the making of men

Tell us about your childhood.

I grew up in Melbourne in a pretty standard family. Things started getting interesting for me around age twelve or thirteen. The first thing that happened was that my mother got very unwell with an autoimmune disease, and there was a serious concern that she was going to die but it wasn’t actually talked about within the family. There was a lot of internalising, and that was very difficult but not talked about and not supported.

The second thing that happened was my father, who would tell me how to live my life and what I should do. That became an issue for me, and I just didn’t want to hear that from my father. So I basically stopped asking him questions or talking to him.

The third significant thing that happened was that a mentor came into my life, a friend of the family, a man who used to take me fishing and who I could talk to about anything. He was quite a colourful character. And I was just fascinated and could listen for hours.

The other thing about my childhood was that I was at an all-boys school, which I found difficult. I wasn’t part of the group. I wasn’t happy. Girls were sort of somewhere a million miles away, on the other side of a big fence. That seemed harsh and cruel. I remember thinking there should be more than this. I felt like I was in prison and just waiting for the day when I could get out of there.

I clearly remember walking out of my last exam at the end of Year 12, saying to myself that life’s never going to be the same, and it’s going to be significantly better, and it was.

What did you do straight after school?

I went overseas for a year. I went to Israel on a leadership training program, and I found myself with 180 kids my age, from all over the world. It was the most extraordinary year of my life.

I was living out of home. I was free. It was the first time in my life I could be me. And we were overseas and didn’t have to study for exams. Learning all sorts of interesting stuff and travelling.

Then I came back to Australia and that was probably one of my worst life experiences, in many ways. I’d actually been through a rite of passage, and no one acknowledged it. They all saw me as the same person who’d left a year earlier, and inside I’m sort of screaming, “I’ve changed! I’m different! I’ve grown up!”

I thought it was only me. Since then, I’ve met up with a lot of people I went away with, and I’ve spoken to hundreds of people at the courses we do. And I hear this same