Tell us, when did you first have that lightbulb moment that made you want to start Paper Sea Quarterly? And how did you get Tom and Andrew on board?

We knew each other from school. I got on well with them but didn’t really hang out much. We started Paper Sea after we’d completed undergrads. Tom studied photography at RMIT, Andrew studied Graphic Design at Swinburne University, and I’d finished an arts degree at Melbourne University and was three-quarters of the way through a Master of Creative Writing. The three of us were doing what we now do for Paper Sea for ourselves before we came together. We met at a café in Richmond and discussed the idea of creating the type of surf publication we craved but couldn’t find. That was nearly five years ago now.

 

You’re still working full-time while running the magazine, how do you make time to get to the coast or out into the wild?

Yeah I work as marketing manager for an app, Skip, in addition to Paper Sea and it keeps me busy – early mornings and late nights, but finding time to get amongst nature is vital. It acts as a mental reset and helps quiet my monkey mind when everything feels like it’s getting a bit too full on. The feeling of driving down the coast for a surf and spending hours bobbing round in the sea makes me so deeply happy; camping and hiking give me the same release.

I’m pretty hyperactive so I’m always searching for new ways to release my mind, which led me to yoga, meditation and climbing – they tie me over between surfs.

 

Have you been on any adventures recently?

I spent ten days down the coast in Vic in late winter with a couple of mates and that was pretty special. We managed to surf twice a day every day and thawed out in front of a fire every night. There was a crazy number of whales and dolphins hanging around all week. A few weekends ago I went for a surf with the same mates to a somewhat isolated beach that offers so much adventure – a great walk in underneath a canopy of native trees, a dodgy goat track down to the beach, sharp rocks to jump off and really beautiful water and waves; then a storm rolled through and it felt like the end of days.

 

There’s no mistaking that print is a hard game to play these days, what keeps you producing print editions rather than just existing in the digital world?

It’s as simple as the difference in appeal between looking at a photo on a screen versus holding a printed photo in your hands – which feels better? In our first discussion about starting something that represented the surf culture we appreciated, we raised this same question: Why would we spend so much on printing something we could just create online?

Our focus on photography and art lent itself to print and from the outset we wanted to create a physical product that could transport people to an inspiring place far removed from wherever they sat – that’s much harder to achieve online.