Trapped: A Couple's Five Years of Hell in Dubai

by Lee, M

  The Fitzgerald Inquiry into Queensland’s entrenched police and political corruption had recently got underway, but for the moment the state was riding high on a boom. The six-month-long Brisbane Expo, centrepiece of Australia’s Bicentennial celebrations, began in April 1988, drawing nearly sixteen million visitors to what had been a sleepy country town not so long before. The so-called ‘white shoe brigade’ was in full flight up and down the Queensland coast. These self-made developers were loved and hated in equal measure, depending on whether you stood to make money from their projects or not.

  They were proud of the fact that they didn’t take no for an answer — they were intent on ramming through developments regardless of environmental or planning concerns — and in the case of notable figures like Christopher Skase, their empires were hollow schemes in which people lost millions. (Skase even called his signature resort Mirage but still no-one twigged until it was too late.) I didn’t realise it at the time, but I would see the same patterns in operation nearly two decades later in Dubai.

  But when we arrived on the Gold Coast the hangover was a little way off. For now it was a success story, full of construction sites and ready jobs. We quickly picked up work. Julie started out doing casual shifts at Grundy’s Entertainment Centre, an early theme park at Surfers Paradise, and soon had regular work there as a cashier. I took short-term jobs wherever I could find them, starting out as a lifeguard at the theme park Dreamworld, then labouring on the ubiquitous building sites, working in carpentry ‘gangs’ building houses in the Gold Coast’s sprawling new suburbs, even trying my hand at real-estate sales. I still wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with my life but I knew I wanted it to be connected to property in some way. In the heady, greedy atmosphere sweeping the region at the time, people were flooding in from the southern states, desperate to get a slice of the sunsoaked, glittering lifestyle, and at the time it seemed there were real-estate agencies on every corner. It was fine for a while, but it wasn’t long before the economy started to slow down.

  We’d been there less than two years when the wheels fell off. The downturn started in 1989 with the infamous pilots’ strike, which hit the region, so dependent on tourism, very hard. Then the bloated economy of the 1980s collapsed in on itself (this inevitable ‘correction’ was something I would also witness in Dubai in due course) and by mid-1990 Australia was deep into ‘the recession we had to have’, as then Treasurer Paul Keating memorably called it.

  We managed to keep our heads above water — just. Casual work simply disappeared and Julie lost her job when Grundy’s went out of business. Fortunately I was still able to pick up construction work, although it was mostly part-time, and Julie found office work with local packaging company ABL Distribution. It was hard, but we got through it. At times we felt we would go under, but in hindsight that tough period taught us some very valuable lessons that would help us down the track. There’s nothing like the school of hard knocks for making you resilient and adaptable.

  We realised, though, that we needed a longer-term plan. Even though the Gold Coast was doing it tougher than many other places, we didn’t feel able to leave during the worst of the recession because we didn’t have the qualifications that would let us just walk into good jobs elsewhere. At least there we had some work and a few basic contacts. But we could see that we wouldn’t make it through another downturn like that without doing something to make ourselves more employable.

  Over the preceding years friends and work colleagues had once or twice suggested we should think about going to university but at first I just scoffed at the thought, at least for myself. Given that I didn’t even have my Higher School Certificate (HSC), surely that ship had sailed?

  But gradually the idea took hold. During my time in real-estate sales I had become friends with a woman called Rosemary Adams, who was also working as an agent. She made some enquiries and found that I could sit a special kind of IQ test to see if I had what it would take to complete a degree. I did it and to my surprise got an outstanding result and was offered places in a number of faculties at Australia’s newest uni, the privately run Bond University, which had recently opened on the Gold Coast. I decided on law and at age twenty-one became a student again. I got very good marks, credits and a distinction, and enjoyed the course, but after two semesters it became too hard, mid-recession, to pay the tuition costs.

  It was disappointing to drop out of Bond, but I’d acquired a taste for learning and uni life. I tried to enrol in law at both Queensland Uni and QUT, but was rejected because I didn’t have my HSC, yet was too young to qualify as a mature-age student. Griffith University had opened a campus on the Gold Coast in 1989, but at that stage law wasn’t offered there, so I enrolled in a part-time Bachelor of Business degree instead.

  Julie had always thought of university as a possibility for herself, and had enrolled in the same course. It made sense; she’d always been good at maths and thought she’d be able to pick up accounting. I had really enjoyed parts of my law studies, especially the jurisprudence side — how societies figure out what’s right and wrong, and how laws fit into that in the real world — but I found myself equally interested in business studies, including finance and accounting. We felt like we were doing what it took to get ahead.

  JULIE

  Marcus hadn’t done anything more than the most basic maths at school, but I was able to help him. I taught him from the ground up, but he’s smart and he was soon off and flying on his own. I remember one particular problem we were looking at where I said to Marcus, ‘This is how you have to approach it, step by step, like this . . .’ and he said, ‘The answer is so and so . . .’ I said, ‘You can’t just guess, you have to work through every stage.’ So we did and five lines later, sure enough, he’d been right. He was fine about following all those logical processes I was showing him, but only to prove the answers he could already see when he first read through the questions.

