‘Out Of The Forest’ by Gregory P. Smith. A Book Review

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Most people who follow me on Social Media, and those who read my Blog ‘My Life and Rhymes; A Life in Two  Halves’ would find some common ground reading this engrossing biography ‘Out Of The Forest; The true story of a recluse’ written by Gregory P. Smith, about his childhood filled with violence and sexual abuse. And if that wasn’t soul searing enough, his mother one day out of the blue, piled Gregory and his sisters into the family car on the pretext of going on a road trip to visit an aunt they had never heard of. It eventually became apparent to the children that their mother had ‘dumped’ them like so much household garbage, at some sort of institution which resembled a small castle. She then hastily drove off never to be seen or heard of again for some time.

Once inside the orphanage, governed by the Catholic order of ‘Mercy’ nuns, Gregory is immediately separated from his sisters. The siblings do not see each other again while incarcerated in the orphanage, and Gregory soon realizes that the nuns hate all children, but more especially boys. Gregory is regularly sexually abused and humiliated by teenage girls who as ‘inmates’ have to bath the boys. He experiences, and witnesses, the cruel deprivation and humiliation of boys at the orphanage, particularly those boys who wet their beds.

When Gregory and his sisters are collected from the orphanage by their mother and taken home, they find everything is as it was before, only worse. Their father is even more violent after long sessions drinking at the pub…one of Gregory’s sisters later recalls that often after their father had severely beaten Gregory, usually while he was trying to protect his sisters from their father’s wrath, it left blood on the walls and her brother covered in blood. Teenaged Gregory finally ran away from home to live on the streets.

The next few years are spent living on the streets, stealing money and food, and running from the police. At one stage Gregory was incarcerated in a youth correction facility. As he grew older, his eruptions of violent anger involved him in countless drunken brawls. Occasionally he was able to find employment, at times earning a reasonable amount of money, but his demons wouldn’t let him be; his childhood trauma ran too deep.

While living on the streets, he mostly kept hunger at bay by rummaging through rubbish bins for discarded food. Calling himself ‘William H. Power‘ had enabled Gregory to hide from who he really was (albeit superficially),  and where he came from. There was too much of his past shadowing him in and around Tamworth where he was born so he wanted to put as much distance between that town and his battered mind and body as he could. There was also the matter of his juvenile police record; he didn’t want anyone to alert the police as to his whereabouts.

Homeless Gregory morphs into an anonymous, yet familiar vagabond wandering around  towns and byways; thumbing rides, walking for hundreds of  kilometres along lonely country roads, and skirting isolated homesteads. One day, while Gregory was sitting in one of the   parks he frequented, wearing disheveled clothing and sporting a long, scraggly beard; talking philosophy with a group of Indigenous people and ‘hippy backpacker types’ it seemed that he was creating quite the impression.  A few people believed he was Jesus Christ, returned to earth. “Come and listen to this! Come and listen. You should hear what he’s got to say! Hey, man, it’s Jesus! He’s back!” they shouted. He admits he was drinking port and smoking pot at the time:

“I was much more comfortable being plain old William H. Power than I was being Jesus H. Christ… While I was only a god for one night, there were plenty of other times I found myself around a fire on the beach with a group of people letting my inner guru out. The dope would flow and they’d inevitably start to share their thoughts on the deep stuff. Metaphysics is big in Byron Bay. Time and time again I’d be the centre of attention, the group in my thrall with the added drama of being able to see my mountain [up in the rain forest]  from the Byron Bay beach.“

Surely there is not such a great leap from there in the park, preaching to followers, to being a lecturer at a university?

However, Gregory spends most of the following years, in varying states of oblivion, homeless and later in the rain forest, most of the time spaced out on drugs and grog. There is a future episode which brings Gregory’s homeless and aimless life into sharp focus: he discovers, following a long period of socialization, an official record of his marriage to a woman, of whom he has no recollection, much less the actual marriage and later, the divorce.

The peace and solitude of the rainforest in northern New South Wales keeps calling  Gregory back and he subsequently makes himself a  permanent home there for more than a decade, where he survived mostly on bush tucker. He built a bed made from ferns and established a constant campfire.  He had decided earlier on not to kill any more animals for food after he had killed and eaten a small wallaby he caught in a trap. The guilt got to him; he missed the little creature which he often spied wandering around his camp. From that point on his health began to deteriorate rapidly.

The long process of rehabilitation back into human society had its genesis in an epiphany which the hermit experiences while lying beside his campfire, in a near comatose state, suffering from malnutrition and long-term gastroenteritis. His ancestors visit him, and while sitting around the camp fire, they tell him ancestral stories and then finally cajole him into leaving the forest and getting help. Otherwise, they caution him sternly, he will die.

With a mind cloaked in a dense fog, Gregory has no memory as to how he managed to walk out of the forest and find help; he had lost track of time and found it difficult to concentrate on anything at all. His body was emaciated and poisoned by rotten grog, drugs, and lack of food. His ancestors wouldn’t let him rest and hassled him with ghostly conversation.

After a long battle and considerable help from many people along the arduous road to recovery, Gregory finally achieves success as a scholar eventually gaining  a PhD in Social Sciences.  He is later employed as a university lecturer.  Oh how far this remarkable man has travelled.

The author informs the reader that he chose Social Sciences as the subject of his thesis because he wanted to study how human society actually functioned. It had been a mystery to him up to that time.

-Anne Frandi-Coory.  26 February 2020