My Escape to Terra Australis: And My Part in the Near Death of the Australian Wool Industry

My Escape to Terra Australis

Australia's history since Captain James Cook's landing in 1770 has been recorded by a long list of historians. This book provides a shorter but equally absorbing account of life in Australia, tracing the life and times of young migrant Gerry Dubbin following his escape, in 1959, from a Britain on the long road to decline. On arrival in Melbourne and the ancient land that had filled his dreams, he found himself in the midst of people and a lifestyle very different to those in his hometown of Leeds. The story of his impressions and experiences is woven around the times, people and places that played a part in his life and work.

Initially the designer with a leading apparel manufacturer, Gerry also set up Australia's first apparel technology training course at the Melbourne College of Textiles and later joined the Australian Wool Corporation (AWC), becoming its national merchandising manager.

In 1974, having been appointed to New York as AWC's international marketing manager, Gerry continued to find himself embroiled in wool's fight against the threat of synthetic fibres. There, he found himself having to deal with the ineffective management of AWC and its companion organisation, the International Wool Secretariat (IWS), both of which were significantly responsible for the collapse of the Australian wool industry in 1991.

The story of this remarkable chapter in Australia's commercial history forms a book within a book, "Australian Wool: The Industry that Nearly Died" - a detailed look at the decades of inept leadership and ego-driven policies that eventually drove the Australian wool industry to disaster.

Gerry Dubbin spent the first eighteen years of his life in Harehills, a working-class suburb of Leeds, principal city of Yorkshire in the north of England. As a boy, he aspired to becoming a writer, a profession that circumstances put out of his reach. Instead, he entered the apparel manufacturing industry as a learner tailor. He studied apparel and textile design at the Leeds College of Technology, emerging with the highest national qualifications, including the prestigious English Silver Medal. Following two years of compulsory national service in the RAF, and seeing few future prospects in austerity-bound post-war Britain, he decided to migrate to Australia in 1959. Following a number of years working as apparel designer in Melbourne, during which he was responsible for establishing Australia's first apparel-industry school of technology at the Melbourne College of Textiles, he joined the Australian Wool Board-later the Australian Wool Corporation-and was eventually appointed as the corporation's international marketing director, based in New York. Since returning to Australia in the late 1970s, he has held senior management positions in the apparel, textiles and timber industries. He later went on to establish a successful signage and architectural lighting company. Following a bitter but successfully fought dispute with a prominent Melbourne real-estate company at the Victorian Civil & Administrative Tribunal, he was appointed as an independent consumer advocate in the real-estate field, a role that resulted in his first book, "Smoke & Mirrors, Egos & Illusions: The World of Real Estate". Ultimately, he decided that it was time to step away from the executive jungle, and rekindle his boyhood desire to become a published writer. "Why Should I Learn to Speak Italian?" is his fourth book. He currently resides in Hastings, a small town located on the Mornington Peninsula's eastern shore, 60km south east of Melbourne.