Australian Longboarding Magazine feature article on Ross Renwick. Written, by Bruce Usher, 2006.
Click to read full article
Ross Renwick on the cover of
Sports Illustrated, 1957.
Ross Renwick on the cover of Australian Outdoors, November 1958.
Ross Renwick circa 1959
Issue One - May 1977
Issue 22, Feb 1979
Issue 40, August 1980
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“Ross came from a seminal time; the first to connect
to the public world with his own individual identity in
surfing; and as the sport boomed he was seen as one
person who was elegant and articulate. Ross came
out with his own original style, and was always seen
with a grin on his face after he caught a wave in -
which later reflected in his art.”
Midget Farrelly, March 2009
Ross was raised in Roseville, Sydney. He walked everywhere. Well, that was until he got his first car. Which he rolled. Then rolled again. And again. Depending on who you talk to, he rolled it six times, all separate occassions. Then he began walking again.
Then he took up surfing.
During 1957, he was photographed on a nine-foot balsa malibu at Avalon Beach for Sports Illustrated, and became the first Australian surfer to be featured on the front-cover. Within the year these boards were in use all along the Australian coast.
Ross worked as a copy writer and a reader during the early Sixties. He was based at Palm beach, living in a house known as Windy Ridge, which soon became the place to hangout for Brett Whitely, Richard Neville, and Martin Sharpe, to name a few. The Rolling Stones even made the house their hideaway during their first Australian tour.
From the years at Windy Ridge, Ross travelled to Paris where he lived and concentrated on his writing. He was soon discovered by the literary agent, Gareth Powell, who, in Ross’s words “paid me a lot of money for my stories”. They were highly acclaimed and published in six countries. At this time he completed his first novel. The writing was minimalist, colloquial, and most of all classic Australian story telling.
As the Paris riots of 1968 inflamed the city, Ross found himself arrested with Peter Clifton. Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were laid up in a Paris gaol. Peter commented at the time, “I was shit-scared, yet Ross seemed to see the funny side”. On his release, Ross returned to his life as a full-time writer and his ritual of joining Bob Dylan for ice-cream. Ross would have remained in Paris, except there were no waves.
As the Sixties rolled away, Ross returned home to the Northern Beaches, and to his career in publishing, becoming the Art Director and Editor of the North Side Journal.
May 1977 saw the creation of Billy Blue Magazine and Design Company, the brainchild of Ross and his mate and business partner, Aaron Kaplan. Billy Blue was named after an African convict who lived in The Rocks around 1800; he’d begun the first water-taxi service, as he rowed the officers across the harbour.
Billy Blue became legendary during the Eighties and Nineties. When I asked Ross how Billy Blue started, he laughed, “Well I just loved magazines. I met Aaron Kaplan who was very important to the success of Billy Blue. He ran the other side of the business and didn’t have any attitude; he did go white sometimes with some of the things that I had written, especially when they were not particularly complimentary to the person paying the money”.
"Billy Blue Magazine had a circulation of thirty thousand, with a three hundred thousand readership. It was a fifty: fifty male and female readerships, which had never been heard of. We had the ages down pat; it was like a snapshot of the population. McNair Anderson decided to survey it twice because they felt the first survey was wrong, it was a mistake, it was not heard of. They had never seen anything like it…"
“We would put the magazine out and they would be all gone in a couple of hours, so people start asking how we can get them every month, so we ran a coupon for people to get the magazines, we had nine hundred responses, but eight hundred were from overseas, mostly from America. We would get these letters saying that they have never seen any thing like this, it is so rude.”
There were 106 editions of the Billy Blue magazine; in which were published many of Australia’s best colloquial short story writers at the time; at first there were hundreds of submissions, and then there were thousands that came through the post, including writers as diverse as Peter Carey, Michael Wilding, Morris Lure, Gin Lowness, and Helen Tracey.
The editorial policy of Billy Blue was less to do with having an editorial policy, than not having one at all. Ross was determined to make his magazine a focus point to clean up the beaches of Sydney. Under his editorial he would take the piss; this included renaming the Tasman Sea to “the Neville Wran Memorial Urinal”, and the “Paint the Sydney Harbour Bridge Another Bloody Colour Society”.
Ross also published six cookbooks, written under the pseudonym “Ziggy Zen”, with titles such as “A cookbook for a man who probably only owns one saucepan” and "How to drink wine out of fish heads while cooking lobster in a volkswagen hub cap". They sold in twelve countries, with close to half a million copies.
As a designer Ross won over three hundred international awards; Swiss Magazine Graphis, Communications Art America, Tokyo Art Directors Club, and UK Design to name a few. In design terms that was like winning the Nobel Peace Prize ten years running. Billy Blue Creative eventually became the most highly-regarded and respected design company in Sydney.
During 2007 Ross sold off his interests in Billy Blue to concentrate on his art. Over the last few years, apart from hitting the surf, Ross has spent his time at his Mac, continuing with his high level of design ethos, as if he is in the midst a renaissance. His art still follows the finest elements of international design, yet there is a uniquely Australian style, in particular around the beach culture, displaying his wittiness, insight, and irreverence.
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