Posted Mon 3 Sep 2018.

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.