Tas BJJ History Project

I don’t know why, but Martial Arts have always been polarising. So many times we have seen a strong Martial Art develop and grow, then for one reason or another it splits into separate directions. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact more often than not this growth and splitting means more creative minds being involved and greater development occurring. The difficulty that this process can cause though is confusion in “the story” of that art. When one style diverges it can easily turn into two competing groups or worse, two factions. It is very common for these factions to tell their own versions of their origins to suit their own needs.

This is as true of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as it is of any martial art. There are many conflicting versions of the arts origins with at least two main camps offering their version. I am not here to try to define the ”true history” of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, others have already put a great deal of work into that (if you are interested in some fascinating and unbiased research in this area I would recommend googling the works of Carlos Eduardo Nogueira Loddo, Matt Philips and Roberto Pedreira), but I will give a very basic overview.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is either a version of Japanese Jujutsu/judo or an evolution of it that was developed in Brazil throughout the 20th Century. There are various Japanese sources for this art, but Mitsuyo Maeda is the most famous and the man that most practitioners trace their lineage too. From Maeda there are several branches of the “Jiu Jitsu family tree” the largest of which being the Gracie family and another major lineage being that of Luis Franca and his student Oswaldo Fadda. The Gracie Lineage is the more prominent, due in most part to the family’s dedication to Jiu Jitsu as well as their large numbers of children. Within 3 generations, the Gracie clan had become a martial arts dynasty with great influences in the self defence, competitive Jiu Jitsu and mixed martial arts worlds.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is famed for its effectiveness in combat, in part due to the mastery of ground grappling of its exponents, but also due to their ability to ensure that encounters are settled on the ground.  A rather unique aspect of the perception of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was the fact that it maintained a lot of the traditions of other martial arts, such as belt ranking and uniforms, but was unapologetically focussed on effectiveness. While students of some arts might wonder at their combat effectiveness, BJJ students worked out early on that they were learning legit combative skills in a high pressure environment.

Throughout the 1980s Brazilian Jiu Jitsu spread throughout the world and the man who did the most to introduce it to Australia was John Will. John found Jiu Jitsu first through the Gracies and then through their cousins the Machados. It was John who drove BJJs spread in Australia and who introduced it into Tasmania. I will go into more detail on John and his effect on the Tasmanian Martial Arts landscape in the next chapter, but will leave him for now by saying that his unique style of teaching and promotion combined with his solid skills in a devastatingly effective Martial Art, started the journey that I write about now.

In order to write about Jiu Jitsu it is also important to understand a little about its “Team” based structure, a structure which inevitably shapes its growth and spread. To understand this structure a comparison to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu’s closest cousin, Judo is useful. On the whole in this day and age Judo is based around the structure as an Olympic sport with students competing for their state and country and having their rank awarded through a nationally governed body. The importance of the club that one trains in is important, but doesn’t identify the student in a competitive sense. 

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu however is based on teams and rank heirachy, so a competitor will enter a tournament as a member of a particular team. This largely means that the team they are under is headed by the coach who awards their rank. This requires a relationship with a coach who has a traceable lineage of student to teacher, to the founding of the art. Team loyalty (and sometimes disloyalty) is a natural offshoot of this sort of structure and as such changing coach can often have great consequences in terms of loyalty or relationships. The Brazilian term for these clashes is often “politics” which seems to be a general word for all manner of sins. 

The result of this situation is that Tasmania has seen its share of changes in the hierarchical structure of BJJ and associated ill feeling. While it is not my intention to focus on the negative it is useful to understand this as means of appreciating some of the reasons that new teams form and clubs seemingly split from time to time.

Through this history we will see the growth of BJJ as an art and sport and we will also see the effect on the development caused by the different interpretations of what BJJ is from the various coaches in the state. We will see how what started as one association in the late 90s grow into at least 6 different associations by the end of this story.

So without further ado, we will start with the early years…