The official language in Australia and Bermuda is the same, English, and yet, since moving Down Under two years ago, Thad Hollis has experienced some communication glitches.

“The first time someone said to me ‘how are you travelling’, I said ‘in the car’,” Mr Hollis said. “It turns out it means ‘how is your mental state today?’.”

‘Feeling crook’, ‘fair dinkum’ and ‘bloody oath’ were a few other Australian phrases that left the Bermudian mediator scratching his head.

He since learnt that ‘fair dinkum’ means, ‘that’s OK, mate’, ‘bloody oath’ is the equivalent to ‘damn right’, and feeling ‘crook’, indicates the speaker is sick.

“I’m the one with the accent now,” Mr Hollis laughed. “My partner Vicki [Abraham] had a friend over, and she said ‘speak Bermudian!’. So I did and she did not have a clue what I was saying.”

He moved to Queensland with Ms Abraham on a domestic partnership visa. Getting the permit was not an easy process. The couple had to prove they had been in a committed relationship for at least two years.

“We had to submit a six-inch deep pile of documentation that included affidavits from friends and photographs of ourselves travelling together,” Mr Hollis said.

It was all worth it, because he is loving the lifestyle.

“We do a lot of outdoor living here,“ he said. ”We bought a house and can go for a walk along the creek. There is a shopping village nearby and beautiful footpaths. It looks like a mini forest.“

As a child in Bermuda he used to admire the parrots and cockatiels in the pet store.

“Those are flying around in the backyard, here,” he said. “There is also a koala breeding ground down the street.”

Queensland has a sub-tropical climate, but Mr Hollis said he could travel for only a few hours and be in a completely different environment.

Despite being more than 11,000 miles from home, he still provides mediation services to clients in Bermuda through his business Better Outcomes Mediation.

“I can work during the day and be on a call with clients in Bermuda at 9pm or 10pm Australia time,” he said. “That would be 9am or 10am in Bermuda.”

Mr Hollis said the pandemic had really changed the way we communicate.

“We have become so comfortable with our computer screens,” he said. “Before the pandemic we had to do mediation face to face, but now technology has caught up. I had an office, but most of my clients wanted to meet by phone or on Zoom. I found I could do mediation through any electronic medium.”

Now, if he needs to, he rents office space for $50 an hour.

To work with Australian clients, he went through a recertification process.

“I could have just started mediation here but they recommend you come in as a nationally accredited mediator,” he said.

To get that designation he did a six-day intensive course with the Resolution Institute in New South Wales. He also did a 15-day programme on working with families, particularly couples facing divorce.

“You get a certificate and apply to the Attorney-General of Australia’s office,” he said. “You get a registration number and then you are a practising family mediator.”

Mr Hollis had already been working in Bermuda as a mediator since 1993.

One of his career highlights was mediating a key agreement with the US State Department to resolve a budgetary conflict at the International Labour Organisation. He also co-drafted Bermuda’s Employment Act 2000 and served as deputy chair of the Labour Law Review Committee in 2019.

In mediation, he tries not to tell people what to do, but asks key questions to help them make up their own minds.

“One of my goals is to remove a lot of the passion and heat from the conflict,” he said. “In a workplace dispute you help people figure out what they really want other than their boss’s head on a platter. We might ask, what led to you getting to this point?”

However, if someone declares that they want to hurt themselves, or someone else, particularly a child, he is required by law to report that to the authorities.

He is now working in tandem with Ms Abraham, who can provide counselling and coaching services.

He fell in love with mediation in boarding school in Britain after taking a course in industrial society.

“I was fascinated by dispute resolution, reconciliation and negotiation,” he said. “I joined the Transport and General Workers Union in the UK in the 1970s.”

He went to the Bermuda College and then studied history and foreign affairs at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

He was 19 when a general strike erupted in Bermuda in 1981. A deadlock over wages between the Government and the Bermuda Industrial Union brought the island to a standstill.

“I was involved in it,” he said. “I was a member of the BIU in the building and construction division. Kenyatta Young signed me up.”

He was not entirely in favour of the general strike but felt they had voted on the matter and that was that.

“That is what you do,” he said. “I was not going to cross the picket lines. I learnt early on that checks and controls work.”

After two weeks, a deal was struck.

“It was a watershed moment for Bermuda in a lot of ways, and we are still, to this day, analysing what happened, as a community,” Mr Hollis said. “There are a lot of layers to it.”

Last year most of his clients were dealing with workplace issues, this year he is seeing more families.

“I was working with a couple this year,” he said. “The husband really wanted to save the marriage and the wife wanted to get a divorce. I did some coaching with them, as they were not ready to go to mediation. I did a couple of sessions with them and then suggested they speak to a solicitor about the legal ramifications of divorce and the cost of it.”

The wife called him recently and said they had been giving their relationship another try.

“They were still going through with the divorce and wanted to do mediation,” he said. “They were not sure what would happen but they were still co-parenting together and going grocery shopping together.”

He does not guarantee his clients the best outcome possible but he does promise them a better outcome than when they first came in to see him.

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