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Dion Agius, The Man From The Year 2000

 

France is a curious country, where staunch secularism is at the heart of public life, and yet where statues of Christ on crosses loom with sinister regularity in every village.  The Big Guy is easily deceived by eating songbirds under tablecloths, and yet here, we see Him conspicuously privy to Dion’s passerine tail waft. 

As a child Dion had grown up on a 100 acre property in coastal Tasmania (the island off the southern tip of Australia). He lived there until the age of 13 in what amounted to one of the most isolated upbringings imaginable. He was also an avid bodyboarder as a kid though his father Mario, a second generation Maltese immigrant, was a surfer and adamant his son learned to stand up.
When Dion did eventually arrive in the world of high profile professional surfing the wide-eyed naivety of his rural upbringing was still very much in tact. It gave him a unique perspective of this strange new world, which, when combined with his filmmaking skills, his learnings from the original ‘personality pro’ Ozzie Wright and the advice of the straight shooting CJ Hobgood, gave him a zany idea. What if he was to make a video diary of his experiences as a young, travelling, professional surfer?

Since those early seminal films like Morning of the Earth and Crystal Voyager Dion felt the surfing world had been left rather thin in terms of showing people what it was really like

to be a big-time surfer. By giving the world unadulterated access into his life he’d be giving the world a window into professional surfing post the year 2000. Globe agreed and Dion.TV was born – the first ever blog produced and run by a pro surfer. Part travelogue, part hi-fi surfing showcase and part reality TV show, Dion.TV was a huge hit with surf fans. Today his idea has been replicated thousands of times over, with everyone Dane Reynolds to Mick Fanning running their own little media channels. Dion no longer does. The internet has changed, he says, and unless you can produce A-grade content for free people don’t really want to know about it. “I just changed the way I was thinking about online content. We were putting out non-stop clips and content and putting it together so quick and I just stopped caring about it and I think other people did too. I look around now and I think people really want good quality stuff for free online. And there’s not many people doing that,” he says. Instead he focuses everything into producing just three or four pieces of well thought out content each year. Some of that work has gone onto become modern surf culture classics, stuff like his Electric Blue Abu Dhabi wave pool experiment (directed by Joe G) and his Wes Anderson-esque Mexico surrealism clip (also directed by Joe G). On top of he independently produced and funded the film, Nti Sheeto (feat. Creed Mctaggart and Ozzie Wright among others) and landed a lusciously curated section in Globe’s latest film Year Zero. With nothing more than a fresh perspective on surfing and some good old fashioned go-get Dion has turned his humble talents into a bankable career. More importantly, as he turns 28, what he calls the “career graveyard” for free surfers, his is looking as healthy as ever.

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