In the rooftop training culture of 1950s Hong Kong, two young men from Kowloon were finding their way into a world that had no particular interest in letting them in. Vince and Dave Lacey were half-Chinese, half-Irish, raised in one of the toughest parts of the city after their father was killed during the Japanese invasion. They were outsiders in almost every sense. But what they built from that position became one of the most remarkable stories in the history of Chinese martial arts outside China.
Rooftops, Bruce Lee, and a change of direction
The brothers’ martial arts journey began around the age of seventeen, when they attended St Francis Xavier College in Hong Kong, one of the toughest schools in the city. It was there they met a young Bruce Lee, and for almost a year the three of them trained together in Wing Chun on the rooftops above the streets of Hong Kong. When Bruce Lee left for America, he left the Lacey brothers in the care of senior students to continue their training.
It didn’t take.
The brothers didn’t connect with the new teachers, and their Wing Chun practice faded.
But then a conversation with a Chinese friend changed everything. The friend told them about Choy Lay Fut, a fighting art known for its aggression and effectiveness against multiple attackers. He also told them about a fighter named Lai Hung, whose eccentric, fearless character had earned him the nicknames Crazy Hung and Daredevil Hung. Lai Hung had made his name defeating four Muay Thai fighters in an open championship, a feat that sent a clear message through Hong Kong’s martial arts community about what Choy Lay Fut was capable of.
The Lacey brothers heard enough. They found him and asked to train.
From Daredevil Hung to Master Kong Hing
Lai Hung was not an easy teacher. Training under him meant hour and a half sessions in horse stance without movement, while he walked the room carrying a steel bar. If your stance crept up, even slightly, the bar came down across your shin. One of the brothers was thrown out for exactly that reason and told not to return. He came back the next day, sat deep in stance, and didn’t move.
In this training room, that was how you earned your place back.
The lesson wasn’t just about the stance. It was about what you were made of.
The brothers continued with Lai Hung for approximately a year. But Lai Hung’s own career as a fighter and competitor consumed his time, and he found he could no longer train the brothers consistently. He introduced them to a colleague: Master Kong Hing, son of the legendary Kong On, one of Grandmaster Tarm Sarm’s six top disciples.
Kong Hing drilled the Laceys in the fundamentals of Buk Sing, the punches, kicks, fighting techniques, and conditioning, including iron palm training. In those early days there were no bags or wooden dummies, and no mirrors. Just two single mattresses and a couple of chairs. The work was the equipment.
Taking on the Lacey brothers was not a straightforward decision for Kong Hing. His father, Kong On, was a man shaped by a different era entirely. A top disciple of Grandmaster Tarm Sarm, a martial arts instructor in the Chinese army during the Japanese invasion, a man whose reputation preceded him into every room he entered. Kong On held a view common among masters of his generation: this knowledge belonged to the lineage, and the lineage was Chinese. It was not meant for outsiders. It was certainly not meant for Westerners.
Kong Hing taught the Lacey brothers anyway. But when Kong On eventually discovered the brothers training with his son, the encounter was short and without warmth. He walked in, looked at them, told them they were Lai Hung students, and left. No argument. No scene. Just the weight of a man’s disapproval delivered in a single sentence and a turned back.
The brothers said nothing. There was nothing to say.
That moment sat beneath everything that followed. The knowledge passed through regardless, carried by a son who understood that some things matter more than his father’s permission. The Lacey brothers trained. The lineage moved. And a tradition that was never meant to leave Hong Kong eventually found its way to Perth.
Bringing Buk Sing to Australia
In 1962, the Lacey brothers left Hong Kong for Australia. Vince settled first in Darwin, working for Qantas and playing in a rock and roll band, teaching the occasional student on the side. By the end of 1965 both brothers had moved to Perth, and in 1966 they founded the Australian Buk Sing Gwoon at Barrack Street Jetty, the first Choy Lay Fut school in the country. Before the Laceys arrived, Kung Fu was essentially unknown in Perth. They built something from nothing, in a city that had no framework for what they were offering.
The school they ran was not comfortable. Training ran from seven to nine in the evening, two hours of warm-ups, combinations, forms, and sparring. The masters were strict about respect and uncompromising about standards. People who came to cause trouble found out quickly that they were in the wrong place. On more than one occasion the police were called to investigate the sounds coming from the premises.
The school moved over the years, from Barrack Street to the corner of Hay and Pier Street, and eventually to Cremorne Arcade, a kwoon tucked down a laneway above a flight of stairs that looked intimidating before you even reached the top.
Kung Fu wasn’t popular in the West until Bruce Lee’s films began reaching mainstream audiences in 1971. After that, the Laceys’ reputation spread quickly. What they had built in those early, quiet years before the Bruce Lee boom gave them a foundation that most schools never had: a genuine lineage, real technical depth, and a standard that had been set by masters in Hong Kong, not borrowed from a book.
George Michielsen, and the line that holds today
It was into that school, at Cremorne Arcade in 1977, that a young George Michielsen first climbed those stairs. He came for three months. He stayed seven years. Fellow students remember him taking notes after training, writing down what he had learned, an unusual practice that said everything about how seriously he took what the masters were giving him.
Vince Cordeiro, who trained alongside George in those years, later recalled telling him one evening as they walked to the gwoon together:
“When I start a school, you will come and teach with me.”
George never forgot it.
When Masters Vince and Dave Lacey eventually left Perth, the school they had built could have dissolved and the lineage could have stalled. Instead, George Michielsen carried it forward, investing everything he had into opening his own school at a time when Kung Fu schools in Perth were virtually non-existent. People doubted him, but he opened anyway. The school that exists today, the Chinese Kung Fu and Tai Chi Academy, is the direct continuation of what Vince and Dave Lacey brought from Hong Kong sixty years ago.
The Lacey brothers were outsiders who earned their way in. What they built proved that the knowledge had no obligation to stay where it began. It belonged to anyone willing to do what it took to receive it. That principle sits at the heart of everything the academy still teaches today.
Vince and Dave Lacey didn’t just bring Choy Lay Fut to Australia. They proved that a tradition survives when the right people refuse to let it stop with them.
