By Phil Jarratt
The man with the drover’s hat and the white Santa beard sits half-hidden behind his antique music stand, strumming an acoustic guitar.
You almost forget he’s there until that crackly, delicate, beautiful voice breaks into a Neil Young classic or one of his originals. This is the voice of a man who has lived and loved, felt pleasure and pain. But when it comes to Adrian “Ado” Spelt, you don’t know the half of it.
In the early morning line-up at Tea Tree Bay I sometimes hear Ado humming a tune while he waits for a wave. Or coming up behind him as he pushes his board trolley along the coast track, there it is, floating on the breeze, a snatch of song. The point breaks of Noosa are Ado’s playground and his inspiration these days, but at 70 this surfer/musician also finds time to reflect on how he got here.
One morning he paddled up to me and said: “Did I ever tell you about our olive farm in Margaret River?” Well, no, but I paddled for a wave and we never got back to it until the leader of the popular SandFlys band and I caught up for a beer and a yarn while watching the waves last week.
The Spelt family migrated from the Netherlands in 1958 when Ado was seven. They were bound for Brisbane but got off the boat in Perth when Ado’s dad was offered a good job at the Kawana refineries. The family moved around Perth as dad built up his own structural engineering business, but they were never close enough to the beach for surfing to become a passion.
But in third form at John Forrest High, Ado became mates with a guy who surfed and the two would hitch-hike to the waves at Triggs Point every weekend. He caught the bug, but it had to compete with a passion for soccer, which he played semi-professionally. In the end surfing trumped soccer, but by then he was a partner in his father’s business, running large work crews. Still, he found time to become part of the pioneering surf scene at Margaret River in the ‘70s.
He recalls: “It was Yallingup first and then Margs, which was the frontier, and my brother and I decided to push our boundaries and focus on Margs. We got comfortable with a bit of size and power.”
Ado also got comfortable with surfing alongside WA legends like George Simpson and Tony Hardy, but only after Simpson threatened to kill him for paddling out at a “secret” break.
Ado got married and had kids, but at 33 his world was rocked when his wife walked out, leaving him to care for the children. Lonely and depressed, he picked up the guitar he’d been too busy to play in ages, started picking on it and writing songs. And then along came Debbie.
She was the love of his life. He left his dad’s business, bought a block of land at Margaret River and built the steel structure of their house in the car port of his suburban home in Perth. He says: “I trucked it down to the block and every weekend Debbie and I would go down there and work on the house, but we ran out of money. Then one day a guy knocks on the door and says he heard I knew a bit about steel and he has a courier business and needs someone to knock up 120 cages with compartments in them for parcels. I told him I could do it but I had no money, so he set me up with all the machinery that became the basis of our business, Margaret River Steel”.
Margaret River Steel got a contract to rebuild dredging teeth for BHP’s sand-mining operations. The business boomed. He and Deb had 30 people working for them. Ado recalls: “One day I’m sitting in my office and a little guy with a big cowboy hat on walks up to Debbie and he says, ‘Ah need a shed and I need a goddamn good one!’ That was how we met the famous Jack Witkin.”
Witkin was a Russian Jew whose family had moved to Colorado and made a fortune in project home developments. But the mega-millionaire was also a survivalist who wanted to build a fortress from the coming apocalypse of Reagan’s Star Wars America. He’d bought 360 acres of pristine land near Margarets and built high walls around the property to keep out invaders. Says Ado: “Jack was an unusual character, super intelligent, often funny but he could also be a real jerk. But somehow we had a connection.”
At 50 Ado was surfing a remote break along the coast from Margarets when he felt a searing pain go right through his back. He thought he’d been attacked by a shark but he was experiencing a major heart attack. He says: “I managed to get to shore and then I had to get to my car. What was normally a half hour walk took me two and a half hours, and I thought I would die on the way. I was rushed to hospital in Perth where I had a quadruple bypass.”
While he was recovering in hospital Jack Witkin drove up to see him, told him he had to get out of the stress of the steel business and made him an offer. Witkin said: “Ah want you to come and look after the property.” The millionaire said he’d give Ado two weeks to think about it, and started walking out, but before he got to the door a little voice croaked out, “I’ll do it!”
So began the amazing adventure of Olio Bello olive farm and sanctuary. In 2020, food and travel writer John Lethlean wrote in The Australian of Olio Bello: “When he wasn’t planting olive trees, Colorado squillionaire Jack Witkin was planting European pines to provide wind breaks for his discreet varietal groves … His legacy is a most beautiful property of extreme serenity.” But it is also in part the legacy of Adrian and Debbie Spelt.
Says Ado: “I built a house for us right on the big dam and started doing what Jack had asked, which was to develop an olive farm. Jack was back in Colorado but he told me to do it however I wanted and he’d pay the bills. It took me a year to get it together, building a tasting facility and restaurant and a huge production shed. I went to Italy for 11 weeks and learnt how to drive an olive machine and brought that back to WA. When Jack finally got back from Colorado he drove through the front gate and hopped out of his car and started sobbing. He just loved that place so much, but his wife had never wanted to come there when he became obsessive about it, and after about eight years she told him, it’s me or the farm, and he sold it to a bunch of Perth doctors.”
Although Ado and Deb stayed on working the farm for a couple of years, the dream was over. They had planted and looked after part of the 13,000 trees of a dozen different varieties, and learnt how to blend them to create premium extra virgin olive oil. In 2006 their fully organic operation won them the best manufacturer award from the Olive Oil Association of Australia. But the doctors had different ideas about how the property should run, and two years later Ado and Deb threw in threw in the towel and headed for Noosa, a place of Ado’s dreams that he first visited in 1971.
They bought the Grind Café on Gympie Terrace. One Grind became two and the business thrived, but then Debbie contracted cancer. Ado says: “She was in trouble and we had no family here so she needed me to be there for her. We sold the business and bought a food truck that I could operate alone on flexible hours. We kept that right up to Covid.” (Debbie is now in remission and doing very well.)
In 2017 Ado and bass player Chris Lofven formed a four-piece band they called The SandFlys, playing salty surf songs and baby boomer favourites. They were an immediate hit, survived the Covid lockdowns and are busier than ever now, with their current line-up including ace drummer Country Bob Johnson and virtuoso lead guitarist Pete Wells.
Says Ado: “And here I am at 70, playing with some awesome musicians, living the dream. In my life I’ve managed huge working crews, but these three are the toughest I’ve had to deal with (laughs). I keep telling them, we have to have fun or it’s not worth doing. I’ll go back to surfing full-time (more laughs). Surfing is not only my leisure, it’s my inspiration, my social life, my meditation. Music is the same. I just get so much enjoyment out of seeing other people enjoying what we do.”
That’s a two-way street, Ado. No one makes playing music look like more fun than The SandFlys.
