aussie bush – your mind is all

I was broke. For 5 years my home was a leaky old caravan parked outside its owner’s home at the end of a dead end street in Hepburn Springs in Victoria’s Central Highlands. I was at a loose end. I started to look into the fascinating stories of the Gold Rush in the area. I found a largely untold history of Swiss-Italian migrants who came out in the 1850s to try their luck on the goldfields. Many stayed on. Fresh pasta was still on the menu at many local restaurants. The local butcher still sold the real Italian bull-boar sausages. Many of the original typical rural Swiss or Italian farmhouses were still working farms, others lay in ruins. I wrote the story and it was published in the local newspaper. The owner of the General Store picked up my story and started a Swiss-Italian Festa with street marches, history displays, even a pasta sauce recipe competition. After 30 years it’s still an annual tourist event in the Central Highlands of Victoria, Australia. ‘Italy In The Aussie Bush’ is chapter 8 of 30 chapters in ‘Man Steps Off Planet’. We don’t need money to make miracles happen.

After a three hour grilling in the building right behind me, there I stood on a busy city street, stripped bare.

My freelance copywriting business of 15 years and I had just been officially declared bankrupt.

My personal documents, passport, business files, banking records and cheque books, credit cards, pretty much everything that represented who I was, and who I might have been, I’d surrendered to the Official Receiver.

In that moment I had ceased to exist.

I felt had been stripped of my identity and I was nobody.

This was an emptiness I could never forget.

I just stood there, in shock, watching people rushing off to their homes and families at the end of their day.

I had neither.

I really thought, in that moment, my life was over.

Bankrupt.

It’s something that only happens to other people. But in the last hour or so, I’d become one.

Order your copy now.

The sun was setting as I strolled to my car which I was expecting to lose as well.

There it was parked at the kerb like every other car – except for one noticeable difference.

Mine was the family sedan loaded to the roof with all my worldly belongings.

But for pots and pans hanging out the windows it could well have been a gypsy caravan.

Which is precisely where I ended up, living in a friend’s leaky old caravan parked by the roadside outside their home in the Aussie bush.

Defeated.

How could I have known that this would be the start of an amazing new life, a romantic paranormal historical world adventure following on the trail of a true mystery worthy of a Hollywood movie.

Now you can read the book ‘Back to the Wall: A Fun Spiritual Adventure’.