On 1 June 1970, Bob Jones opened a dojo at 48 Elizabeth Street in Melbourne's central business district and called it Zen Do Kai. The system he and Richard Norton built there — eclectic, street-oriented, distinctly Australian — would grow into one of the most significant homegrown martial arts organisations the country has produced.
But nothing emerges from nowhere. By the time Jones opened that door in 1970, a scene had already been taking shape for the better part of a decade. Dojos had been built, teachers had arrived from Japan and Korea and Hawaii and the United Kingdom, television had done its cultural work, and a generation of young Australians had already begun looking at the world differently. Zen Do Kai did not create that world — it was created by it.
This is the story of what that world looked like.
Judo Was Everywhere First
If you walked into an Australian martial arts club in 1960, you were almost certainly walking into a judo club. In the early years of that decade, judo was not just the dominant martial art in Australia — it was, for most people, the only one. The discipline had begun finding its footing after World War II, partly through servicemen who had been exposed to Japanese culture and physical practice during the Pacific campaign. But it remained a minority pursuit until the 1964 Tokyo Olympics put judo on television sets across the world and transformed its public image overnight.
Suddenly judo was not a foreign curiosity — it was an Olympic sport. Enrollments climbed. A golden era followed, stretching from roughly 1970 to 1985, during which Australian judo reached its broadest institutional depth.
What judo gave the wider martial arts scene was something more than practitioners: it gave structure. The Judo Federation of Australia established centralised administration, standardised grading, and national championships. When the Oceania Judo Federation was later formed in partnership with New Zealand, even international representation became possible. This bureaucratic model — the idea that a martial art needed a governing body to be taken seriously — became the template every subsequent discipline would follow.
The Caulfield Dojo: Melbourne's First Purpose-Built Training Hall
In the mid-1960s, a builder named Arthur Moreshead changed the physical geography of the Melbourne martial arts scene. Moreshead had emigrated from the United Kingdom in 1960 and, in partnership with Rod Todd and Les Dockery, established the Caulfield Judo School on leased railway land near Glenhuntley Station. It is widely regarded as the first purpose-built dojo in Melbourne, and most likely the first in Australia.
The facility bore the marks of its era. Moreshead, drawing on his construction expertise, engineered a "floating" floor suspended on springs and entirely separated from the exterior walls — designed specifically to absorb the impact of judo throws and protect the bodies doing the falling. The mats were padded with sawdust under thick canvas. The shower cubicles were installed but unplumbed; anyone wanting to wash after training used a bucket and an outdoor tap, a custom that was deeply unpopular in Melbourne winters.
None of this deterred Moreshead, who was himself a remarkable figure. He held a 4th Dan in judo from the Kodokan, alongside a black belt in both karate and aikido, and an Ikkyu in kendo. He had trained under Abbe Kenshiro — an 8th Dan in judo, 6th Dan in aikido, and 6th Dan in kendo — in Britain before migrating. He was, at the time of the dojo's construction, the highest-graded exponent of Japanese martial arts in Australia.
Crucially, Moreshead did not want to run a judo club. He wanted to build a multi-disciplinary martial arts academy, and he opened the Caulfield dojo's doors to instructors from other traditions. That open-door policy would have consequences he could not have anticipated.
Karate Arrives
By the mid-1960s, karate was beginning to push through. The styles that took root first — Goju-Kai, Shotokan, and Kyokushinkai — arrived through a combination of invited instructors, dedicated immigrants, and the initiative of local practitioners who had trained abroad.
The most consequential arrival for the Melbourne scene came in 1966, when Constantino "Tino" Ceberano — a young but highly proficient 3rd Dan in Goju-Kai — migrated to Victoria. Ceberano brought with him a tradition that had passed from Gogen Yamaguchi's Japan Karate-Do Federation Gojukai through instructors in Hawaii, and he wasted no time putting it to work. Arthur Moreshead invited him to teach at the Caulfield dojo, and so one of the most fertile cross-pollinations in Australian martial arts history began: Goju-Kai karate being introduced to a room already conditioned by judo's rigours.
From that initial beachhead, Ceberano built a network of suburban dojos across Melbourne — in North Balwyn, Ashwood, the city centre, Bayswater, Rowville, Werribee, Footscray, and Thomastown. Among the students who passed through those dojos in the late 1960s were two young men named Bob Jones and Richard Norton. Both would go on to found Zen Do Kai in 1970.
