BJMAW 2020, 79 Phillip Island Road, Surf Beach (2026)

Increase female participation with new students, and retain those already within the BJMA systems Raise the profile of females within BJMA on social media.

17/04/2026

Carlie Rice and Marlee Quakawoot from Chikara Martial Arts QLD at the BJMA Muay Thai Tour 2026 😁

04/08/2025

Sounds too wild to be true, doesn’t it? How could a 19th-century pr******te possibly rise to command a pirate empire of over 300 ships and 40,000 men, outwitting global powers and retiring as a wealthy legend?

Born in Guangdong, China, Ching Shih, originally Shi Yang, worked in a floating brothel before catching the eye of pirate lord Zheng Yi. Marrying him, she quickly learned the ropes of piracy, and after his death in, she audaciously took command of the Red Flag Fleet. With unmatched cunning, she unified rival factions, enforced a strict code, punishing disloyalty with death, and grew her fleet to over 300 junks and up to 40,000 pirates, creating a maritime empire that rivaled nations.

Her fleet terrorized the South China Sea, plundering ships and extorting coastal villages while clashing with Chinese, British, and Portuguese navies. Ching Shih’s genius lay in her strategy: she married her adopted son, Cheung Po Tsai, to secure loyalty, bore two children amid her campaigns, and negotiated a jaw-dropping amnesty deal in 1810. This allowed her to retire with her wealth intact, untouchable by authorities, having never lost a major battle.

At 35, Ching Shih settled in Guangzhou, running a gambling den and brothel, living lavishly until her death in 1844 at 69. Her improbable journey from s*x worker to pirate queen, defying empires and retiring in splendor, sounds like fiction but is a documented saga of ambition and resilience that reshaped maritime history.

17/07/2025

In 1945, six women programmed the world’s first computer—without manuals, formal training, or recognition. Their names—Betty Holberton, Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, Ruth Teitelbaum, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence—were nearly lost to history. When a young computer scientist named Kathy Kleiman stumbled upon a photo of them beside the towering ENIAC machine decades later, she was told dismissively, “They’re probably just models.” But they weren’t. They were the world’s first true coders. Originally hired during WWII as “human computers,” the women were tasked with programming ENIAC from scratch—working from blueprints alone, since they weren’t allowed in the lab. They invented the first algorithms, flowcharts, and logic systems on paper, before manually programming the machine by plugging in cables, switch by switch. On February 14, 1946, ENIAC debuted to global astonishment. But while the male hardware engineers were celebrated, the women behind the programming were left out of the headlines. Society didn’t yet see coding as “real work.” As computing evolved, so did the myth of the male coder, and the women who had laid the foundation were erased from textbooks. But they continued shaping tech—Holberton wrote the first software application, Bartik advanced memory systems, McNulty helped invent subroutines, all core to modern programming. Their legacy was nearly lost—until Kleiman tracked them down in the 1980s and brought their story back into the light. In 1997, they were finally honored, many in their seventies. But by then, tech culture had already shifted, claiming innovation as a boys’ domain. We can’t undo that erasure—but we can rewrite the narrative going forward. Because women didn’t just enter tech—they built it. And the legacy of the first programmers belongs to all of us.

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http://bjma.com.au/

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