In the early 90s, skateboarding was evolving at a rapid pace and for a young person like myself... The USA Skate Scene was the source of my inspiration and fueled my daily thoughts. I clung to every new video and magazine that would make it to Australia. I would sit waiting in the Snake Pit Skate Shop with only rumours of what video was about to hit Australian shores.

The hard part was that the flow of media was completely different then. There was sometimes up to or more than, a half year wait... after American release of a video to reach Australian skate shops.

For me a new video was a way to learn skateboarding and I used to lie awake at night thinking about the latest video to come out, before it had arrived.

I am not sure if it is the same for everyone, but I learned to skateboard by myself... Rewinding and slow-motioning VHS tapes until the picture quality had turned to animated gravel like snow.

The main people to teach me the theory of skateboarding were in fact all vert skaters... Vert meaning vertical halfpipe or in simpler terms - big ramps.

Gregor Rankine, Gary Valentine, Tas Pappas, Ben Pappas (RIP), and Christian Biancardi were the main ones that trained my thinking of what skateboarding is and how to approach it.

I actually think Vert Skating is incomparably harder than Street Skating. Even though Tas used to encourage me to skate vert... I stuck with street. You need a much stronger physical body to withstand the punishment vert dishes out... and a physically strong body is not something I had as young person at the time.

Apart from teaching myself, there was however one person that would teach me the detailed mechanisms of how to do tricks... and that was...

Ryan Denereaz

ライアン・デネレイは９０年代のオーストラリアの有名なスケーターでした。 ９０年代、ライアンはオーストラリア最高のストリートスケーターだったと思います。私は、基本的にスケートは独学でしてが、 ライアンがたくさんのトリックを教えてくれました。この写真には、９０年代のストリートスタイルの雰囲気があると思います。

Ryan was one or two years younger than me but actually used to teach me how to skate, from where to place my feet on the board for certain tricks, to speed, timing, distance and just general abstract thought processes related to learning new things.

Ryan, was I believe the best street skater in Australia during a large part of the 90s.
There were many others... but he did have a prodigious talent and was way ahead of his time. While, there is some excellent footage of him, he did not film that much. Most of the amazing things I saw him do in the 90s, were never filmed. His skills went far beyond anything recorded in print or on film.

Ryan would arrive at my house early every Saturday before 7am... sometimes closer to 6:20am. He would arrive unannounced, without calling. Most people didn't have mobile phones then. It would wake up the whole house! Although, regardless of being sound asleep, I was happy to hear him ring the doorbell.

We would eat breakfast and catch the train straight to Prahran Bowl. We would touch down at the bowl under cold brisk blue skies before heading to St Kilda Road to literally drill tricks over and over. The streets were almost completely still early in the morning on weekends in the early 90s.

Both in solitude and relative silence, amongst the scenery of hard urban structures and flowing breeze against swaying St Kilda Road foliage... Ryan would teach me how to do tricks that I wouldn't push myself to, because I thought they were too hard or just couldn't understand.

I was a very self-conscious young person and the tricks he would train me to do, I would never film or do in public, because I hadn't perfected them.

By 11am we would be back at the Snake Pit Store on Chapel Street ready to meet other team members or skaters as they started to arrive in Prahran. From there we would explore the whole city often skating until 8pm or later.

I never thought of it that way, because we were just kids mucking around on the streets... but in some ways it was like getting one on one lessons with a person whose thought process was way ahead of its time.

I would often get confused after learning something new and confess that I can do this trick, but don't really understand how it works or exactly what I am doing...

Ryan would say...

"Just keep doing it over and over. Just keep repeating..."

Implying that it wasn't really important whether I understood the concept he had taught, but rather that I would understand through repetition over time.

Many years later in the late 2000s while on a trip to Melbourne, Ryan called me out of the blue. Eddie Martin - another skateboarding friend, who went into directing films, had recently met in me Tokyo and told Ryan that I had finished a book manuscript.

Ryan had become successful in business and wanted to catch up and talk about my ambitious new project... A book about Japan.

When we met, it was exactly the same as before...

He got straight into the mindset and strategy of completing complex projects and what I needed to do to make my dream into a reality.

Still to this day I often have to learn complex new skills by myself. Skills that I am only starting to gain proficiency in... and yet to develop the technical awareness of how I am able to do something that is really confusing for me.

I remember what Ryan taught me...

"Sometimes you need to push yourself to do things that are not easy for you... That don't come naturally... Beyond what you think you can do... Once you get it, it doesn't matter that you don't understand how you are able to do it. Just keep repeating it over and over... Until perfection."

Image of Ryan Denereaz - Photograph by Andrew Currie.

To go beyond the 90s and into the 2000s...

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