I was born in 1961 in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, to upper-middle-class parents. Seemingly unwanted from the beginning, I suffered severe abuse for the first fourteen years of my life. The reasons behind being unwanted remain a mystery to this day, or at least to me they remain a mystery. My father (“the old man”), who was a hard-headed, abusive, racist drunk, (behind closed doors), ran a large international construction company and had many powerful friends as a result. His boss (Uncle Wilfred), was a sadistic, drunken child molester, who played a far to significant roll in my early life as my “baby sitter.” My mother, I guess, tried, but was too weak to combat the strength and force of the old man in order to protect me, so she simply gave up. On my fourteenth birthday, I’d finally had enough of being savaged and made a bid for freedom. I hitch-hiked more than four-thousand kilometres, alone, and found myself living in a cave in Marble Bar in the far north-west of Western Australia. I had a morbid fear of dark-skinned people due to the old man’s racism and hatred of them. He said they were “all cannibals and would eat me, so, if you ever meet a good one, shoot him before he turns bad.” Unbeknown to me, Marble Bar, in those days, (1975) was an entirely aboriginal town. The first people I saw were three aboriginal men, and I ran from them and ended up hiding in the cave. Several months later a remnant group of Nyamal tribesmen, who still lived their traditional nomadic lifestyle after avoiding integration, found and forcibly removed me from the cave. I lived with them, happily (once I knew I’d not become a meal) for five years in the desert and am, to my knowledge, the only white man to become a fully initiated member of the tribe. Then decades later I met my beautiful wife, Delia, not in Australia as one might expect, but, in the Philippines which is where we now live with our eleven-year-old daughter and our four adopted sons.
