Terry Bourke

[1] He worked as a show business journalist and production assistant in Hong Kong for a number of years before returning to Australia in 1971.

He entered the world of feature films in 1965 by raising $320,000 for actor Jeffrey Stone's first and last East-West Motion Picture Ltd production Strange Portrait (1966) with Bourke credited as an associate producer.

Bourke made his directorial debut when he wrote, produced and directed Sampan AKA San-Ban[6] shot in the New Territories in 1968 with an eye on international distribution.

[8] Some sources credited Bourke as being the first Occidential to direct a Hong Kong film[9] One of the principal investors in Sampan was Guamanian businessman and future senator Gordon Mailloux.

However, the good was canceled out by his cavalier attitude to money (always other peoples'), his disrespect of his peers, and an almost obsessive jealousy of anyone else in the industry... To his credit, Terry had an uncanny ability to make a tiny creek in the suburbs of Sydney look like the back blocks of Vietnam.

He could also carve a piece of cardboard, put lights behind it and shoot it with a title beneath, and those that saw it on the silver screen would swear it really was a Manhattan skyline.

Well that's not quite correct, he could direct traffic, but only if it crashed and banged and caught fire and exploded and featured excessive nudity and bonus kinky moments.