Sidharta Books & Print

Bill Stanford was born in Orange, New South Wales and educated in Moss Vale and Sydney. He was a jackaroo at Mudgee, Coonamble and Armidale before becoming a driller in a mining camp in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The latter exposure to men from a great variety of lands encouraged him to buy a one-way ticket to Europe on a Russian ship. For two years he travelled, with stops in Italy, working on a Chianti vineyard; Germany, where he was a civilian assistant to a four-star General at an American Army base and England as a tour guide before accepting the position of a club manager. Along the way he was stoned by a crowd of Muslims at the mosque in Meshed, Persia, briefly arrested by the police in Afghanistan for speeding in a horse-drawn cart, chased on foot by four Afghans, two of whom were wielding their knives over an economic misunderstanding in Kabul, mugged twice in Brazil and detained for five days by the KGB in Russia.
Soon after he married Janice, settled down at Dubbo, NSW. They raised their family on the small holding and Bill commenced his own financial planning business and sold it 20 years later, as he did the farm, after 37 years.
Over 14 consecutive years he and Janice explored at first-hand the lands, cultures and histories of peoples in more than one hundred and twenty countries.
Having seen something of the history of other lands Bill has now traversed those of his own country and wishes to pass on as best he can, some of the happenings and characteristics that made Australians what they are today, wherever they originally came from.