  MARCUS

  Life was very busy: we worked, mostly full-time, Julie still at ABL Distribution and me wherever I could find a job. At night, while it felt like the rest of the world was out enjoying life, we studied. We occasionally saw friends, including Rosemary, but mostly we were consumed by our work and study loads.

  The Gold Coast was a good place to live if you didn’t have much money. We rented a tiny dump of a cottage that opened right onto the sand in the suburb of Mermaid Beach. It was draughty and freezing in winter (yes, even in Queensland) but the location couldn’t have been more perfect for people like us who loved the beach and were out on it as often as possible.

  Getting an education meant racking up debts left, right and centre. First there was the cost of enrolling in the university courses, which amounted to thousands of dollars. Like many students, we deferred these, as you were allowed to until you had graduated and were earning a decent income. Then there was the cost of the equipment we had to have — a computer that we shared, a simple dot-matrix printer and our shared textbooks.

  Law and business textbooks are very expensive and they’re not optional. Because we had no assets, low incomes and no credit history, we bought them using store credit cards that charged a whopping 29 per cent interest. When you’re paying that kind of interest it’s impossible not to get into some kind of debt spiral. But we made a conscious decision to lift ourselves up into a better life. If one of us got down, the other would remind them that this was just temporary and all this hard work would pay off.

  The other thing I was squeezing into my routine was triathlon preparation. Looking back, it’s a little hard to see how there were enough hours in the day, but I was young and full of energy. In 1991 I had picked up a magazine that happened to have in it a story about a sporting event known as the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon, an extraordinarily gruelling elite-level event. I said to Julie, ‘I’m going to do that.’ After reading the story and seeing what was involved, she very sensibly said, ‘OK, but why don’t you start with one of the smaller local versions instea
d?’

  It was easy to stay fired up about the sport, because the International Triathlon Union’s World Championships were held on the Gold Coast that year. While the distances were a lot shorter than the ironman triathlons, it was still enough to test the mettle of everyone who attempted it. A 1500-metre open-water swim was followed by a 40-kilometre cycle then a ten-kilometre run, and the best of the best would be on our doorstep trying to seize the year’s top title. We went along and watched these incredible athletes, including Australian Miles Stewart, who won, and twenty-year-old Lance Armstrong, who would switch to cycling the following year. (He was then an inspiring up-and-comer, not the disgrace he would become.) I was well and truly sold — I wanted to be out there doing it myself.

  It took patience, though. You can’t just decide one day you’re going to do a triathlon and the next day enter one. You need to train hard and work up to it, and that’s what I set about doing. It was a big time commitment on top of work and, soon, uni study, but it helped me to focus and I found it exhilarating.

  Three years after setting my mind to it, I’d built up the skills and stamina to tackle my first triathlon. It’s a very individual sport and that appealed to me; I liked that you had to rely on your own resources. You were competing against everyone else there on the day, but the real competition always felt internal. You had only yourself to blame if things went wrong, and only your own determination and resilience could help you try to find a way to succeed. You were in control of your own destiny.

  Triathlon is a pretty selfish sport — you spend a lot of time on your own, pounding the roads or churning out laps at the local pool watching that endless black line, just building up the miles. Typically, Julie just got on with things in her own self-contained way. I’d be out there running, swimming or cycling and she’d set herself up in a nice spot on the grass by the beach or lake, calmly studying, working her way through some dense textbook on corporate tax law or quantitative analysis.

  I was working towards competing in the longer ironman version, the type that had first inspired me. My years of training amounted to a necessary apprenticeship. You have to prove you can handle peak events by completing shorter stepping-stone competitions along the way. And you have to mature mentally and physically, learn to pace yourself.

  You can race all day perfectly and lose it in the last five kilometres because you ‘hit the wall’, as it’s known. You just can’t convince your body it has anything left to give. You’ve run too hard too early and the need to stop swamps the desire to finish what you started. It took a while to learn that lesson; I hit the wall many times. But I worked and worked at it. In 1995, when I was able to complete the Hell of the West race, I knew I was ready. This aptly named ordeal is held in the inland town of Goondiwindi in February, when temperatures regularly top 45°C. It consists of a two-kilometre river swim (half-upstream, half-downstream), an 80-kilometre cycle and a 20-kilometre run.

  So at 27 I entered my first ironman triathlon — a four-kilometre swim followed by a 180-kilometre bike ride, after which you run a marathon, 42 kilometres — held in Forster–Tuncurry, NSW. It didn’t quite go as planned.

  JULIE

  Marcus’s mother and father, his (half)brother Wayne and I were there to cheer him on. These races have a time-limit, usually up to about fifteen hours — if you don’t finish within that time, you officially don’t finish even if you cross the line. The swim was uneventful but they were only about two hours into the cycle when something in one of Marcus’s bike wheels snapped. You are allowed to get replacement parts and keep going, but there are strict rules about having to wait for the officials to bring them to you.

