A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS ROBBIE NEWMAN
In the mid-60s I left my home in the rural Hills District and started living by myself at Newport Beach. I was 16 and became friends with local surfer and surfboard builder, Dick Van Straalen, and became his first team rider.
“I started working part-time in the kitchen of the Newport cake shop that Dick’s father owned. Dick’s father sort of became my adopted stepfather. Newport became an alternate art and free lifestyle scene. This was around The Summer Of Love in 1967. There was a coffee house at Newport called Maxims, a beatnik place. Newport was quite an amazing hub and in a strange way all this opened my own ‘Doors Of Perception’ into visual and creative pathways. One of Dick’s current carbon fish
