Layne Beachley

Layne Beachley (b. 1972), surfer and business woman, is a seven- times world champion professional surfer. As a girl growing up in tough circumstances in the Sydney coastal suburb of Manly, Beachley excelled in several sports, but she elected to focus on surfing at the age of sixteen. With a negligible amateur record, she turned professional in 1989, and by the time she was twenty she was ranked number six in the world. Over the course of the 1990s she persevered with her training regime through debilitating illness to triumph at the World Championship in 1998. She won the same title in the next five consecutive years, between 1999 and 2003, and took a seventh title in 2006, her seventeenth year on the tour. Her other women’s surfing records include riding the biggest wave ever, gaining the most world championship tour victories (twenty-nine) and earning the most money on the circuit. In 2003, when she was Australian Female Athlete of the Year, she founded the Aim for the Stars Foundation for the academic, community and cultural improvement of young Australian women. The following year, she was included on the list of Australia’s Most Beautiful Exports. She was inducted into the USA Surfers’ Hall of Fame and earned a stone on the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame in 2006. That year, she initiated the richest event in women’s surfing history, the Havaianas Beachley Classic at Manly. Inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 2011, in 2013 she was ranked third in the list of Australia’s top 100 sportswomen of all time. Having retired from professional surfing in 2008, Beachley is now a lively speaker and ambassador for various charities and causes including her own Aim for the Stars Foundation, the National Breast Cancer Foundation and Planet Ark.

Petrina Hicks has spent more than a decade making series of photographs of individuals that strain the definition of portraiture, finding, it has been said, ‘beauty in perceived imperfections and render[ing] idealised beauty strange’. Commissioned to portray Layne Beachley, Hicks said that she chose to make a stark representation of the champion as she ‘wanted her eyes to be the central focus… I realised these were where all her strength is revealed.’ During the shoot in Hicks’s Bondi apartment, Beachley observed that in her experience, ‘whales look you right in the eye, but sharks stare straight through you’.