Tim's death, the Tasmanian surfing community rallied around Mick (ABC News/Aneeta Bhole)

The last seven years Mick gave himself over to other causes: fighting environmental vandals and bearing witness to their damage, yet there was still an elfin lightness to his touch. Bad news always landed better with a joke.

Together with Talon Clemow - somewhat of a Tasmanian protege - Mick was working on a short film with local mob for the upcoming NAIDOC week. Yesterday, Robyn found Mick unresponsive on the couch, laptop fired up with work notes, his dog Atlas by his side. He couldn’t be revived.

“It’s devastating news,” said Talon. “But I’m honoured and grateful to have been so close to him over the years.”

Much as Mick and Robyn had, it’s now time for the Tasmanian surfing community to grapple with the loss of one of their own. Mick had set them one hell of an example to follow.

//STU NETTLE

(Except where noted, all direct quotes are from Mick's book 'Surfing On The Inside')