Gregory P. Smith - Out of the Forest

For ten years a man calling himself Will Power lived in near-total isolation in northern New South Wales, foraging for food, eating bats and occasionally trading for produce.

But who was this mysterious man who roamed the forest and knew all of its secrets and riddles? Some people thought he might be Jesus. Others feared he was a more sinister figure.

The truth was that he was neither miraculous nor malevolent, but he was, most certainly, gifted. And when he finally emerged from the forest, emaciated and close to death, he was determined to reclaim his real name and give society another chance.

Today, Dr Gregory Peel Smith, who left school at the age of fourteen, has a PhD and teaches in the Social Sciences at university. His profoundly touching and uplifting memoir is at once a unique insight into how far off track a life can go and powerful reminder that we can all find our way back if we pause for a moment in the heart of the forest.

I woke up on my back with a large snake on my chest. Surely it was going to sink its fangs into my throat and leave me to die in the ferns and the dirt.

Id slept in enough roadside ditches to know I shared Australia with an all-star cast of nasties, not least taipans and eastern brown snakes. Theyre pretty much a slithering death sentence, especially if you have the misfortune of waking alone in a forest with one on top of you.

I cant say that my life flashed before my eyes that night as I lay there frozen, but even if it had I probably would have looked away such was the waste it had been. One thing was certain, though: I wasnt yet ready to die. I stilled every cell while the snake continued to explore my body and after minutes that felt like years its cold, scaly weight slipped off my left flank.

Cautiously I sucked in some air, rose to my feet, took a burning stick from the campfire and waved it around like a homeless Indiana Jones. There, on the forest floor near the edge of my camp, I saw it: a huge diamond python. One hundred per cent non-venomous. Just passing through.

The snake didnt stand a chance as I lunged and gripped tight behind its jaws. Dinner! I hadnt eaten in days. My terror was replaced by excitement as its body whipped and curled in the night air. I found my pocket knife, hacked the wide, flat head off the twisting creature and slung its body in the branches of a bush to deal with later.

I loaded up the fire with plenty of wood for the rest of the night and in the flickering amber I gave solemn thanks. Id only been living in the rainforest for a few months but Id developed a reverence for the natural world and deep regard for the spirituality of all things. I told the snake I was sorry that Id had to kill it and how grateful I was that its flesh would sustain me. I vowed to never forget it.

I woke again just before sunrise eager to return to the business of the snake. The rewards for keeping my cool during the horrors of the night were even more apparent in the grey dawn. Suddenly I had at least a few days of food and Id obtained an item of potential value the scaly skin. Id also been given something mystical and immensely powerful. Namely, snake blood.

After carefully separating the reptile into its component parts of skin, blood, meat and bone, I spent the rest of the day harvesting fern leaves for the coming nights bed and gathering wood for the fire. Later on, when the sun slipped behind the mountains to the west, I threaded strips of snake onto sharpened skewers Id made from gum-tree twigs, and dangled them in the flames. As I chewed on the meat and gazed exhausted into the dancing flames, I had no idea I had just opened the door to a nightmare more frightening than any giant serpent. And it felt as if it might never end.

When I was a little boy I had a recurring nightmare about a huge ball. The damned thing would chase me through whatever dreamscape I happened to be trapped in and no matter how fast I ran, I could never get far enough ahead to feel safe. I was always on the brink of being crushed.

As is so often the way, my dreams simply reflected my waking anxiety. According to my mother I was two years old when my father picked me up by one foot and flung me head-first into the lounge-room wall. My left eardrum ruptured and I temporarily lost hearing in my right side, too. At least thats how Mum told the story I was too young to remember.

Whether it happened or not, the salient thing about that nugget of Smith family history is that an act of brutality against a toddler fitted so easily into our overall story of abuse and dysfunction. Maybe it was an exaggeration, perhaps it was a bitter wifes tale, or maybe it happened exactly the way Mum described, but something bad happened to my head. Today I wear a hearing aid in my left ear as proof.

Violence was so common in our house that for a while I thought every father must beat his wife and children. The world terrified me. At bedtime Id gather my sheets around me and take refuge behind fabric walls. It was my fortress; a flannelette barricade that nobody could breach. Hollywood Westerns must have been big at the time because I armed myself with an imaginary rifle that had a wooden shoulder stock and Id shoot anyone or anything that came too close. Id circle the wagons in my mind, take aim from behind my pillow and boom !

When I wasnt getting flogged by Dad in one of his drunken rampages or defending my bed from imaginary raiders, I had to do nocturnal battle with that big rolling ball. My childhood, whether I was awake, asleep or somewhere in between, was like a never-ending bad dream.

Life began for me on the twentieth day of the fifth month in the common era of 1955. People do a double take when I say it like that, but its my way of stating for the record that Im not a Christian. I have no need, however, to qualify the place of my birth the City of Tamworth, nestled in the Peel Valley in the vast New England region of New South Wales.

I may not be religious but I am a Tamworth boy through and through. Dad was born there, as was his father, and his fathers father before that. In fact, we were once something of a pioneering family. Dads great-grandfather, William Joseph Smith, had been a man for his time. The son of an English Wesleyan minister whod arrived in the Colony on a ship full of convicts, William was the first of my paternal forebears born on Australian soil. Not content with life on the coast, he ventured inland from Sydney and fell in love with the riverside township of Tamworth in the 1870s. William was a tanner by trade and a progressive thinker whod become intrigued by the new-fangled idea of electric street lights. Back then, Australia was illuminated after sunset either by moonlight or, in some urban areas, gas-powered lamps.

William won a seat on the local council and lobbied fellow aldermen that Tamworth deserved better. He faced down the naysayers for years and on 9 November 1888, half the town crowded around their newly constructed power plant to watch the mayors wife turn on the lights. With the twist of a golden key Tamworth entered the history books as the first city in Australia indeed in the entire southern hemisphere to flood its streets after dark with the reassuring glow of electric light. William was the toast of the town.