Category: Media
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Australian Story – 18 months on
Published on 12 December 2019 – the final episode of the year. This powerful story explores how Gregory is now using his voice to help others sleeping rough. Watch it here.
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ABC News feature – The homeless hermit who came out of the wild
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…
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Australian Story – Out of the Woods
Introduced by David Shoebridge, NSW Greens From a homeless alcoholic living in the wild to academic success and a book deal, Out of the Woods tells the inspiring comeback story of forest-dweller Gregory Smith. When he left school at 14, dogged by the crushing assessment that he was “functioning at the lower level of the…
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Danish newspaper story
I have no idea what the words say, I do like that my image is larger than Putin and Trump.
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Podcast – Man 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? Published July 10, 2018 – listen to the episode…
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Article in The Guardian
Published in June 2018, you can read the full article here. There are as many pathways to homelessness as there are homeless people in the world. For some, it’s a sudden freefall triggered by a lost job, a broken home life or some other seismic personal upheaval. For others the road to sleeping rough winds…
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The Sydney Morning Herald – Gregory Smith: Survival instinct
Published on June 8, 2018 (also appeared in the SMH Spectrum Magazine June 9-10, 2018). Read the full article here. On a day of dark clouds, Gregory Peel Smith took his pack and walked out of Mullumbimby, climbed a mountain, hit a dirt road and wondered what was at the end of it. He was…
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Life Matters: How Gregory Smith lost and found himself
Interview on the ABC from June 5, 2018 – listen here.
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Newcastle Herald – The life-story of the man who staggered out of the rainforest
The extraordinary life story of Gregory Smith, a homeless man who lived as a hermit in a NSW rainforest for 10 years, has been told with the help of a local scribe. Former Ulladulla Times columnist Craig Henderson was asked to co-write Smith’s memoir, Out Of The Forest, after the remarkable tale first came to…
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WA Joondalup Times – Dr Gregory Smith to talk about memoir Out of the Forest
Published May 23, 2018. GREGORY Smith had a childhood filled with violence, abuse and confusion. His father was a violent alcoholic and his mother was hardly the maternal type. As children, Smith and his four sisters were taken to an orphanage in Armidale, NSW where they remained for the next two years until reclaimed by…
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The Leader – Gregory’s journey from the orphanage to the jungle and to university
Published on May 18, 2018 – read the full article here. It has been a long journey for author Gregory P. Smith. It includes being raised in an orphanage to living homeless on the streets and battling drug addiction, going off the grid in the jungle for ten years and finally attending to university, first as…
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Northern Star Lismore – The amazing life of Doctor Gregory Smith
Published 26 September 2016. One of the country’s “Forgotten Australians” has graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy in Lismore, after surviving institutional child abuse in the sixties. Dr Gregory Smith, who has testified for the ongoing Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, spent 10 years as a hermit in the bush…
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Conversations With Richard Fidler
Dr Gregory’s story lay dormant for many years until a chance offer to appear on ABC Radio’s Conversations with Richard Fidler, in July of 2016. This Conversation is also available on CD.
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The Daily Telegraph – Academic highlights Forgotten Australians
Published on August 6, 2015 – read the full article here. Gregory Smith was a homeless man sitting on a park bench beside a building site in Tweed Heads when he had an epiphany. He suddenly saw that his future could be a different landscape from his past. Last week the Southern Cross University academic,…
Dr Gregory P. Smith OAM 