In January 1973, I arrived in Sydney, NSW, Australia, the culmination of an 11-month journey overland through Asia with my girlfriend Heather and friend Richard. We had crossed Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan by rail and bus, and then travelled through the legendary Khyber Pass into Pakistan, and spent a month exploring Northern India and I made the first of what was to become  a total of 14 visits to Nepal.

We eventually flew from what was then Calcutta to Bangkok, continued our travels through Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia before eventually arriving in Australia in August 1972. It was an incredible journey and I am still friends with, and from time to time  still meet up with, people with whom I travelled and met en route.

6 months behind me, Tony and Maureen Wheeler made the same journey and wrote two iconic guidebooks ‘Across Asia on the Cheap’ and ’South East Asia on a Shoestring’ which proved to be the foundation for the Lonely Planet Publishing Empire, surely the world’s most popular travel guidebooks.

And ten years later, I used my organizational skills and travel experience honed on that overland journey to establish Casterbridge Tours with my wife Sharron, which grew to become one of the world’s leading Educational Tour Operators.

I kept a very detailed journal of my 1972 travels through Asia which I finally had typed up to over 400 pages of A4 about 12 years ago, and still hope to have time to edit into a book before I die. But memorable and influential as the journey was, and indeed my affection for Asia is such that I have been a frequent visitor all my life and for the last 14 years spent half of each year living in Asia, it was my time in Australia that was to prove the making of me and have a profound experience on the rest of my life.

After arriving in Australia, I secured a job as an assistant prospecting hand, camping under the stars and taking samples from dry river beds as part of a team of four in the remote and rugged Kununurra region of Northwest Australia. We were looking for traces of copper at a time when there was only an unsurfaced road to get us to this isolated region with a unique and rugged beauty. We had no topographical maps, just satellite photos to tell us where we were.

It was perhaps the best job I ever had and I am still friends with the young (then) geologist who was my boss. But when the rains came, I retreated to Perth, and after a thankfully brief job lagging hospital insulation pipes with asbestos (I was not aware of the dangers of asbestosis at that time), I hitchhiked across the dry and dusty Nullarbor Plain to the Eastern States of Australia and eventually ended up in Sydney, without doubt one of the world’s most spectacularly located cities.

When I saw an advertisement for a position as a Geography teacher, I put on the best clothes that I had accumulated in the previous 11 months and went for an interview at Sydney Grammar School which I had assumed was a state school for academically bright boys. The headmaster Alistair Mackerras was a member of one of Australia’s most famous families and his 4 brothers had all risen to the top of their chosen professions including Charles Mackerras, Director of Music for the English National Opera.

I obviously posed a challenge for Mr. Mackerras who desperately needed to recruit a 5^th Geography teacher for his faculty. I possessed two university degrees including one in Geography and had worked as a Geography teacher in London so obviously I was not stupid? (some will say the verdict is still out on that one!) but he was far from convinced and so he told me

‘I think we can offer you the position but ………………………. you will need to smarten up and do something about your appearance’

Obviously, the leather jacket from the Istanbul Bazaar combined with shoes, shirt and tie that I had purchased from Coles (The Australian equivalent of Woolworths) on my way to the interview were not as impressive a combination as I had thought!

I accepted the position but it was only on the first day that I fully appreciated why a smart appearance was desired. It turned out Sydney Grammar School was not a state school for the most academically gifted but one of the most prestigious fee paying (private) schools in Australia! This was quite a contrast to the Inner City School where I had previously taught  in London and where the ambulance came to the school several times in the year I taught there. Was it 9 times for students involved in fights and 3 times for teachers attacked by students?

If truth be known I only planned to take the job at Sydney Grammar School for one term (semester) and then I planned to return to the Bush, or more specifically to the Kununurra region where I was told the place on the prospecting team was mine to reclaim if I wanted to return.

However, as it turned out I stayed in Sydney teaching at Sydney Grammar School for 4 years February 1973 until August 1976, and they proved to be formative years that shaped the rest of my life to this very day.

I did not find the position demanding which ultimately was a reason that significantly contributed to my decision to depart and resume travelling and then establish my own business. However although my teaching was far from inspiring,  most of the students were receptive to my efforts and there were no discipline problems. I was able to establish and coach a football (soccer) program and Sydney was a beautiful and spectacular city to live in.

It is human nature to remember the best parts of bygone days and to look back with rose tinted glasses but I often think that those years in Sydney were the best of my life in many ways, although maybe I did not fully appreciate it at the time.

But what really distinguished these years in Sydney for me was that it was there where I discovered and then developed my entrepreneurial skills.

