It's a long way down to the water below - higher than an Olympic platform - and framed by some very nasty rocks.

But as a young fellow growing up up in suburban Kings Meadows in northern Tasmania, on summer weekends Chic Henry would dive from the bridge on many occasions, together with a bunch of his "mad mates", as he called them.

"The day was coming when one of us would have a problem and it was me doing my best and most stylish swan dive when a gust of wind blowing down the gorge flipped me over," he recalled in his autobiography I Remember One Time.

"I guess it was my years of diving crashes that taught me to hit the water in a floppy way. No pain except for the initial thump on the water.

"I remember everyone looking down at me with great concern.

"No problems. Just another day."

And that one incident, in essence, sums up the crash-or-crash-through style which predominated the mischievous and rambunctious life of Canberra's best known promoter and the "father" of Summernats, Anthony Robert "Chic" Henry.

His credo, most appropriately, was "never let fear hold you back". He was a man with literally a thousand anecdotes and every one of them true, if a little embellished for effect.

Chic Henry died aged 75 on April 14 after a lengthy bout with cancer, his loss mourned not just across the Australian street machine fraternity but in the the US, too, where he travelled and made many friends.

Born and raised in Tasmania, even from his primary school years racing billy carts down steep Quarantine Road risking life, limb and significant gravel rash, Chic Henry's life was like a Boy's Own adventure novel.

He was a tall and skinny teenager whose frame quickly filled out as he took energetically to swimming, diving, water polo and surfing. Hours in the water made him very fit.

Somehow, too, probably through his infectious, devil-may-care personality, he straddled the great divide between being a "clubbie" - a member of the surf club fraternity - and being a dyed-in-the wool surfer, who traditionally disparaged the clubbies.

Never the academic, Chic Henry's scholastic life was dominated by sports and activity; he was the school swimming champion, popular with the girls and of course, just loved cars.

If one person could be roughly identified as being the trigger for his lifelong car passion it was Launceston's Wayne Mahnken, roughly the same age, a self-taught engineering whiz who became a Tasmanian motor racing legend of the 1960s and 70s. Mahnken built the fastest turbocharged EH Holden in Australia and would terrorise any interstate drivers seeking to take home trophies from Tasmania's Symmons Plains or Baskerville raceways.

Chic Henry joined the Army at 18 and trained as an apprentice blacksmith, digging trenches, throwing live grenades, marching about and whenever he could grabbing a leave pass, then racing off in his Austin A40 to hunt for surf and woo girls.

While in the Army, he married his first wife, Doreen, and was subsequently posted to Sydney, then Townsville. A daughter, Angela, was born. The local Savannah dragway was like a magnet for Chic Henry who bought a VE Valiant, which he modified for competition. Drag racing quickly became his particular motorsport passion.

While there, he trained as a clearance diver. After years of diving and swimming, he had built up such a formidable lung capacity that, during the blow-in-the-tube testing phase, he "blew the needle off the graph". Although it was the time of the Vietnam War and he had applied for active service, Chic's name was never called.

"I can say I wish I had actively served for a country I'm so damn proud of," he wrote later.

Discharged after nine years in the army, he took on a number of jobs: construction welder, lifeguard and funeral director, anything to fund his obsession with socialising, drag racing and fast cars in general, which he mechanically massaged with the help of his many friends, and raced.

The national modified car scene at the time was a fractured one, with hot-rodders in one corner, drag racers in another and the rest falling somewhere in between. Chic formed his own Brisbane-based street machine club, the Broadway Knights, and welcomed all.

"We had people with a big variety of cars, from Falcon GTs to custom-painted Mitsubishi utes and that pleased me because I think that no matter what sort of car someone drove, hanging out like this was simply having fun with our cars," he said.

It was that ethos, together with his gregarious energy and an ability to engage affably with people from all walks of life, which was to later make the Summernats street machine festival such a massive success.

Summernats was Chic Henry's crowning glory, even though there was precious little profit from the event during its formative years. The event half-stumbled into Canberra in 1988 because as the-then national director of the Australian Street Machine Federation, he identified Exhibition Park as such an ideal location.

As event promoter, Chic Henry described his commitment to the first Summernats as "a bit like going over Niagara Falls".

Around the same time he made another big commitment. Amicably divorced from Doreen for many years, Chic Henry met and fell in love with Debra, soon to be his second wife.

"I suppose it was time for me to lift my game," he admitted after he met her. The pair were married in Sydney and moved to Canberra, with a garage to contain Chic's beloved 1962 Chevrolet Impala always part of the arrangement.

Through its ups and downs, close shaves with bankruptcy, outrageous stunts and shows, accusations of sexism and so-called "toxic masculinity", Summernats thrived under Chic Henry's decades of stewardship.

The event is now owned and run by Out There Productions.

Chic is survived by his wife, Debra, son Kody and daughters Georgia and Angela.

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