A Supreme Court blood feud.
The four-time runner-up to the world surfing title and star of the compelling is-he-gay-or-is-he-ain’t surf film Scream In Blue (he would later clarify he dreams about women not men), is locked in a Supreme Court battle over who owns a Sydney terrace house worth two million bucks.
Bondi-born Cheyne Horan, sixty years old and a pioneer of professional surfing, is fighting a “trailblazing female barrister” over who gets the spoils of a house owned by his grandparents, Albert and Alice Horan.
See, Cheyne and his brother Stephen claim their grandma wrote in her 1974 will that she wanted the joint to stay in the family. And, since Cheyne and his bro are her last surviving blood relatives, they get the cash from its sale.
They’re fighting the executer of the will, Sydney lawyer Janet Coombs, a member of the Order of Australia and daughter of Australia’s first-ever governor of the Reserve Bank. A gun, you might say.
It gets weird, as these things tend to do.
A couple of months before Alice died, alcoholic and riddled with liver cancer, two new wills were drawn up, leaving the property to the grandma’s other kid, Cheyne’s uncle John Horan.
John, who is described in court docs as brain injured, suffering a mental condition, violent and “incapable of looking after himself or his affairs”, died in 2016, leaving the now dilapidated house to a Christian charity that no longer exists.
Ms Coombs was named as the executor and trustee of John Horan’s will.
Cheyne and bro want the wills deemed invalid leaving ‘em the house.
Etc and ad infinitum.
Families, eh?
(Read this classic interview with Cheyne, by Matt Warshaw and via the Encylopedia of Surfing, here.)