The Lost Kids of Marrawah

If there was a bright center of the surfing universe, Zoe Grey lived in the town it was furthest from.

For Zoe and her brother, Zak, growing up in Marrawah felt a long way from pretty much everything. Tasmania was remote Australia, and Marrawah was remote Tasmania, a farming town of 300 souls banished to the far northwest corner of the island at the end of the road before the great west coast wilderness opened up beyond. Zoe and Zak were the only kids who surfed, and through winter were often the only surfers in the water. The coast felt like a secret playground. They’d find new nooks in the reefs, paddle out, and give the wave a name.

Imagine their surprise, then, when a convoy of hire cars loaded high with surfboards rolled into town one day. This was 2009, back when the pro tour had budgets and a little imagination. O’Neill had taken their event and searched the globe for the coldest, remotest place to hold it. They chose Marrawah.

“It was like a strange dream,” recalls Zoe, who was 14 at the time. “I have this vivid memory of Sunny Garcia driving his hire car—this bright-green, lowered Commodore—down onto the beach and driving off with these fat beats blaring. I think one of the surfers got a taxi from Launceston, three and a half hours away. They had no idea where Marrawah was.”

There weren’t a lot of places to stay, so the surfers were billeted with local families. “I remember we had a cute guy from Réunion Island staying with us,” Zoe says, “and the locals were all laying bets with each other about whose surfers were going to win.” The waves pumped and Jordy Smith won. Then the whole show drove away, the dust settled, and life in Marrawah went on for Zoe Grey.

Surfing was always central to it. Zoe’s dad, Harvey Grey, had left Marrawah at 17 to travel the world, surfing through South Africa, Morocco, and Europe for years before returning home and taking over the family beef farm. He passed riding waves on to his kids. The Greys’ farmhouse sat out on Taypalaka/Green Point and overlooked a friendly right-hand reef on a coast that was rarely friendly.

The west coast of Lutruwita/Tasmania faces square into the teeth of everything the Southern and Indian oceans can conspire to throw at it. While summer can be idyllic, as a surfer, most of the winter is spent waiting for breaks in the weather and swell. “The weather just announces itself,” says Zoe, bluntly. “There can be full two-week-long systems with sideways rain and huge swell. Winter can be challenging. It gets dark at five, and it’s always raining and windy.”

A classic farming town, Marrawah had a pub, a phone box, a church, and a general store, but not much else. “The primary school we went to had a total of 35 students enrolled,” recalls Zoe. The Grey kids’ real education was outdoors. “We’d spend our days helping Dad on the farm and playing in the bush, exploring. We used to play this game called ‘Lost Kids,’ where we would go out into the bush around home and build little cubbies in the wormwoods and pretend we were the only ones in the world. It was an incredibly idyllic upbringing—the beauty of understanding our environment and connecting with it. And I wonder if it also encouraged a level of creativity—being in a remote place and having to be resourceful and developing these great skills. I can see how my childhood gave me values that I hold really strongly now.”

Art didn’t come to Zoe immediately. “I wasn’t born with a gift for drawing,” she offers, “but I always had an element of creativity in the way I did things. It wasn’t until high school that I became interested in music and art. I was interested in the conceptual side of it and the meaning behind things. Zak was a big influence. He was into punk music, and that trickled down to me, as it does with siblings.”

Hobart, the state capital, called as Zoe got older, and after finishing high school she enrolled in a fine arts program at the University of Tasmania. “That was really scratching [the] surface,” she says. “We didn’t get a lot of technical training, but we were building ideas.” In terms of her artistic style emerging, it was the year after finishing her degree that really set her on a course.

Zoe took a year off and moved back to Marrawah, which is where, she says, she really tapped into something. “I remember Mom and Dad being away at the time, so I spent heaps of time by myself. I set up a little studio in the shed—behind the ping-pong table, with a little heater that ran all winter—and spent the year painting on my own,” she says. “I looked at a lot of painters I admired, and I experimented a lot with techniques and materials. Then I went back to Hobart for an honors year at uni, started exhibiting, and my work settled more or less into the style of what I do today.”

When asked to describe that style, Zoe takes a pause.

“I make paintings about place, mostly about my home, exploring my personal connection to it, the way I understand it and my experience of it,” she says. “With Marrawah, the way I connect to it is through the natural landscape—through surfing, through walking. I like moving through places where there’s no other people around.”

There are few places on earth as breathtaking, wild, and isolated as the west coast of Tasmania. “It’s rocky, rugged coastline sprinkled with bright-orange lichen,” Zoe says. “The bushes and trees bend backward from the prevailing winds, bull kelp washes up on the beach in big piles from the swell, and the sand shifts with the seasons.” It’s an old coast with a long story. Just north of Marrawah is Preminghana, a basalt headland with strong cultural significance to the Indigenous Peerapper people, home to petroglyphs carved into the rocks thousands of years before. “It’s a powerful mountain that looms at the end of the bay,” Zoe says. “You always feel its presence.”

To the south of Marrawah lies Takayna/the Tarkine, a 2,000-square-mile area of old-growth forest with one road in and nobody around. To the south again is Southwest National Park, which sits inside the UNESCO-recognized Tasmania Wilderness World Heritage Area, even bigger, even wilder, with no roads and fewer people. The coastline has been exposed and broken down by polar storms ever since the Australian and Antarctic continents split. Behind it, mountain ash trees hundreds of feet tall stand sentinel—trees that were standing when Abel Tasman first sailed past almost 500 years ago. Humans are the exception here, and with the landscape too vast and empty to truly comprehend, it inevitably drives the questions inward.

