THE HOLLMER-CROSSES

started bodysurfing at Fairhaven on the Victorian coast when I was a kid, but I spent most of my holidays visiting relatives on the northwest coast of Tasmania. Later, I met Sonya, my boys’ mum, on the Great Ocean Road. We had a house at Fairhaven and Sonya’s parents had a weekender at Aireys Inlet. Sonya was 12 when I met her and was a Hodgman surf mat rider. Her parents, the Hollmers, were post World War II immigrants from Hamburg, Germany and Friesland, the Netherlands. My grandparents were from the Tassie Midlands and my mum’s relatives, the Irish Cooneys, came out on convict ships in the 1830s. When I was 17 and Sonya was 15, we hitchhiked around Tassie for two weeks. We got married a few years later.