  So he just had to sit there waiting desperately for this replacement wheel. They brought one, but the tyre was flat, so that had to be fixed. The whole thing took an hour and a half and during that time every other person in the race passed him. Every one — all the 70-year-olds, the people who looked unfit enough to make you wonder how they qualified, everyone. He was absolutely dead last. But he got back on that bike and over the next ten hours he caught hundreds of people to end up in the middle of the field. It was an amazing effort. He could easily have just thought, ‘I’m done, it’s all too hard,’ and just given up. But he didn’t.

  He’s always had that inner strength. If he wants to do something he’s going to do it, no question about that. But as amazing as that effort was, he wasn’t satisfied. He said, ‘I don’t really feel like I can say I’ve done an ironman triathlon until I’ve done it properly.’ So the next year he went back again and he blitzed it! He came 168th out of 1000-odd competitors in a time of ten hours and eight minutes and got a special mention as ‘most improved’. And once he’d done it to his own satisfaction, that was it. He retired undefeated, as he says.

  Chapter 2

  ‘ARE YOU INTERESTED IN DUBAI?’

  MARCUS

  In October 1999 we found time to get married at last. It was a lovely wedding on the Gold Coast, in the celebrant’s garden, which backed onto a rolling green golf course. We kept it deliberately low-key, just us and three of Julie’s work colleagues to witness our signatures — plus the celebrant’s dog, who nudged me to play catch with him throughout the short vows.

  That year, after almost a decade of hard slog, Julie graduated and I followed in 2000. We each had Bachelor of Business degrees majoring in finance and accounting and I had a ‘minor’ in law thanks to the legal studies I’d done at Bond. Now we could reap the rewards of that big effort. After graduation I got a job in finance, making a daily hour-long commute to a Brisbane office, while Julie continued working at ABL.

  In 2002 we decided to move back to Sydney. We still had a lot of debt to pay off, and moving cities would be another hit on the finances, but we saw it as an investment. We now had the kind of skills that made us valuable in the labour market and Sydney was a bigger pond.

  In Sydney we found a typically tiny worker’s cottage to rent in the inner-west harbourside suburb of Balmain. It was a neighbourhood full of life and energy with a strong community feel and a great diverse population mix — old people who’d lived there all their lives, well-to-do professionals, young families, students — all happily living cheek by jowl. People mingled and mixed at cafes and pubs and markets. You didn’t need a car; if you wanted to get into town you could just hop on a ferry or a bus. There was plenty of green space, including a dog park at the bottom of our street, so we could continue to enjoy an outdoors lifestyle.

  Julie took a good job at a smaller, specialised chartered accounting practice, Holden & Bolster, just across the harbour in the CBD, and I began consulting with the property giant Jones Lang LaSalle. I quickly worked my way up the totem pole, through roles at major property players including Westfield and Woolworths. My next move was to Investa Property Group, which had offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Investa was mainly a property fund management business, set up as an offshoot of Westpac Bank. It owned and fund-managed office towers and industrial sites in various cities and later went into property development in its own right. I was a project consultant, working for several of the divisions during the three or so years I was there, but the thing I did most was serve as what we called an integrator.

  Investa was growing strongly during this time, acquiring other smaller companies including the building company Clarendon Homes. Unsurprisingly, there is normally a lot of fear and suspicion among the staff of the company that has been acquired. Investa would send in a two-person team consisting of me, for the business side, and an HR specialist. Our job was to allay the fears — we weren’t here to slash and burn, it wasn’t that kind of takeover — and to help them get their systems up to scratch in terms of the professional standards expected of a public company.

  On my part it required both detailed knowledge of every part of the new business as well as the way Investa ran, and high-level people skills. It was essential to gain the confidence of people in the business in order to find out how they did thi
ngs, what worked and what needed to change, and to get them on board instead of fighting the inevitable.

  Typically, we’d be sent into a newly acquired company for fifteen to seventeen weeks at a time, the white-collar equivalent of fly-in, fly-out workers. During the week we would stay in serviced apartments that had been provided for us in the relevant city, which might be anywhere in Australia. Brisbane was a frequent destination, which seemed an ironic twist, having so recently moved from Queensland. Sometimes I would fly back to Sydney for a few hours for a meeting with no time to even call Julie, let alone see her before heading back to Brisbane. We caught up by phone each weeknight and I would fly home on Friday evenings so we could have the weekend together.

  The kind of commercial-property business analysis and integration I was doing was highly specialised. I had a very particular skillset, with my accounting qualifications and understanding of commercial considerations, real estate and property development. I was able to deal on a business manager level, and had extra insight gained from my legal studies.

  I was in demand because the clients liked the fact that I would do anything that needed to be done. ‘Anything to help,’ was my mantra and the senior managers I worked with valued that greatly. There was nothing calculating or fake about it on my part. I’ve never been able to abide people refusing to help someone or sort out a problem because it is supposedly outside their job specifications. If I saw something that needed to be taken care of, I would always try to get it sorted with the minimum of fuss.

  Soon I found myself earning very good money indeed. Specialist roles in the commercial-property sector were well remunerated and I had become a sought-after consultant. Julie was also on a good wage, in a stable job.