Australia’s relationship with Chinese martial arts is younger than most people realise. For most of the twentieth century, Kung Fu simply wasn’t here. It was a closed world, guarded by tradition, hierarchy, and a deep cultural caution about who the knowledge was shared with. The idea that it would one day be taught in Perth, let alone reach students across the globe, would have seemed unlikely to the men who first carried it across the ocean.
And yet here we are. The story of how it happened is worth telling.
The art that wasn’t meant to leave
Traditional Kung Fu, particularly the Buk Sing Choy Lay Fut lineage that forms the foundation of the Chinese Kung Fu and Tai Chi Academy, was never intended for outsiders. Knowledge passed within families, from master to trusted disciple, across generations. Even within Chinese communities, practitioners earned access slowly and carefully. Outsiders, and particularly Westerners, simply didn’t get in.
The Lacey brothers were the first crack in that door. Vince and Dave, half-Chinese and half-Irish, grew up in the streets of Kowloon, trained alongside Bruce Lee in the Wing Chun system, and eventually found their way to Master Lai Hung and the Buk Sing Choy Lay Fut system. They became two of the celebrated Five Black Panthers of Choy Lay Fut, elite fighters whose reputation spread through Hong Kong’s martial arts circles. When they immigrated to Australia in 1962, they brought the art with them. It was a small opening, but it was real.
Perth, 1966
When Masters Vince and Dave Lacey settled in Perth at the end of 1965 and founded the Australian Buk Sing Gwoon in 1966, Kung Fu was essentially unknown in Western Australia. They opened their first school at Barrack Street Jetty, a modest beginning for what would become a significant chapter in Australian martial arts history. After three years they moved to a school on the corner of Hay and Pier Street in the city.
The training was hard and uncompromising in the way that traditional martial arts always had been. Horse stance for an hour and a half. Iron palm conditioning. Sparring without warning or weight classes. The school attracted serious students and filtered out the rest quickly. Trouble-makers came looking to test themselves and the masters, known throughout Perth for their formidable reputations, handled every one of them.
Kung Fu remained a niche pursuit until 1971, when Bruce Lee’s films reached Western cinema screens and suddenly the whole country wanted to know what this was. The Lacey brothers had been quietly holding the flame for five years before the world caught up.
A young student from Perth
In 1977, a seventeen-year-old named George Michielsen climbed the stairs to Cremorne Arcade in Perth and pushed open the door to the Lacey brothers’ school. He intended to stay three months. He stayed seven years.
What George found in that school set the direction of his entire life. The discipline, the depth and the demands of training under masters who had learned the art in the streets of Kowloon. More than anything else, he understood that this knowledge was rare and fragile, that it could disappear, and that someone needed to care enough to preserve it.
When the Lacey brothers eventually moved to America, George decided to keep the art alive in Perth. That decision was not a small thing. The Chinese martial arts world remained deeply closed to Western practitioners, and earning the trust and respect of the masters who held the deeper knowledge would take decades of commitment, travel, and the kind of personal integrity that speaks louder than words.
Crossing the cultural divide
Sifu George Michielsen’s journey to build the Chinese Kung Fu and Tai Chi Academy is, in many ways, the story of a Westerner earning his place in a world that never intended to include him. He was described as a ‘gwai lo’, a foreign devil, navigating a secretive world with fierce hierarchy and a language barrier at every turn. But the masters who spent time with George saw his respect for the arts and his genuine commitment to keeping them alive.
The Academy that grew from all of this isn’t just a school. It’s a living custodian of rare, authentic knowledge that could easily have been lost.
Where the art stands today
From that single school at Barrack Street Jetty in 1966, this tradition has grown into something that now reaches practitioners well beyond Perth. The Academy has competed internationally in Hong Kong, produced champions, welcomed grandmasters and visiting masters from around the world, and established brother schools in Kalgoorlie and Fremont, California. Sifu George and his team continue to pass down the same values and standards that defined that first school sixty years ago.
And now, through online courses taught by Sifu George Michielsen, these arts are accessible to anyone, anywhere, for the first time in their history. Knowledge that once passed only in closed rooms to trusted disciples is available today to a student in any country, through a structured, lineage-based program that holds nothing back and compromises nothing.
That is a genuinely remarkable thing. And it’s only possible because a handful of people, at various points across the last sixty years, cared enough to carry this forward.
If you’d like to be part of what comes next, the courses are waiting for you. Explore them here.
