What’s your goal and overall mission of the new project? So from ASL, you went and created Surf Europe in France, then Waves Mag to Stab and now BeachGrit. And, in the real early days, like nineties, I called up Brock Little and asked what he liked so much about ASL and he told me, “Because you don’t take surfing seriously.” It confirmed everything I instinctively felt and convinced me I was on, maybe not the right track, but…at least an original…track. I never felt surfing was a terribly serious pursuit. Humor has obviously played a huge role in your success, being able to poke fun at a lifestyle sport that’s notoriously known for being ego driven and pretty serious, what pushed you to take that route? Doors opened quickly, newspapers, other magazines etc. Asked my brother to write me a story, stole another one from Tracks, put it all in a CV and got the gig. The way the blackjack game works is you take twenty minutes off every hour. Saw an ad for Editorial Assistant at ASL in a newspaper during my break. How does one go from being a blackjack dealer to running ASL Mag in only a few years? My goal, which I’m yet to reach, is to write exactly how I think. The publisher was stunned at my sheaf of handwritten pages (“ You wrote this?”) and it made me realise the importance of writing freely, without self-censorship or worrying what people might eventually think. I had to write an advice column for ASL and, suddenly, the old Oscar Wilde quote, “Nothing Succeeds Like Excess” hit me and I wrote as if nothing mattered. If you really want me to be frank, I don’t think of myself as a writer, more an editor who can assemble what I hope is an Evelyn Waugh-Huysmans-Tom Wolfe-sque paragraph or two. I came from not much so I never really had much to lose. You might even have a grotto to park your boat at your riverfront house.ĭid it impact on my writing? On journalism? Yeah, I think it did. You have a boat so you surf at Rottnest and the outer reefs.
When I hit 13 I was old enough to ride my bike an hour and a bit to Cables and Cottesloe, a couple of crummy beaches. I liked motos and throwing rocks through windows. Y’either grow up south of the river, in the suburbs, not so much poor as locked into football and whatever else. It’s a Tale of Two Cities, least it was when I was riding my little bike around town. So you’re from Perth in West Aus, what was it like growing up on the ‘other’ coast of Australia? Did it help you become the journalist you are now? What’s the main difference between those from the West and the East coasts? We chat with him about what makes him tick and why a less serious mentality is more often a better one when it comes to approaching surf. Derek Rielly is one third of the trio behind Beach Grit: the popular online thorn in the side of the surf industry.
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