Kyokushinkai — the uncompromising full-contact style founded by Mas Oyama — also began establishing itself during this period. Students of Oyama Karate started training in Australia and New Zealand in the early 1960s, and in 1967, an instructor named Shigeru Kato was brought directly from Japan to teach in Sydney and Melbourne. The following year, the South Pacific Kyokushinkai Organisation was formally established. The Goju-Ryu tradition found another expression through Sensei Sal Ebanez, who had trained in Hawaii from 1961 and served two tours in Vietnam before arriving in Australia and beginning to teach in 1970.
Korean Arts and Immigrant Pioneers
The Australian martial arts community of the 1960s was, in significant part, a community built by immigrants. The stories of people who arrived with a martial practice already embedded in their lives — and who had to find a way to continue it in a country that barely knew the art existed — run through this history at every level.
Jack Rozinszky is one of the defining figures. A Hungarian teenager, Rozinszky fled the violent suppression of the 1956 revolution and arrived in Melbourne in 1958. He had a background in wrestling and gymnastics, and went looking for martial arts training in a city where almost none existed. He found his way to the Silver Top Taxi Club, which offered rudimentary jujitsu and karate. His physical gifts quickly set him apart. In 1965, a public demonstration in which he shattered five clamped bricks with elbows, knees, feet, and palm heels left a mark on everyone who witnessed it — including, reportedly, future martial arts innovators in the audience. In 1967, Rozinszky travelled to Korea and graded to 1st Dan in the Jidokwan school, becoming the first Australian to achieve that rank. He returned to build the Melbourne Taekwondo Centre, an institution whose historical roots trace back to 1963 and which eventually produced multiple Olympic representatives and World Champions.
Korean arts also entered through official channels. In July 1965, the Victoria Judo Federation invited Ke-Hyung No to conduct specialist courses in both judo and taekwondo across Australia — an initiative that led to the establishment of Ke Hyung No's Martial Arts Centre in 1971.
Kendo and the Problem of Distance
In the mid-1960s, kendo was virtually unknown in Australia. The first informal kendo practice had begun around 1963 in Sydney, under Jim Paterson — but with no qualified kendo teacher in the country, the curriculum was assembled from imported books. The result was technically rough.
Kendo's situation improved when John Butler arrived in Melbourne from Great Britain in May 1966. Butler had begun his kendo training in 1959 after hosting a visiting Japanese judo champion, and he brought with him a level of authenticity the local scene had not previously seen. His instruction, rooted in pre-war methodologies that included throwing and combat techniques, gave Melbourne kendo a foundation worth building on.
The Australian Kendo Renmei was formally established in 1969, driven by Rex Lawley with the assistance of a Japanese liaison named Yoshida. The AKR's petition for recognition from the International Kendo Federation was immediately successful, and in 1970 Lawley and Darryl Morris attended the First World Kendo Championships in Kyoto as Australia's representatives — a journey that would have been unimaginable a decade earlier.
Television Did Something Extraordinary
The growth of dojos and the arrival of instructors tells only part of the story. What brought ordinary Australians to the door of a martial arts club in the first place was, in large part, what they had seen on television.
Beginning in 1964, the Nine Network broadcast a Japanese historical drama under the English title The Samurai. The original series, Onmitsu Kenshi, followed a samurai named Shintaro Akikusa and his ninja companions through feudal Japan. It rapidly became the Nine Network's highest-rating programme and a cultural phenomenon that nobody had anticipated. Children across Australia ran through suburban streets in makeshift ninja suits, re-enacting what they had seen the night before. When the lead actor, Koichi Ose, toured Australia in January 1965, the crowds at Sydney Airport reportedly rivalled — and by some accounts exceeded — those that had greeted the Beatles the previous year.
This matters because The Samurai landed in the middle of what was still a period of real post-war tension in Australian attitudes toward Japan. The war had ended less than twenty years earlier. A Japanese actor inspiring the kind of reception given to a British pop group was not a trivial cultural event. The show did genuine work in softening those attitudes and opening a generation of Australians to Japanese culture — including, directly, Japanese martial arts. Dojo enrolments climbed noticeably in its wake.
Then came Bruce Lee.
