I Didn’t See This Coming.

Just when I was down-and-out, when my freelance copywriting business of 10 years had hit the skids, I went bankrupt.

Strange things started to happen.

What was going on?

You’d think I had started a new life without intending to.

New things, new ideas, new open doors were rushing towards me.

Which is where my story begins.

Right here.

My first thought was survival.

I needed a place to live.

Cheap.

I had nothing.

I’d been offered a small Victorian holiday flat in a quiet springs resort in the Wombat Forest about one and a half hours from Melbourne.

I packed all my stuff into my car and went to the Central Highlands.

My life, as I knew it, was over.

I arrived with nothing, to nothing, with nothing to do.

Soon I was offered an old caravan for almost nothing.

I moved in and lived there for the next 5 years.

Parked precariously outside my benefactor’s home in the hills I could relax at last.

He created evocative airbrush paintings under the house.

She was a devoted follower of Sai Baba, her Indian Hindu guru.

An interesting couple.

We had many inspiring conversations.

The kind of mental and spiritual stimulus I’d been missing in the corporate world.

It was my new life among the sweet smells of Nature and the soothing sounds of the birds and the waterfall outside the caravan.

I felt at home there to ponder my fate and, well, to recover from the stresses of the past.

Then something happened that woke me from my reflective mood.

A file of documents about an historical mystery fell into my lap.

There was a friendly ghost from the past.

I’d been given, very mysteriously, a new challenge and my mind was off again.

And that mysterious file was the start of a new adventure that had my mind racing in a whole new direction I had not anticipated.

No way.

Which is where the intriguing material from the mystery file grabbed my attention.

Which soon became the focus of a new and amazing true story.

A 250-page book, a true story.

I’ve given my book a knockout title.

A very different title for a very different kind of book.

Of survival without money.

Of the paranormal.

And of the romantic.

Of a hushed up secret from the early days of British exploration around Australia and New Zealand.

One reviewer calls it “fun and entertaining”.

It’s an exciting story that took me to the other side of the planet chasing clues to a true historical romantic mystery across 5 countries.

I’ll tell you more next time.

Watch for my next post or follow me at aussiescribe.com.

Love and Peace,

Neil

Unsung Heroes From Aussie Italian Gold Rush Miners to Sailing Ship Mysteries & a Lost British Prince In Aus.

It’s the Gold Rush era of California, New Zealand and southern Australia. They came from the Ticino region in the south of Switzerland and the foothills of the Alps in the north of Italy in the 1850s hoping to strike gold. Many sailed out on borrowed money expecting to strike it rich and make their fortunes in the Central Highlands of Victoria, Australia, where I lived for 5 years. Most didn’t.

But hey, were they unsung heroes who left behind a permanent legacy of Italy in the Aussie bush?

There was a ghost. A clue led me back to a fashionable Catholic widow over 200 years ago in Regency England who secretly married the heir to the British throne, the Prince of Wales. I think it was a legitimate marriage which, if proven by the other clues I uncovered, would have cast serious doubts on events of that time. If there were legitimate children then where are they? Who were they? And how did they change history, if at all?

But hey, was the first born son an unsung hero who was sent secretly to Australia and became the enigmatic Commander of the ‘Lady Nelson’?

And there’s more.

Explore.

Illustrated: The tale of the mutiny on the Bounty remains one of the most intriguing stories of adventure on the high seas more than 200 years after the ill fated voyage that made Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian legends. But what of the unsung heroes (like the unknown British sailor without a past who became Commander of the ‘Lady Nelson’) who sailed with Bligh on the ‘Bounty’?

Neil.

How Miracles Happen.

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.

Read What I Did To Survive Loss.

Sheltered under tall eucalypts my home was a friend’s old caravan lazing outside the gate of their home at the end of the road in a small country town in the hills. Its condition and location were a metaphor for how things had worked out for me.

The roof leaked.

The water pump was broken.

The gas stove didn’t work.

Both tires were flat.

The whole thing felt like it might collapse in a heap at any moment. Yet this had become my home and within its thin walls was stored everything I owned.

The scents of nature – pine mixed with eucalypt and, on cooler days, the smoke of wood fires – drifted through on the gentle autumn breezes as if there were no walls at all.

The birds were my neighbors. Squawking galas. Screeching white cockatoos. Cawing crows. Gossiping magpies. And an occasional laughing kookaburra.

I could hear the endless rushing of water from the creek which had cut a deep gully beside the caravan. It was here along Doctor’s Gully some 150 years earlier that Swiss-Italian immigrants first struck gold.

Not so for me.

I’d stand on the footbridge outside my door and be mesmerized by the small waterfall and wonder how in hell I got here. As for the familiar world I knew, well, I’d had no choice but to leave it all behind me. I found myself in another world, a stranger where I didn’t belong.

Or so I thought.

I’d ‘escaped’ to the town of Hepburn Springs, a place of healing to the local aborigines in the Central Highlands of Victoria, Australia, to see if I could do the same.

I was still haunted by the memory of a year ago standing, stunned, on a city street in Melbourne in the fading autumn light. Following a three hour grilling on the ninth floor of the building right behind me, my freelance business of fifteen 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 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.

There’s a Buddhist aphorism:

“You have come here to find what you already have.”

Anyone can replicate my solution to losing everything.

I’ve recorded the whole experience in detail in my book ‘Back to the Wall’. To read more or order your copy click here.

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