I had come from the UK, a country that was historically class ridden. The working classes were expected to know their place and the upper classes had a sense of entitlement. Of course, this is generalization and true to some extent in most countries but without doubt I grew up from humble beginnings in a society where everyone was aware of their class.

And understandably, the working classes often displayed resentment towards those who had wealth irrespective of whether it was inherited or acquired by hard work.

However, I found Australia to be far more egalitarian and there was a different mindset.

Whereas the attitude in the UK was often one of resentment with comments akin to:

‘Why has that bastard got a Rolls Royce’

But in contrast I found a much more positive ‘can do’ attitude in Australia where I was more likely to hear:

‘Look at that Vietnamese guy, he’s only been in the country 10 years and he already has a Rolls Royce. If I work hard maybe I can get one as well’

I loved the ‘Can Do’ mentality that has stayed with me all my life and to this day I am never inclined to take No for an answer and always look for a way to make things happen, rather than wait for them to happen. These were all traits and characteristics of my personality that come directly from my time  in Australia.

American’s think they are passionate about their sports but they are rank beginners in comparison with Australians, who, more than any other nationality on the planet love their sports and are also compulsive gamblers. People always said if two Australians saw two flies on a window they would have a bet on which of the flies flew away first!

My daily bus journey to Sydney Grammar School from the beachside suburb of Coogee where I lived, passed the beautiful Randwick Racecourse and I started following the race results in the newspapers and then going to the regular horse race meetings most weekends. As a result, I developed an interest and passion for gambling which has now been my main social pastime for over 50 years although I have hardly had a bet on horses for over 40 years. I bet on most sports but primarily football and tennis.

In Australia, I combined my entrepreneurial skills and newly found interest in gambling with spectacular results, and to this day, I will never tolerate any criticism of Australia or Australians because the 4 years I spent living and working in Sydney were the absolute making of me.

It started one day in the staff room at Sydney Grammar School when a fellow teacher Don Schumacher (who I visited in Tasmania 8 years ago – see here), knowing I was interested in horse racing, showed me a piece of paper

Look what I bought Mike, only $25 and I hope it’s going to make me some money’

It consisted of 4 sentences

1 Restrict your bets to races for two-year old horses competing in  distances of 1200 metres or less at either Randwick or Rosehill Racecourses.

2 Restrict your selections to horses that are drawn in the number 2, 3 or 4 barriers.

3 Restrict your selection to horses whose last 3 starts were all improving and who were placed in the first three places at their last start e.g. 7 5 2, or 5,4,3 or 4,2,1

4 Bet $10 to win if the horse is ridden by one of the top 5 jockeys in the latest Sydney Jockeys table.

‘You paid $25 for those 4 sentences?’ I said

But I was thinking I am sure I could research and come up with something better.

And perhaps people would be willing to buy it from me for $15?

And that started a course of action that was to shape the course of my life from thereafter!

For the next two months, I spent most of my spare time in the NSW library analysing the last 10 years trotting results. Trottting is the Australian term for Harness Racing or Pacing – where horses race pull a small sulky or two wheeled cart which seats the jockey.

I eventually found some patterns which stood the test of time, printed up some promotional fliers and launched the release of ‘Trotterific Betting Systems’ for all those punters (betters) who were fed up with another losing day at the races!

I recruited three of my 6^th formers (17- and 18-year-old students) and positioned them outside the exit of the next Race Meeting at Randwick and from this rather inauspicious beginning my business career was launched!

Many of my fellow teachers thought I was crazy trying to sell a Betting System and others thought the parents who sent their sons to one of Australia’s most prestigious schools did not expect them to be recruited by a teacher to hand out promotional leaflets to disgruntled punters!

Interestingly enough, those parents who were aware of what I was doing thought it was good for their sons to go out and work for a couple of hours and earn $10 rather than just expect their parents to provide a new Hi-Fi for their bedroom!

Teaching at Sydney Grammar School was ‘an easy gig’ and I did not find it challenging. I had plenty of spare time and when I found there was a positive response from gamblers who were willing to purchase my ‘Trotterific’ betting system I was soon back in the library newspaper archives researching another staking plan which I called ‘Double Bonanza’!

And so it continued!

I had plenty of time over the next three years to research additional systems or staking plans. I rented firstly Post Office Boxes and then vacant rooms in older almost derelict office buildings purely for a mailing address. A client several hundred miles away was always likely to be impressed by a prestigious central Sydney address and was not likely to know it was an empty office in a run down and dilapidated commercial building!

So when school finished at around 3pm, I would walk around the city centre checking the city centre mail boxes and offices I was renting and then hire a taxi for two or three hours to check mail boxes that I was renting in the suburbs of Sydney. Then I would go home and open all the envelopes I had collected, remove the cheques, and make sure I sent the right system to the right punter. The next day at lunch time, I would be visiting various building societies and banks to bank the cheques and the main post office to mail systems out to those who had purchased the same.

