Thank you for taking an interest in who we are and what we represent.

The Southern Cross Martial Arts Centre, and Gōki-Kai Karate-Dō, is very proud to be a distinctively Australian organisation delivering distinctly Australian martial arts to the distinctly Australian market. We recognise that Australia is not Medieval Japan, 18th century Okinawa or even America or the UK. Whilst training systems from those eras and Countries have a great deal of merit, they are dealing with a whole range of different legal and cultural issues and contexts that we are not dealing with here and now. Australia’s culture, history, legal system and multicultural mix requires specialist and local knowledge, that’s where we come in to the picture.

The Southern Cross Martial Arts Centre logo features the red, white and blue colours of the Australian flag, the stars of the Southern Cross and the triple comma’s of the mittsu tomoe.

The Southern Cross is the constellation of stars which features on the Australian flag, as well as that of New Zealand, Brazil, Samoa and Papua New Guinea. The founder of Southern Cross Martial Arts Centre, Kaichō Damien Martin, also had an ancestor at the Eureka Rebellion at Ballarat in 1854 and the Southern Cross features on the Eureka flag as well.

The background feature of the logo is the three comma like objects that are reminiscent of the Japanese mitsu tomoe and the spiral triskele design of the ancient Celts of Europe. The spirals tie the heritage of the company founder (distinctly Celtic; Cornish/Irish/Scot) to the Eastern philosophies of his martial arts studies. On a practical level the three spirals represent the aspects of the training of Gōki-Kai Karate-Dō: we train the mind, the body and the indomitable spirit.