In front of a raucous partisan crowd of around 20,000, the former Chantry High School pupil was thoroughly outboxed by his more experienced Australian opponent and found himself 8-1 down going into the 10th round.
The 30-year-old landed a trademark KO power punch to raise the roof, claim the WBA Interim World Heavyweight title and move onto a record of 19-0-1 (18 KOs).
Put to Wardley that this fight had been dubbed 'Running towards adversity', he joked: "Running into punches more like!"
He continued: "Look, I said I'm not the finished article. I haven't got everything nailed down, everything perfect, everything all ticked off.
"I'm still very much learning on the job, which is a funny thing to say given I'm 20 fights in and interim world champion.
"Justice has more amateur fights than I've even had fights ever in my life. He's been boxing since he was eight years old. I've been boxing for about eight, nine years.
"I've got to learn and these fights make me better. We saw how much I took from the first Frazer (Clarke) fight (12 round draw) and how I took that into the second one (first round knockout).
"That's what I'll do with this one. The lessons learned in this fight against someone with his skills, some of his attributes, some of his hand speed, is stuff I'll take and learn and build on."
Asked what his overriding emotions were, he replied: "Relief! No, look, it was elation.
"I was unhappy going through the fight with the way I was performing performance wise. I'm much better than that. I do have a way better boxing skills than I showed on the night tonight.
"But sometimes you've just got to do what you've got to do to win. It's not always going to be perfect. I had to figure things out on the fly and grit through it.
"I had a quiet word to myself on the stall. I haven't got here by feeling sorry for myself or being annoyed with myself."