Walking into Guntha Rhon’s surfboard factory in Ballina’s industrial estate, you shuffle through foam shavings, past burly men, coated in a thin layer of white dust, across floors thick with dried resin, and past rows and rows of boards – everywhere boards – in various stages of becoming. It is a place of organised chaos. The glassing bay is clean, if not tidy, because it has to be. The dunny, well that’s another story. In the fourth bay along, you might not expect to see a young woman working, cap backwards, planer in hand. But Hannah Mangnall, of Ways Away Surfboards, has been a consistent, if unlikely member of the factory community for the past four years, and has been shaping boards for longer still.
While shaping a surfboard might…