There were other vendors researching and selling systems and I would regularly approach them suggesting we exchange our mailing lists (somehow my best clients always often seemed to disappear from my lists before I passed them on!), and after two years, what started as a bit of fun and a hobby was a very profitable business and I had a mailing list of over 5,000 gamblers throughout Australia.

At one stage I even rented an office in Adelaide and would fly there once a week for several weeks to collect the mail! Adelaide was a two-and-a-half-hour flight away from Sydney but I thought it was worth the expense because a new system seller appearing from a different city might appeal to my clients!

So every few months I would research a new staking plan, go to a local agency who would type up labels and spend a couple of evenings sticking address labels  and stamps to the envelopes and stuffing the envelope with a promotional leaflet for a new betting system from an always new address.

Eight years later, my wife Sharron and myself began doing exactly the same when mailing our educational tour brochure to 80,000 teachers in the USA and we did this by hand for 16 years before we finally used a more impersonal mailing agency. Another lesson I learnt in Australia and put to good use!

I was also writing a regular newsletter with analysis and suggestions for gamblers and both my mother (who made several visits to Australia from the UK) and girlfriend Heather were helping me on a near full time basis stuffing envelopes for another mailing and visiting mailboxes to collect cheques.

And when I finally resigned from Sydney Grammar School in 1976 to resume my travelling and eventually return to the UK, I remember one of my colleagues in the staff room commenting

‘We will miss you, Michael. Who is going to manage the staff football team? Do you remember when you began. We all thought you were a crazy Pommie (Englishman) when you tried to make money selling your crazy betting systems’

Surprisingly, I was a model of restraint and resisted the temptation to say that there were now three of us  working on my crazy betting systems and I probably earning 3 or 4 times more from my hobby than my teaching!

Selling beer to drinkers, cigarettes to smokers or betting systems to gamblers is not difficult because sadly many of the buyers are compulsive so in that regard, I am not particularly proud of what I did but it certainly honed my entrepreneurial skills.

When I look back on those years it is almost with a sense of amusement because I developed an interest in gambling, researched it in great detail for my own benefit and then made a business out of it.

I was to do the same with my love of travel where I parlayed it into a world class travel company (I am not exaggerating – we received 16 offers from 4 continents when we sold Casterbridge Tours) and when I started to collect Art Deco sculpture, I was so enthusiastic about my new interest that I would often rent space at Antique Fairs to sell some of my pieces to other collectors.

And when people know I am a gambler it is not unusual for someone to tell me

‘I have a friend who has a great system…………………’

I usually roll my eyes and respond

‘Trust me – there is only one system that is guaranteed to work. And that is to sell systems to people stupid enough to buy them!’

All the systems I sold ‘worked’ but of course anyone can make a set of rules to fit past results and there is no guarantee that pattern will repeat itself in the future. Some do and some do not but at least my systems and conservative staking plans were designed to introduce some order, structure and discipline that most gamblers desperately need as so many gamblers  are often tempted to ‘chase’ their losses with often disastrous results.

And when I say my years in Sydney were to change my life I was not joking.

In 1977, I returned to the UK and used a lot of the money I had made selling systems in Australia to buy a nice house jointly with my mother where she could live in comfort. She was then in her mid-60s and living in a damp infested hovel she and my father had bought in 1963 for $3000. It had taken them until they were almost 50 to save up the deposit to buy their own house!

And together with my future wife Sharron, I used the remainder of my accumulated earnings from Australia to purchase a closed down Cottage Hospital from the UK Government which we called Casterbridge Hall and converted it to Residential Study Centre for American students and school groups who wanted to visit the UK to learn about English History and Literature.

And again, I used another research tool developed  in Australia with my betting systems when we spent 6 weeks in the British Museum Library researching the identities of wealthy Americans with teenage children who would be potential clients.

Between 1979 and 2011, Casterbridge Hall evolved into Casterbridge Tours, the first Travel Company in the UK to earn the prestigious Queens Award for Enterprise, and one of the world’s leading Educational Tour Operators providing Educational Tours throughout the world for schools and universities in the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa and the UK.

Along the way, we purchased homes in Switzerland and Canada, and in 2011, we sold Casterbridge Tours to the USA’s biggest Educational Tour Operator and I promptly opened an Art Gallery to display my Mountain Photography. I also invested much of the proceeds from the sale of Casterbridge Tours into primarily commercial and some residential property in the UK which keeps me busy to this day although most of the day-to-day management is undertaken by my superwoman assistant, Holly.

