Out of the woods

Updated

Beetles, worms and lizards — Gregory Smith ate just about anything to stay alive in the forest. From a homeless hermit to a university lecturer, he's proven you can overcome anything in your search for a safe place.

He walked into the forest at dusk as the rain started to pelt down. He crouched on the ground and pulled his old Driza-Bone up over his head and watched the leeches swelling on his legs. He had nowhere else to go.

At some point, the rain stopped. The clouds rolled away and he could see stars stretched across the sky. Finally, he fell asleep.

In the morning, his mind was quiet. There were no voices, no traffic noises, no interference. Just the soft sounds of the forest.

He remembers snippets — eating a python one day, killing bats with a slingshot the next. Eventually, he says, he ate anything that crawled. "I've eaten beetles, worms, grubs, witchetty grubs. I started hunting land mullet, lizards, any lizard."

Gregory Smith credits the reflective time he spent in the forest as pivotal in his eventual recovery from a traumatic past. His story shows that even the most damaged among us can return to life.

There were times that Gregory, now 63, thought he might die in the forest. "I never would've picked this outcome."

A 'sociopath' at 14

Through the 1960s, Gregory Smith's father cast a shadow of fear over the family home in Tamworth. "There were horrendous punishments," recalls Wendy Smith, one of Gregory's five sisters.

When Bruce Smith came after the kids, Gregory's mother, Beryl, did little to protect them. Gregory's oldest sister, Glenda West, recalls her first "lesson in life". She was six when her mother punched her in the stomach for accidentally overfilling the washing machine.

In 1965, Gregory's mother took her children to St Patrick's orphanage in Armidale. She returned six weeks later and picked them up, then five months after that she put them back in the orphanage. Gregory was only 10.

He was left traumatised by the orphanage experience and its archaic disciplinary practices; he says he would sometimes be locked in a closet for "non-compliance" for up to eight hours a day.

By the time he was 15, Gregory was in and out of juvenile justice centres. He was told he had a low IQ and a state psychiatrist diagnosed him as "a personality disordered adolescent, sociopathic type".

By his mid 20s, Gregory's life was a disaster. For a while he was homeless and lived on the streets around Woolloomooloo in inner-Sydney. He was drinking heavily and would lash out at the slightest provocation.

Gregory had turned into his father. "It's like a thief in the night, alcoholism, it takes away certain things, and you don't even realise they're gone until you want to use them — tolerance, patience, friendliness."

He would spend the next 20 years battling anger, addiction and one crisis after another: in one short period between 1979 and 1980 his marriage collapsed, he burnt down his home, spent time at a psychiatric hospital, and had a near-fatal car crash.

The end of the road at 41kg

In 1989, Gregory ambled up a ridgeline road in the hills near Mullumbimby. "I'd exhausted all my options," he says. "This dirt road seemed like a good idea at the time." At the end of the road, he stumbled into Goonengerry National Park, a 442-hectare wet sclerophyll forest. "I ended up there because I had really nowhere else to go," says Gregory. He wasn't being "kicked in the guts" or told to move on.

In time, he built a fire pit and fashioned a small table and workbench out of bush rocks.

"There was no need to rush in the forest," says Gregory. "Over time this developed into a sense of, 'I'm OK here'. I have a certain amount of control over what's happening in here," he says.

He found a water supply — a small creek that tumbled off a cliff into the valley below. He built a log bed with a mattress of ferns on a slab of lava rock.

Gregory's memory gives him trouble and initially he claimed to have lived in the forest for 10 years. Local landowners who remember him estimate he was there for far less time — perhaps 12 months. Gregory says he can't remember. For years he'd abused alcohol and drugs and, in the forest, those habits brought on periods of psychosis that destroyed his physical and mental health.

After being hit by a car on a remote northern New South Wales road in 1999, Gregory was admitted to a mental health unit. He weighed just 41.5 kilograms.

On a sunny afternoon in 1999, after being released from hospital, Gregory sat on a park bench on the Tweed River. His backpack was full of supplies — tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, bourbon and a cask of wine. He was 45 and the past decade of his life was a blur.

At that moment, sitting beside the river, the stakes were high: Gregory could continue on a path of alcoholism, addiction and certain death. Or he could choose something else, life, even though he had no sense of what that might look like.

He remembers sitting there and thinking about the life he'd led, full of conflict and rage. "All my life, I thought I was fighting other people. I was fighting myself," he says. "I thought, 'I have to change who I am'."

Gregory got up and walked away. He left his backpack behind.

In 2002, he enrolled in a course at Southport TAFE. His father had pulled him out of school when he was 14. Now he was determined to finish his high school education. His TAFE teacher Pamela Lyon remembers Gregory as a student who had little faith in his abilities. "He cried one day," says Ms. Lyon. "He cried and then he got on with the job and he learned what he had to do in order to succeed."

Ms Lyon recalls that, at some points during his studies, Gregory lived in his car at the beach and did his homework sitting in the sand dunes.

"I found myself moving my possessions into the sand dunes, closer to TAFE," says Gregory. "When people would ask me where I lived, I'd just say 'Y'know, ah yeah, down next to the beach.'" — Gregory Smith

A place to call home

In late 2003, at the age of 48, Gregory graduated from an adult tertiary preparation class.

But his struggles were not over and he was frequently unmoored by dissociative episodes.

Psychotherapy has given him techniques to manage the episodes. If he dissociates at home, he focuses his attention on objects that are dear to him — his didgeridoo, laptop, a notebook and a set of marbles. And he has other points of focus now too. In 2008 he graduated from Southern Cross University with a Social Science degree. He majored in sociology in an attempt to understand why he hated society so much.

Gregory could never have predicted where that subject choice would take him. During research for an assignment, he came across the 2004 Senate report on Forgotten Australians. The report details the physical, sexual and psychological abuse estimated to have been suffered by up to 500,000 children in institutional or out-of-home care through the 20th century. "I was stunned," says Gregory. "That's me."

For his thesis, titled 'I would like to tell you a story, but I'm not sure if I can', he interviewed others like him who had been through St Patrick's orphanage. He received first-class honours and went on to gain a PhD.

"I didn't always have the language to tell my story," says Gregory. "And it's through education and especially sociology that I was able to find that language."

It is only when Gregory started full-time teaching work at the university and moved into an office near his PhD supervisors that he stopped believing he was a sociopath. Until recently, he kept a framed copy of the state psychiatrist's letter with the sociopath diagnosis next to his PhD testamur.

'A catalyst for bringing us together'

Once a year Gregory and three of his five sisters rent a house at Woolgoolga on the New South Wales mid north coast. They eat fish and chips by the water, grocery shop together and take turns cooking. It is their way of reclaiming the quiet time they never had together as children. "I think it's very fair to say that Gregory's recovery was a catalyst for bringing us together," says Glenda.

But her brother is still a nomad. He divides his time between Southern Cross campuses and a 25-acre bush block near Grafton that he bought just after he started his PhD. Owning a piece of land has meant that now he always has somewhere to go. "Even if it was only a tent to put up there, nobody could kick me off it."

Gregory finally had somewhere to call home. And hanging on a hat stand in a corner of Gregory's two-room shack is a Driza-Bone.

"Today I don't think I'm a sociopath. Today I don't have to live up to it. I'm just another human being, do the best I can." — Gregory Smith

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Topics: human-interest, homelessness, drug-use, mullumbimby-2482, armidale-2350, tamworth-2340

First posted