The adult Smith drifted in and out of casual jobs, or was fired. He got into the habit of provoking fights, so the physical pain would distract him from the emotional pain. "When this label was presented to me, it gave me a licence to be angry and violent," he says. Many years later, he was re-diagnosed as suffering from depression and PTSD, but the sociopath label had already done its damage. A doctor examined him and said he was "a sociopathic type". Everything he did in later life, big or small, was a sin: alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, thieving, fighting, trying to kill his father, trying to kill himself (a particularly bizarre episode where he set fire to the house where he lived).Īfter various run-ins with the police, the teenage boy was made a ward of state. The experience left him with a load of Catholic guilt. When he was 10, he was left for 16 months at St Patrick's Orphanage in Armidale, where the Sisters of Mercy proved merciless in their beatings. Young Gregory thought every family must be like that. Meanwhile his alcoholic father was regularly beating his wife and children, and his mother beat the five daughters. It began when he was a small child and had nightmares about being chased by a huge rolling ball. I'm awestruck at what can happen in a person's life – if you allow it."Īll his life, Smith says, he's been running away, without knowing where to run to. Does he pinch himself sometimes and wonder if all that has gone before is true? "No," he says. Smith has spent most of his life on a disastrous trajectory that began with violence in the home. It's hard to believe he left school at 14, when he was diagnosed as "functioning at the lower level of the dull range". Everything he says reveals a fierce intelligence, and he uses the sophisticated vocabulary of a highly educated academic. Speaking on the phone, Smith sounds relaxed and eloquent, with flashes of humour. But today, at 63, Gregory Peel Smith has a PhD, teaches in the Social Sciences at Southern Cross University, lives on the New South Wales South Coast with his third wife, Lizzie, and has produced a memoir, Out of the Forest, about his extraordinary journey. Such a tale should surely end in tragedy.
Each time he left, he couldn't get back to the forest soon enough.
He got himself a reputation as the local hairy wild man some of the Byron Bay hippies thought he was Jesus. Smith made occasional forays there, to trade his pot for food and supplies. But however bad it got, the outside world was worse.
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