When Dion eventually arrived on the Gold Coast from Tasmania he was immediately enrolled in Australia’s premiere high performance surfing academy – the same one that’s produced Joel Parkinson and Mick Fanning among others and which was then run by Mick’s current coach, Phil Mcnamara. It was here he first fell under the corrupting influence of Paul Fisher, the renowned Gold Coast wild man who would introduce this quiet kid from Tasmania to the world of partying, boozing and women. It’s remained his achilles heal to this day.

“Some of the worst decisions I’ve made in my life have been when I’ve either been drunk or hungover,”

he says.
Just recently Dion stood his father up after they’d made plans to go surfing at Stradbroke Island together. Surfing with his dad is something he rarely gets the chance to do these days due to his demanding travel commitments but after getting talked into a few beers at the pub with Creed Mctaggart he ended up chasing “some house party, which turned into six or so more drinks” and slept through his alarm. He woke at 10 am to a dozen missed calls and the realisation he’d just stood his father up.
“We never get to surf together anymore,” he laments. “I was like, fuck, I’m 28, I can’t still be doing shit like this. I was so depressed.”
Following the release of several high profile video parts, including a section in the Modern Collective alongside the biggest names of the time, Dane Reynolds, Jordy Smith, Dusty Payne and Mitch Coleborn, Dion went AWOL from surfing. Over a period spanning about two years, he spent time living in a loft in New York, did a stint in Stockholm, moved to Bondi, and basically avoided the surf scene and surfing in general. He also partied a lot. “My surfing definitely suffered,” he admits today, though he refuses see it as a detriment to his career.
“You’re opening your mind and experiencing so many things you don’t usually get to experience. In surfing, the places you generally go aren’t places like Stockholm or New York and there is so much inspiration there and so many creative people and that stuff can help you exponentially to explore other avenues and see what other people are doing in other cultures or aspects of similar sub-cultures, and then bringing them back into our sport, because if you look within the sport there is a lot of inspiration and stuff like that, but only to a certain extent. When you start to look outside it and get influenced by all these other things the opportunities are just endless for the things that can be done. All those experiences definitely helped that happen for sure,” he says.
The time spent outside surfing, he says, has given him a fresh perspective on what he does. It’s as if it gave him the chance to float above it and look down on it rather than exist within it. And if there is one thing that has defined his career so far it’s been his continued ability to convey a side of surf culture that is at once familiar but also brimming with the colour, excitement and technological abundance that characterises this modern age.
After breakfast, while chattering along a dusty backroad in my van looking for waves, Dion rather abruptly asks me whether I have a philosophy. “You know, like words to live by?”
I do and tell him before asking what his is.
Dion ponders for moment, looking out the window, before answering. “I just think that there are enough opportunities in the world that if you’re motivated and not lazy, you can do what you want to do. You can make it happen,” he says.