Interview with Rob ‘Wedge’ Francis: sketchy skate spots and freestyling in the seventies

Sunset at Noble Park: the after-school scooter kids and their minders have gone home for dinner, replaced by an older crowd. One nonchalantly drops in, on a scooter, at the deep end of the bowl. Another hang-ten wheelies on the flat before rolling into the snake run.

The three of us are standing in a cosy circle, off to the side. There’s Kyoko and Cheryl, two adult beginners who frequent this suburban skate park for its transition, and I, a beginner freestyler who prefers the bright blue court nearby. None of us talk much beyond the occasional yelp as we each try to make our own no-comply impossible happen. Push the tail down. Sweep sideways. The board should wrap around the foot.

My board is flying everywhere. After watching a few attempts, Wedge tells me to slow down. He demos again. The board whips around windmill like. He then kicks the heelside edge up with his back foot, dropping to one knee. It’s like a bizarre marriage proposal, but instead of a diamond ring, there’s a caught skateboard in his hand.

The combo came from freestyle-skateboarding veteran Russ Howell who visited Australia for Expo 75, a surf-and-skate event that Wedge competed in. ‘I’m still in touch with him,’ Wedge tells us. ‘He can still do a gazillion 360s. On his seventieth birthday, he said he wanted to do a handstand for a mile, so he did a hundred-yard handstand run…sixteen times.’

Rob ‘Wedge’ Francis started skating in 1975 on a bidirectional deck shaped from a piece of discarded weatherboard and some garden hose. Like hundreds of other kids around the country, he was caught up in the latest craze imported from America. Skateboarding would be replaced with another craze the following year, but Wedge stuck with it, despite being ‘ostracised by everyone’ (Anderson 2024), eventually becoming Australia’s skateboarding champion in 1979 (Cansdale 2022).

He learned how to skate in a time before flatground ollies were invented. Skateboard trucks were still attached to surfboard-shaped decks with wood screws. Bearings were of the open-cone variety.

There were no skateparks, so riders made do with the concrete spillway off Regent Street, Mount Waverley. ‘It was one bank,’ Wedge recalls. ‘It was like the steepest over there.’ He indicates towards the biggest flat bank at Noble Park and then to the Skyrail which separates the park from the Douglas Street shopping strip. ‘But as high as the bridge. At the bottom it was just lumps of concrete tombstones and stuff, so you really couldn’t go down the bottom of the thing.’

‘You had to turn really quickly. You’d carve across it and do a kickturn around…You could get the 360 slides going down. So that was a bit of fun.’

The spillway in Mount Waverley, the concrete roof of the now-demolished toilet block in Burwood East’s Tally Ho, the famous Pymble pool in Sydney, these were sketchy, difficult-to-skate spots. Wedge recounts Stacy Peralta visiting the spillway and saying, ‘Ah, Wedge, I don’t know how you ride that thing.’ But until there were dedicated skate spaces, this was it for Wedge and his mates.

It’s unsurprising that early competitions focused on slalom and freestyle. Some were held at the newly built Doncaster Shoppingtown complex.

‘Right over at the far boundary, there was a car park that goes down…and scoops up. We used to slalom there and there was a bit of freestyle going on as well.’ Back in 1976, Globe cofounders Peter and Stephen Hill skated there as ‘little grommets’, and a social worker would bring kids over from Broadmeadows, an outer suburb on the other side of town.

Slalom and freestyle were the two categories of the 1976 Sydney Skateboarding Olympics, which was held at the North Rocks Shopping Centre car park, as well. ‘Olympics’ seems like an out out-of-place descriptor for something so niche, but Wedge notes even back then there was a push for skateboarding to be part of the global sporting event.

He came third in slalom and second in freestyle, despite having to figure out how to skate in shoes for the first time: ‘I went to go into the competition, and they were, “Oh great, you’re here. Fill out the form. Where are your shoes?” I’ve gone, “I dunno. They’re probably in the car, why?” And they’ve gone, “Oh no, you gotta wear shoes if you want to go in the competition.” I thought, “I’ve never skated in shoes.” Anyway, they made me skate in shoes.’

In the footage of his 1976 competition run, Wedge slipped off a few times, perhaps due to fatigue from too many hours of skating or the unfamiliarity of wearing shoes on a skateboard. However, he still managed to pull off spacewalks, hang ten into 360 nose wheelie, and aggressive bertslides.

In what he calls his ‘brag file’, a collection of old skate footage and photos on Instagram, there’s black-and-white evidence of him, long-haired, shoeless, and doing triple-decker handstands. I ask him if he can still do any of his freestyle moves.

‘I can’t do the handstands any more because this got smaller.’ He points to one arm. ‘And this [my gut] got bigger. I can do some [freestyle] but just when I’m mucking around.’ To prove it, he picks up the MOSS-Foundation-branded popsicle deck that he’s brought with him and starts to perform spacewalks and walk-the-dogs.

He also does his signature 360 spins, what he once claimed in a 2017 interview to be his ‘special (stupid) superpower’. I count 6 rotations. His advice on spins: start on a wheeled chair to understand the physics, then try on a bank with a skateboard, and keep on practising for two years straight. Something like that.

Then it’s my turn at show and tell. I combo a heelside rail entry, rail whip, and rail exit. Wedge makes an admission, ‘My ankles are scared watching you.’ And even though I turn the board onto its side to illustrate how stable it is with the offset wheels and the very tight trucks, he eyes it with much suspicion. While the skate veteran is happy trying spacewalks out on my modern version of a freestyle single kick, there’s no way he’s attempting rail tricks this evening.

Our exchange of tricks and words at the skatepark highlights changes the sport has seen since 1975. The advances in hardware, the creation of new disciplines, the tricks that we now take for granted were yet to be invented in Wedge’s youth.

There’s a tendency for us freestylers to mourn the loss of the so-called glory days of the seventies and eighties, but we forget that skateboarding and freestyle has grown since and continues to evolve. Today’s history lesson brings to mind words once published in a Broken Fingers issue:

…we’re no longer trying to play catch-up with what was done in the 1980s. In my eyes, many freestylers are starting to surpass some of the great legends that we looked up to as young teenagers, starting to improve on and develop beyond the tricks that were left to us.

Tony Gale (2016)

Instead of always looking backwards, we should embrace the innovations made possible with time.

The day finally ends and the lights at the park flick on. Kyoko, Cheryl, Wedge, and I part ways with the promise of another meet-up. Brunswick maybe? Is there transition? Is there flatground? Yes, and yes. Maybe we’ll see each other there.

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REFERENCES:

• ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) (1 August 2018) ‘Sydney’s Skateboard Winter Olympics (1976) | RetroFocus’ , ABC News In-Depth, YouTube, accessed 9 February 2024
• Anderson G (9 January 2024) ‘1979: Early Australian Skateboarding’ , Geordie Anderson, YouTube, accessed 20 February 2024
• Cansdale D (18 June 2022) ‘Skateboarders remember Sydney’s Pymble pool, an ‘almost unrideable’ bowl that launched a scene’, ABC News, accessed 10 March 2024
• Doncaster Templestowe Historical Society (n.d.) ‘Doncaster Corner – Serpell’s Store to Shoppingtown’, Doncaster Templestowe Historical Society website, accessed 20 February 2024
• Gale T (2016) ‘My Generation’, Broken Fingers Freestyle Skateboarding Quarterly Year One, USA
• Gordon D (2017) ‘Skaters at Home: Rob Wedge Francis’, Daryl Gordon Photography website, accessed 20 February 2024