At 76, David Crook could probably hold his own in a street fight because he is a master (sifu) in kung fu and runs the oldest Chinese martial arts school in Canberra – Bac Fu Do – which he founded in 1969.

The son of a boxer can still break out five hand combinations in three seconds and you’d never believe he suffered a stroke eight months ago. Neither could his doctors.

His kung fu school in Macquarie is about to enter its seventh decade and David continues to teach the martial arts discipline that he started in 1963, at 16 years of age (3/6/63 – an auspicious number in Chinese numerology).

“I’ve got flexibility,” he said. “I’m still pretty fast and I’ve got very good hand speed and I’m still strong. I used to be able to get down in a full side splits and front splits but I can’t do that anymore.”

David’s kung fu school is the only one in Canberra that still has its original founding master teaching. After more than 60 years of martial arts, he’s not slowing down.

David teaches once a week, instructing a class of a dozen students in intense drills, or a burst of activity for 10 seconds. This might include targets or tackle shields that are used to knock you off balance or charge at you.

The 76-year-old teaches numerous hand techniques, kicks, elbows, knees, head-butts, you name it. He’s also got a mean karate chop.

“I did a lot of breaking when I first started training,” David said. “There’s an old photo of me hitting a pile of a dozen roof tiles. A lot of people have hit those tiles and they break them and they just fall in a heap but when I hit them, they haven’t just cracked in half, they disintegrated.”

David doesn’t do breaking anymore, however when he first established the school in 1969, he conducted many demonstrations. In the first 18 months, he broke about a thousand roof tiles, 400 bricks and a stack of 500 pine planks.

These days, the retired public servant practices around the house doing footwork and throwing hand techniques. Don’t let the grey hair fool you, David is an authority on nerve point attacks.

“Most of the stuff that we do is if we want to take somebody to the ground, we’ll use nerve point attacks,” he said. “We do a lot of work on the body’s anatomy and how the various vital organs sort of work. The body’s a target-rich environment.”

David also credits the martial arts with helping him in his public service career to be more incisive and decisive.

“A lot of the qualities you get from martial arts are perseverance, you get the determination, you get decisiveness,” David said.

As a sifu, David is a master in kung fu. The Chinese community also calls him “sigung”, which means grandfather or grand master (David was a regular at Jack Chan’s parents’ Chinese restaurant too).

David’s dad was doing martial arts right up until he was 85 – looks like it runs in the family.

Bac Fu Do (Canberra) https://bacfudo.com.au/