Saving Woolstores: Sylvain Tognelli On The Woolstores Forever Campaign
Images by Bryce Golder and Duncan Wright.
Growing up in Melbourne, Woolstores felt like a spot that was geographically the last spot in Australia.
Located in Fremantle, Western Australia, only a stone’s throw away from Perth, the world's most isolated city, it makes sense that it feels so far away. It’s the long ledge with coping against the brick wall that was in almost every big video of the late 2000s, from Nike SB’s Nothing but the Truth to Lakai’s Fully Flared. It’s the spot that big name pros like Paul Rodriguez and Eric Koston have spent time at while travelling through Perth. Beyond that, for the last thirty years, it has been a Western Australian skateboarding institution, and the meet up spot for the city’s skateboarders.
Currently, the spot is under threat of being taken away due to redevelopments on the building. The skateboarders of Western Australia have come together to set up the Woolstores Forever campaign to save the spot. They’ve been hosting events at the spot, raising awareness for it’s importance to the city, speaking to developers and the council, archiving all the footage ever filmed at the spot, and so much more.
One of the people involved with the campaign is recent WA expat, Sylvain Tognelli, who you may know from his parts in Blueprint’s Make Friends with the Colour Blue and Isle’s Vase, or more recently, from his output in the Atlantic Drift series. Just over a year ago he moved from Paris to WA with his wife and is now a big part of the Woolstores Forever campaign. I spoke to Sylvain about the campaign, the situation with developers, and what people outside of WA can do to help them save the iconic spot.
I think most people know about Woolstores and would’ve seen it in the plethora of videos it’s been in over the last thirty years, but I think the best way to start this is to introduce Woolstores for people who don’t know about the history of the spot. What is the history of Woolstores?
For me, I can only talk about it from an outsider perspective. Growing up skating in Europe, I would see Woolies in videos. I never knew where the spot was, I always thought it was in America. Then, the first time I found out where it was Wieger [Van Wageningen] told me that he skated this amazing ledge in Australia, and I don’t think I connected the dots that it was Woolies until the Nike SB video Nothing but the Truth came out. It always felt like this very far away, hidden gem. It didn’t feel like all these other spots where you knew where they were like Hollywood 16 or the Carlsbad Gap, there was always this mystery to it.
Yeah, even for me growing up in Melbourne it always felt like the last spot in the country.
Yeah, it feels that way when you’re in Melbourne. It seems so far away.
So yeah, what is happening with the spot?
About a year ago, a lady that works for the developer got in contact with Rowan [White] and a few other skaters and said they are going to redevelop the building, but they want to be considerate to the skaters. The developer who bought the building is pretty progressive and they pride themselves in trying to do the best by the community. She approached a couple of the guys, and they had a few discussions, there wasn’t that much that was set in stone. It was a lot of discussions about what the skaters want and need, but it was hard for those guys as they didn’t know how much power they had.
Then in January, the developers came back with two proposals for Woolstores, which were either they move the spot and put it somewhere else, or they keep half of it and have shops there, where on the lease they have to agree that they are okay with people skating the spot. Rowan sent me a message with the two proposals and was like what do you think, and I was like none of them are really good. You’re only one shop owner away from not being able to skate there. Then building it somewhere else, basically you’re building a skatepark that looks like Woolstores.
I had this weird reaction where it is like, this is the only good street spot in all of Western Australia which is four times the size of France and it might just go. That alone could kill the community, you don’t have a place to meet anymore or where you can spend all day skating. I just thought surely there is something else we can do; I knew about the Long Live Southbank campaign, and they saved the spot. So, we decided to reach out to those guys and Gustav Edén from Malmö, who is a skateboarder who works for the City of Malmö. Those guys were really amazing; they were able to help us and give us another way to approach this.
Where did you guys go from there?
After speaking to them I was really inspired to keep on pushing and wanted to inject some of that energy into us all. Then we started speaking to more people who have been doing things in WA for skating for a while like Brett Margaritis and Ben Bowring. We had a couple of phone calls and pretty quickly everyone’s vibe changed from ‘It is what it is’ to ‘We can fight for this’. It wasn’t just because it is a good skate spot, but it is because we truly believe it is an asset for the city and the community at large. It is this amazing sporting facility, that attracts people from all over the world. There is value in it for everyone, more than just the skaters.
