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Blogs by Dave Oliver

Chairman
Written on 12 Mar : 10:47
[ Dave Oliver Blogs ]
At the weekend I did a seminar and at the end one of the questions I was asked is how did I get started in the martial arts. The answer is I was living in Australia in Perth on the West Coast where I had emigrated to work as a bricklayer in 1968. I went on assisted passage, you paid £10 and the Australian government paid the rest of the fare, so we were known as ten pound poms to the locals. I was renting a house with six other guys who had gone out there to work, one of them was a guy called Michael Deeken from Bristol who I was in the same bricklaying gang, one Friday after work we went up to Freemantle to play pool in a bar, 2 guys were playing, so Deeken put some money on the side of the table to say we would play next but when they finished 2 Australian guys walked up and knocked the money off the table and said we are playing next. They obviously knew we were poms by our accent, broad Bristolian and semi Brumi. Deeken said I don't think so and the guy squared upto him and said who's going to stop us, with that Deeken kicked him in the head with a turning kick and sparked him out, much to my amazement and everyone elses in the bar. Afterwards he told me he was a black belt in Wado-Ryu karate and he was going to start a class, so I said count me in, I trained with him for 6 months before returning to the UK where I took up tkd and the rest as they say is history.