Iconic surf town under siege from thieves as young as eight as Ugg boot mastermind recounts three am home invasion

"Young children, aged between eight and 15, out late at night, entering homes with machetes and axes, stealing cars and money.”

The octogenarian mastermind behind the sheepskin boot, Shane Stedman, also a top-tier swordsman, surfboard shaper and recipient of an Order of Australia medal it has to be added, was robbed last week by a gang of teen thieves inside his Crescent Head house. 

His new Landcruiser Sahara 300, $150,000 of almost-unbreakable Japanese muscle with only ten thousand k’s on the clock and which was getting set-up to take him and his gal Jenny on Australia-wide adventures was stolen, thrashed and then burned. 

Read about that here. 

Crescent Head, if you didn’t know, has a weak and unchallenging, but very pretty point break. It is real popular with longboarders and Great White sharks, sometimes both at the same time. There are occasionally good beachbreaks although it is verboten to speaketh the name of that Hossegor-like stretch.

The joint’s location twenty clicks off the main highway and the hellhole rural town of Kempsey, that joint gives me Wake in Fright vibes every time I fly through it, meant that, for a long time, it was spared the crime that comes from hopeless people living hopeless lives in hopeless and bleak little towns.

“It wasn’t that long ago we wouldn’t lock up, the windows were open, you’d never think about locking up at night. Times have changed. If people have got dogs they poison the dogs, if people have got security lights or cameras they unscrew ‘em, or paint ‘em black,” Shane tells me.

“Now I’ve got this place locked like Fort Knox! You’d need a jackhammer to get in here!”

Sleepy little surf town like Crescent Head and nearby South-West Rocks where Chris Davo’s life ended, has been labelled an easy mark by kiddy crooks egged on, says Shane, by “elders who are telling the kids, ‘These white buggers stole your country. Go and steal from them.’”

“Some of the stories you hear are horrendous,” Kempsey Shire Council deputy mayor Julie Coburn told the press.

“Children have always been involved in petty crimes, but we are talking about young children, aged between eight and 15, out late at night, entering homes with machetes and axes, stealing cars and money.”

Shane Stedman reckons of the two crims who busted into his joint, two were about twelve with an older man telling ’em what to take and what to leave.

All of ‘em in hoods and wearing gloves.

“They’re quite innovative,” says Shane. “If they put their minds to doing good, they’d help the world instead of hindering it. If they want to do something in Crescent they go down to South-West Rocks to cause a disturbance and then when the cops go there they know they’re free to come to Crescent and do what they want. They’re not silly. Just sad. I feel sorry for ‘em to be honest.”