From there Rowan got into gear and when he gets onto something he can be insanely productive. He does the job of like five people, he also has a full-time job as a doctor. Now he has started to work on the Woolstores Forever campaign. At the beginning it was mostly just Rowan and I trying to do something and then a few others came in. Rowan has been doing most of the work, especially being in Fremantle it’s easier for him to talk to the council and everything. Ben Bowring created the Western Australia Skate Association in 2020 and was nice enough to let us use it as the non-for-profit organisation we could run the Woolstores Forever campaign. Through that Ben’s been getting involved and it has been amazing in so many ways. It has been good to have people from different generations of Woolstores and having the different point of views. Having the older guys involved has helped so much with having their connections too. We’ve found so many experts to advise us from friends of friends which has been really helpful.
It’s funny because if you externally look at the Woolstores Forever campaign it looks like it is only the skaters who are fighting to keep the spot, but I feel like most of the people getting involved and giving us really good advice aren’t skaters. They are people who care about the community and the cultural heritage of Fremantle.
What have been the main concerns of the council and developers?
The main thing that we know is that skateboarding at the spot in the development is something that is only a possibility. The issue that we saw that when we met with the developers, is they saw skateboarding as a problem to be solved. From our perspective, skateboarding at the Woolstores is an asset to the community, it’s a plus. So, you need to try and keep it, not just because of the skaters but because it is better if you can keep the spot as it is. I think the main thing that we see as a challenge is to show the city and the developers that it is not a problem, it is something that is already there and is thriving. Something that will bring life to the redevelopment. We are trying to tell the developers that we should do something together where everyone is happy and trust us because you guys are going to come to us in five years and say you guys were right. We have that confidence because we have all these examples from those redevelopments including skateboarding around the world going well.
What we realised is that looking at Woolstores and other spots around the world and thought ‘Why is it so special?’. Then we thought about the uniqueness of the spot. It is so extremely rare to find that long of a perfect ledge. If you would bring someone like Mark Suciu to Woolies he would probably be able to film a six or seven trick line on the one ledge. I can’t think of any other spots in the world where someone could film a line that long on a single ledge.
Yeah, it is such a unique spot. Over the last ten years it feels like we are coming to a point where almost every meet up spot and every plaza around the world are being redeveloped or demolished to stop skateboarders using the space. How important is it for the skateboarding community to have these spaces where it is safe for them to skate and meet up with their friends?
Yeah, it’s important to make that clear that people also don’t come to Woolstores just to skate. It’s the community. People come to the spot to hang out with their friends. You want to be able to access the space always and it not to be a spot where you can only skate every so often.
I saw this in Paris with Republique, the city built that plaza to create a community of skateboarders. It has been around for around ten years now. It is in pretty much the centre of Paris, and they had issues there with not a great crowd hanging around there. It was all gravel and then the city came up with the solution of bringing skateboarders into the space. They redeveloped it into a concrete plaza and now it has become such a lively place where people want to go hang out and skateboarders from all over the world come there to skate.
What is the ideal situation that you guys are pushing for?
Ideally, we are looking for a way where they can redevelop building where we can keep skating the whole ledge whenever we want. We want to have it in a way where we are co-designing the spot with the developers to make sure our insights are being heard. I really believe there is still space for something positive.
A bunch of other cool stuff has come up from this too, you guys are running events every Sunday at the spot.
That was this guy Jeb, who has an organisation called Whereabouts Skateboarding. They do events and lessons; Jem already had these events planned before we started the campaign and then reached out to us and asked if we wanted to do it together to get more attention on the campaign. So yeah, that was three Saturdays of events. It has been working out really well, it has all been very organic. We are still only just starting on the campaign. Rowan has been doing a lot to collect the archival footage and Morgan [Campbell] is getting a lot of archival photos. The way it started is we had people talking then got radio and TV opportunities. It has been great.
What else have you guys got planned?
Rowan is going to work on an exhibition across the street at this venue called DADAA. He wants to do a big retrospective of Woolstores, not just with the skateboarding but the graffiti history around the building. It will probably be later in the year. Hopefully we can do more events between now and then and keep it going. It is a long road so it’s best to try not to force things and try to build something with the community.
What can people who are outside of the Fremantle and Perth area do to help?
The most helpful things people can do is keep up to date on the Instagram @woolstoresforever and if anyone would like to donate you can donate on the website hellowasa.com.au. Also, if anyone reading this has any expertise in heritage law and architecture, please feel free to reach out to us, more help and perspectives are always welcome.