As I write these words, we have some 21 commercial properties, 6 residential properties and 6 homes split between 4 countries plus two more apartments acquired in Thailand since I started writing this article. One I plan to live in and the other I will renovate and sell.

And all this started distributing leaflets outside a racecourse in Sydney over 50 years ago!

So, it is hardly surprising that I value the period I spent in Sydney in the 1970s because many of the lessons I learnt have stayed with me for the rest of my life.

I learnt that the harder one works the greater the rewards.

I often comment that its quite a coincidence that the luckiest people around always seem to be those who are the hardest working as well.

I learnt to believe in myself.

I learnt to ignore the naysayers who tell me things will not work. It just motivates me to find ways to make things happen.

I learnt how to manage risk. I would never invest $100 to make $10 but I will invest $100 to make $400. In other words the upside potential must always significantly outweigh  the potential downside loss and only a fool will  mortgage or use their family home as security to invest in a business.

I learnt it was OK to use the full width of the pitch and I learnt it was never worth taking the risk  of doing anything illegal.

And in particular, I never forgot the philosophy of one of the greatest ever Australians Gough Whitlam, a mercurial leader who for 3 years as Prime Minister dominated the nation.

He once said the key to his success was

‘to crash through any obstacles I face or crash in the attempt’

He managed both! Gough Whitlam achieved a lot and, in many ways, transformed Australian society in three short years but ultimately crashed when he was dismissed by the Queen, or at least the Governor General who was the Queens representative in Australia.

For me it was an exciting time of change to be in Australia and I discovered that I had entrepreneurial skills which combined with a strong work ethic would serve me well for the rest of my life.

And as a bonus, I was living in one of the most spectacularly located cities in the world, built around a magnificent harbour and with a succession of wonderful ocean beaches within a 30-minute bus ride of the city centre.

As a nondrinker, I was never attracted to or part of the male bonding ethos that is still an integral part of Australian society but I loved the climate, outdoors life style and above all the informality.

So, for all the reasons  above, I have always retained fond memories and a never sense of gratitude to Australia in general and Sydney in particular and I have always been happy to revisit whenever I could.

In the early 1980s when growing Casterbridge Tours in the UK and needed funds to invest for marketing etc. I would sometimes revisit Sydney and dust off the mailing list and sell some new betting systems.

And even when Casterbridge Tours was firmly established, I still returned to Australia every three years until around 1994 to keep my status as a permanent resident ‘alive’. But when the rules changed, and my residency could no longer be retained my regular visits ceased as I had an ever-growing travel company in the UK to manage and a young family to raise.

In 2013, our younger daughter Lisa and her husband-to-be James, both relocated to Richmond, at the foot of the Blue Mountains and less than an hour by train from the centre of the Sydney, as they both received scholarships do research for PhDs at the University of Western Sydney.

Many families might be saddened when one of their children relocates half way around the world although in truth, the world is a much smaller place now than it was 50 years ago with social media, free video calls and cheap airfares!

However, I was thrilled because it gave me the opportunity to resurrect my love affair with Australia and Sydney after a 20-year absence and I made 5 visits between January 2014 and January 2017, often combining them with visits to the Australian Open Tennis tournament in Melbourne and indeed prompting me to write this article about Sydney and Melbourne, forever linked in an eternal rivalry.

If we fast forward to March 2023, my wife Sharron and myself, found ourselves in Queenstown on the South Island of New Zealand after spending a month travelling and visiting friends in New Zealand and then on a month-long expedition to the rarely visited Ross Sea area of Antarctica (for an account of this expedition see here).

We were both planning to return to Vancouver BC in Canada for my mother-in-laws 100^th birthday but by different routes.

Sharron planned to visit her cousin Lindy in Queensland and then they were both flying to Canada together for the big family reunion and Betty’s 100^th birthday, whilst I planned to meet friends in Singapore and the Philippines as I made my own separate way to Vancouver.

And as it was a 12-hour flight from Queenstown to Singapore, I had decided to break my journey and where better than Sydney, the city that had played a pivotal role in my life, and which I had last visited six years previously when Lisa and James were close to completing their PhDs.

I only spent 36 hours in Sydney and all on my own as I did not have time to meet up with any of my former students that I used to teach at Sydney Grammar School, and many of whom have gone on to forge successful careers in Law, Medicine, Business and have indeed retired. By contrast I, their former teacher and soccer coach, am still beavering away at this and that!

But my 36 hours was enough time to revisit some of Sydney’s famous attractions and places where I worked and played and indeed to unlock all the memories that stimulated me to write and record my affection for Sydney accounted above!

And indeed, I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to have learnt so many invaluable lessons at a formative time of my life when I had the privilege to live in this spectacular city.

 

© Michael Bromfield

 

© Michael Bromfield