Stu Nettle: Voice & Vertigo

Injuries are mostly out of our control. But recovery offers many choices. Will we allow the scar tissue to stiffen or soften us?

Stu Nettle is the editor of Swellnet, one of Australia's leading independent surf media and forecasting sites, where he has written about board design, surf industry happenings, surf science, and coastal geology since 2008. 

Stu is a lifelong surfer but late-comer to surf media. He “had many unrelated life chapters, business failures, social experiments, and surf adventures before he ever got a word published.” 

We first encountered Stu’s work amongst the lively pages of Kurangabaa, an academic – leaning surf journal he helped to found and run in the early 2000s. It was a trove of thoughtful essays, along with poetry, fiction and interviews – and part of a larger, exciting, indepedent DIY surf culture of that time. 

We wanted to know: what kind of life has shaped the voice and perspective of one of Australia's most prolific surf journalists?  

Stu talks us through the Sunset Beach hold down that changed him, the value of knowing our history,  gender politics at Swellnet and the the future(s) of surf media.

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Listen with Lauren L. Hill & Dave Rastovich

Sound Engineer: Ben Alexander

Theme song: Shannon Sol Carroll

Additional music by Dave & Ben

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