THE man from Toowoomba doesn’t want to be depicted as a wandering Australian backpacker. But it’s undeniably how he started out. “I was going away for three months and haven’t been back except for visits,” says Stephen Fenwick, 59, the chief executive of DHL Express Americas.

Fenwick departed his Queensland home more than three decades ago. After touring Europe and volunteering with an Israeli kibbutz on the Lebanese border, he went looking for a job that would help to fund further travels. He ended up with DHL, now the world’s leading logistics company but back then a fledgling international courier company

that specialised in sending valuable documents on planes with

trusted backpackers.

For the couriers, it was like aerial hitchhiking. “It solved two issues, the money issue and the opportunity to see the world,” says Fenwick. “In London at that time, DHL had 12 people; We did everything. I was a salesman, a driver. I went to the airport and helped out in accounting.” Accommodation was even more chaotic. “I was sleeping on the floor of this guy’s place in Knightsbridge.”

But he also travelled … lots. “I would never have got to the Middle East because of the visas,” he says. “It’s not the sort of place you’d go to.” Just the list of places he’s lived is impressive: Switzerland, Belgium, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the US — a couple of times, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Singapore. He’s currently based

in Florida.

Fenwick doesn’t look like a backpacker any more — the suit and shirt are far too expensive — but he’s not wearing a tie when we meet in the company’s New Kingston office. His style is antipodean casual and conversation comes easily. “I left home with two suitcases,” he says. “Now I’ve got a 40-foot container.”

He confesses to being what the Brits would call a water rat, growing up around a marina, painting and cleaning boats.

“Water and surfing and boating were part of the lifestyle.” And when asked about his current home in Florida the first thing he mentions is his 34-foot Searay. “I really love Florida because it reminds me of Queensland.”

Fenwick was in Jamaica last month as part of a grand

tour of his company’s

regional offices, including

Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. In Kingston he

visited the Queen’s Warehouse operations at Norman

Manley Airport.

“The Customs officers don’t have PC screens at their desks,” he notes. “And they don’t have scanners.”

This is crucial for DHL. The company is able to track every package in its system and knows when it’s being picked up, transferred or unloaded.

“We know where things are. We provide information about shipments coming in to Customs before they arrive,” he says, which should cut the time it takes to get them processed and into the hands of customers.

But although he offered to bring some of his IT people down to advise, getting the infrastructure right will take investment, he admits.

What DHL can do is to advise local officials. “We can be a bridge,” he says.

“We can tell them what we do in other countries.”

Fenwick’s previous post was in the Asia-Pacific region, where he helped DHL to take advantage of the rapid economic development. “I see Latin America as a little bit like that in the next decade,” he says, pointing to the growing, well-educated middle classes in South American countries. “As the third world becomes more confident with itself, it starts to trade within itself.”

And that should mean more business for countries such as Jamaica. “Within the Caribbean, we’re looking at our air network,” he said.

Developments in the wider DHL network will also benefit Jamaica, he said. The company’s new flight from Hong Kong to Los Angeles cuts a day off transhipment times. “We’re looking at how we can bring that connection down to Mexico and the Caribbean.”

The company has been through some tough times in recent years. First it was bought by Deutsche Post, Germany’s privatised post office. Then it decided to get out of the US market, where it was running a distant third behind rivals UPS and FedEx.

“It was the right decision,” says Fenwick. “Running a domestic service is very focused on the day-to-day, unlike international. Frankly they’re quite different animals. Our expertise is in customs and melding how you work in China, the USA and Jamaica.”