“I’ve just been head down, bum up all week,” says Rob Lewers, founder and owner of Concrete Skateparks. It’s a Friday arvo and it must be nearly beer o’clock down on the NSW Central Coast, where Rob’s working on a new skatepark at Narrara. Rob has spent the past 25 years building skateparks all over Australia, from Paddington to Belconnen to Nimbin to the more recent Sydney Park, which he describes as an “absolute nightmare”.
It takes many different skills to build a skatepark, from design to surveying to earthworks to formwork to steelwork to concreting. There are also negotiations with councils, contracting and then pulling together a solid crew to get it all done. A lot of that can go wrong. Before the interview begins, I ask Rob if he’s comfortable talking about council dramas, lost money and the nightmare at Sydney Park. Without hesitation, he says, “Sure, mate. I’m an open book.”
Getting Into Skating
I got into skating around ’82 or ’83. My sister played hockey and the hockey carnivals were in Palm Beach on the Gold Coast and Hunt Park, where they had all those concrete halfpipes. Those parks were pretty new back then. I remember skating Tugun when the formwork was still on the side of it. I saw guys skating them and thought, “Holy shit, I want to do that.” Then around ’86 or ’87, when I was 16, I