“It’s rich terrain for painting and making artwork,” Zoe says.

“The process of painting is this beast of flow and intuition, a sort of call and response.”

While Zoe’s inspiration comes from a life spent in Tasmania’s northwest, her art comes to life today in the southeast. It’s a six-hour drive between Marrawah and Nipaluna/Hobart, cutting diagonally across the island, either through the Highland Lakes or down through Launceston and the Midlands. It’s a drive she’s done hundreds of times over the years. Inspiration at one end, a blank canvas at the other.

“That’s been my process,” she says. “The paintings I make are almost exclusively about home and that landscape of Marrawah, but they’re almost always made in my studio in Hobart. That distance between them means you’re relying on familiarity and memory. It’s in your head, and it’s in your body, too. I’m making art through a lens of memory and feeling but also emotion. My work is obviously not representational. It’s abstract—and it’s becoming more abstract with time. You can pick out forms like rocks or the ocean or a tree, but they’re more reimaginings of a place and time from my past.”

When it comes to making marks on canvas, Zoe draws parallels with surfing: “The process of painting is this beast of flow and intuition, a sort of call and response—calling on that familiarity or memory or feeling or whatever it is about that place, and then responding visually with a mark, a color. Surfing’s such a beautiful experience, and I find that can be reflected in the process of painting. There are these little moments where you aren’t thinking about anything else and you’re in this flow and you’re just responding, like drawing a line on a wave.”

In a short career, Zoe’s had remarkable success. Last year, she won the Hadley’s Art Prize, awarded annually for a portrayal of the Australian landscape. Her winning piece, titled The Shape of Rock, was inspired, of course, by the landscape around home. She describes the win as “life-changing,” netting her a AU$100,000 prize, which has allowed her to focus purely on her work and has opened doors on the mainland.

Zoe’s win also reflects a recent shift in how mainland Australians see Tasmania. For decades, the island state was considered a poor cousin, both socioeconomically and culturally. Over the past few years, however, Tassie has become downright du jour—“the Tassie trend,” as Zoe refers to it—driven by tourism, with mainlanders drawn to the Tasmanian landscape, mostly, as well as Tassie increasingly gaining a reputation as a cultural hub.

Hobart is home to MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, a controversial multimillion-dollar gallery built on the banks of the River Derwent, described by its owner as “a subversive adult Disneyland.” MONA’s annual Dark Mofo festival has become infamous, attracting mainlanders by the thousands to, among other things, swim nude in the middle of a Tasmanian winter. “There’s no denying its effect,” says Zoe of the gallery. “It’s definitely changed the place and put Hobart on the map.”

This tussle between old and new Tasmania, however, has been going on out of the mainland gaze for years. For example, just south of Marrawah, Zoe often spends time in the Tarkine. 

“My brother fly-fishes down there in the rivers, and I sometimes 

go with him and bushwalk or do a bit of drawing,” she says. 

Almost as an afterthought, she adds, “I also spent days on a blockade down there.”

One way to pay homage to the Tasmanian landscape is to render it as high art. The other, very Tasmanian response is to get out on a logging blockade or a tree-sit. For years, the Tarkine has been a flash point for conflict between environmentalists and the logging industry. “I’m a bit too soft for the front line, though,” Zoe says, laughing. “You’ve got to be gutsy for that kind of activism.” She uses her growing profile, however, to support the groups fighting for the Tarkine, and she was recently featured in a Surfrider film, Southern Blast, campaigning against offshore gas development off Tasmania’s northwest coast.

Nowhere in Australia are progressive and conservative politics more starkly contrasted than in Tasmania, with loggers and greenies often living side by side. “The people I went to school with are definitely not saving the Tarkine,” laughs Zoe. “Our parents were hippies, but I have friends I went to high school with, people who I am still in touch with and have a very special shared history with, but I know we’re not voting for the same people—and that’s okay. I think growing up in a rural area, you get a bit more of an understanding that not everyone thinks like you, but you can still love people and spend time with people who are not at all aligned with your beliefs about things.”

Broadening her worldview, Zoe has been taking artistic residencies abroad, most recently in Svalbard, Norway. “It was right up near the North Pole, the furthest, most northern settlement in the world,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in islands and isolation, and going to Svalbard in the Arctic on my own was kind of chasing that. I was certainly trying to prove something to myself. I guess it was a new level of perspective. It’s as far away from home as I could get.” She laughs. “Ironically, I got there and ended up just making work about home,” she continues. “I was feeling so far away and just longing for it.”

Earlier this year, Zoe lost her mom, Jan. The months since have been reflective, and she’s found herself drawn back to Marrawah. While at home, Zoe and her brother have been building a studio on the farm. “Ever since I was little, I always wanted to build a little place here,” she says. “I remember doing little drawings and planning it. My brother’s building it for mate’s rates. He’s meticulous. His life is so chaotic, but on site he’s millimeter perfect. It’s been a good chance for us to spend time together.”

As Zoe’s world, her art, and her career expand, she’s increasingly drawn back to where it began. “This place is not only a meaningful home to us now, but a space for healing,” she says. “In between working on the build, we go fishing along the point, trying to get a black-back salmon for dinner. We surf when there’s waves, swim and snorkel in the summer. We watch the sunset from our mom’s favorite spots. Dad walks on the beach almost every day, collecting rubbish, coming back with salty shoes and a backpack full of rope and plastic. I walk the rocks, soaking up the color, the texture. Me and my partner, George, plan our veggie garden and dream of our future here. I often describe being in this place with my family as a deep sense of being exactly where I’m meant to be—a sureness, an unrivaled contentment. I feel ready to be in one place now, ready to be home.”