Lee's films — The Big Boss in 1971, Way of the Dragon in 1972 — transformed the public idea of what martial arts could look like. Where the received image of karate or judo was formal, ritual-heavy, and somewhat austere, Lee embodied speed, explosive power, and a kind of physical intelligence that read immediately on screen to anyone. His influence was felt everywhere that martial arts were practiced or watched, and Australia was no exception. The National Library of Australia's newspaper archives from 1971 to 1974 record his name turning up in bankruptcy notices, real estate listings for dojo spaces, and general news coverage — a measure of how thoroughly he had permeated the culture.
The surge in interest he triggered was not just for kung fu. It expanded demand across every discipline: karate, taekwondo, aikido, judo, and the emerging eclectic systems that had begun to appear. The dojos that had been quietly building their communities through the 1960s suddenly found themselves with waiting lists.
Getting Organised
By 1970, the sheer number of clubs and practitioners demanded something more than informal networks. National bodies began to form, and the administrative architecture of Australian martial arts — still largely in place today — took shape within a few short years.
- The Australian Kendo Renmei was established in 1969 and immediately gained international recognition.
- The Australian Karate Federation was formed in 1970, spearheaded by federal politician Don Cameron MP. The AKF fielded a national team for the inaugural World Karate Championships in Japan that same year — a level of international engagement that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier. It would eventually grow to encompass over 120 styles and gain World Karate Federation and IOC recognition.
- The Karate Union of Australia was established in New South Wales in the early 1970s, operating under the technical authority of Master Y Sumi.
- The West Australian Karate Federation was founded in 1973 by Sensei John Ellis, a Japan-trained instructor who had to work to unify a Perth scene where karate had existed only in scattered gyms through the 1950s and 1960s.
- The South Pacific Kyokushinkai Organisation had been established in 1968, formalising that lineage's presence across Australia and New Zealand.
The involvement of a sitting politician in founding the AKF was not incidental. It reflected how quickly martial arts had moved from "foreign curiosity" to "recognised sport" in the public mind. Government bodies, national coaches, accreditation schemes — by the mid-1970s, the infrastructure of a proper sporting industry was in place.
The Social Conditions That Made It All Work
Martial arts booms do not happen in a vacuum. They happen when the cultural mood is right, and when enough people have both the time and the psychological need for what a dojo offers.
Post-war Australia was a country renegotiating its relationships with Asia. Immigration was changing the demographics of cities. The White Australia Policy was being slowly dismantled through the 1960s. In Melbourne particularly, waves of immigrants from Europe and Asia had created communities that brought their physical and cultural practices with them. The martial arts scene that emerged was, in part, a product of this opening — of a society becoming less insular and more willing to look outward.
By the late 1970s, youth unemployment in Australia had risen sharply, and young people were spending longer in education by necessity. The combination of uncertain economic prospects and more time on their hands created a large population looking for structure, community, and a sense of agency. Martial arts dojos — heavily glamorised by Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and the cinema of the era — provided all three. They offered something tangible: a rank system that rewarded consistent effort, a community with clear norms of respect, and a physical practice that produced visible results.
It was into this world that Bob Jones stepped in 1970 — a former student of Goju-Kai, a seasoned bouncer who had tested traditional techniques against the reality of pub security work, and a man with a clear-eyed view of what the existing martial arts were not delivering for the people he knew. The scene he founded Zen Do Kai within had been fifteen years in the making.
The Inheritance
Zen Do Kai did not spring from nothing. It was assembled from a specific set of materials: the Goju-Kai training that Tino Ceberano had planted in Melbourne's suburbs, the Caulfield dojo's tradition of multi-disciplinary openness, the cultural appetite for martial arts that The Samurai and Bruce Lee had built, and the practical demands of a domestic security industry that tested everything in the most unambiguous possible way.
The Australian martial arts scene of the 1960s was, in retrospect, an incubator. Judo gave it its first institutions. Immigrant instructors gave it technical depth. Television gave it a mass audience. The Olympic movement gave it sporting legitimacy. And the particular geography of Melbourne — its working-class pub culture, its dense suburban dojo network, its openness to new arrivals who brought new arts — gave Zen Do Kai the specific conditions it needed to become what it became.
Understanding that context does not diminish what Jones and Norton built. If anything, it makes the achievement more interesting: the capacity to look at everything that existed, recognise what was missing, and build something new.