Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being with me here. Thanks to Mason and his family for having us here. I feel very comfortable in this house, actually. Might be a wog thing. 

Sorry… Yeah, it’s true. It’s true. It’s all very familiar. Look, and you know, also thank you to Center for Stories for thinking I was interesting enough to have anything to share with you all. You know, we were given the brief about talking about 2020 and reflections on 2020 and you know, at first that felt like a bit of a tall order cause I was like, well, 2020 is a pretty bloody weird year. 

I don’t really know what I’m going to say considering it was pretty good to me compared to a lot of other people. But if 2020 gave me nothing else, it certainly gave me time to reflect and it gave me time to reflect on just how the hell we got here. You know, where. Like eating a bat shuts down the world, people are fighting over toilet paper, you know, you know, where there’s enough people in the world that are convinced that a reality television celebrity and beauty pageant founder is the savior of the free world. 

And I, and I mean that without judgment, just kind of like, man, what a strange state of affairs. It made me really think hard about why, how and why people believe and do such wild things. And then, you know, being in Perth as well and being as fortunate as we’ve been, it’s a pretty safe distance to feel a bit smug.

You know, while people are storming the White House in like, you know, like in a raccoon hat and just being like, Oh man, what a bunch of weirdos. But before I could get really, too smug, 2020 kind of force-fed me a memory, that I’d long forgotten about. And If anything, it actually was one of the darkest periods of my own life and something that was so weird and strange. 

It potentially undermines any credibility I think I could have. So in 2012, I was almost ensnared in the grips of a fundamentalist sect, parading as a health retreat in the southern highlands of New South Wales. I should probably mention that it was a very strange time of my life as well. I was really fat. 

I was newly unemployed. I was really beyond depressed. I was quite heavily medicated. I was really fed up with failure and quite frankly, I was actually blind to a future worth fighting for at that stage. But, so to say that 2012 was rough for me would be an understatement. I really felt like I was teetering on the edge of my own sanity. 

So in my desperate quest to find a reason to even stay alive. I kept thinking about this health retreat that we drove past when I lived in Canberra. And it had this sign out the front that always caught my attention when we’d go visit the South Coast. And it had three words on it that I’ll never ever forget. 

A new beginning. Sounds really basic. But the reason that hit me so hard was because this whole idea of a big reset was something I was really obsessed with at that time. I just thought if I can just have enough time to just take time out of my life to get my shit together. And come back and engage into the real world, I’ll be okay. 

So, I thought that’s what they were going to give me. So, long story short, off I went, after having moved back here quite recently, I went back over to the East Coast. And before long, I was on a train from Sydney, back through those beautiful mountains where I saw this retreat. So, I get to this train station in the middle of nowhere, which is where we were going to get picked up. 

And I was kind of like, Oh, it’s beautiful. Pretty far out of civilization here, but cool, like it’s really pretty. I’m sure it’s really nice, and I was getting excited for waiting for this luxurious pickup. But the only person I saw at this train station was just what I described as this twiggy little man, with a station wagon. 

And I was like, okay. If he didn’t have the logo of the retreat on his jacket, I probably would have got back on that train. Because I was like, what the hell? Okay. But, I was a bit far gone at this stage, so I just went with it. And again, I was reasoning with myself. So I had a little bit of a red flag, but nothing too big. 

And I just told myself, Oh, settle, settle down. Like people are different out here and it’s cool. Like, you don’t know this person, so don’t judge. So I didn’t judge. Well, I did, but I, you know, I reserved, I held onto it for a bit. In our trip to the retreat, there was just this weird moment. I’m sure other people would think of it as just an innocuous chore that just had to be done. 

But we had to make a stop to the local shops to pick up just one onion. That was it. And I just remember thinking, actually I don’t even remember what I was thinking, but I remember something just being really uncomfortable about it. And maybe, aside from maybe being a judgmental little princess, I was probably more thinking, oh, it kind of signals something that’s a bit unprepared and uninspiring, to be honest. 

Maybe this experience is not necessarily going to shape up to what I thought it would be. Finally, we start driving to the retreat and I see that sign. I was like, yes, it’s actually going to start. And then we drive into the, down the driveway and it’s in this forest. And we just keep driving and driving and driving and driving and driving. 

And I just felt like it was, this driveway was going forever. And so it turns out the retreat was not too close to the front of the driveway. And I was just like, again, just… kind of taking it all in. I was probably just on autopilot talking to the twig man driving me and you know the canopy of the forest was just getting, providing more and more shade. It was just getting darker and it just felt like the world was closing in on me a little bit. Then we get to this little house and the house,  the house was just like a little homestead. 

It wasn’t derelict, but it just wasn’t inviting, you know It was just this very plain-looking small house. And again, I reason with myself just being like, oh look, I’m sure it’s nice on the inside, we walk inside and the only word I can really use to describe it is dull. It was beige, it was grey, it was all the shades of white you could imagine. 

All the rooms, all the doors to our rooms were lined up like we were walking through a hospital corridor. And again, I was just like, Oh, okay. Let’s just, you know, relax like I have barely been here a few minutes. Just go with it. Then, you know, we, we kind of put our bags down and we start to settle and we start to meet the people who would be looking after us and it wasn’t Like a suite of slick looking professionals or, you know, like wayfishing in fets. You’d see it at a beauty spa. It was the family of that twig man. So I was like, hang on, what? I didn’t see that in the promo material. What the hell is happening here? 

So there’s twig man. Then there’s his wife, who I would describe as, I’d describe as a cross between Terry Irwin and Katherine Knight. I don’t know if any of you know who Katherine Knight is. I dare you to look her up, but trigger warning. It’s pretty disturbing stuff. Then they had their son. 

Like an older, like a young man. He was kind of this off puttingly friendly but in a creepy way kind of young man. Otherwise harmless. But it was when he was stood next to his wife that that affability took on a really sinister tone. And it was the, the young, the young woman, the wife, the emaciated child bride, as I call her, that made the biggest impression on me. 

She really was just like this vortex of a person. Because she was just so meek, like she never made eye contact. She was always looking at the floor. She always had her hands crossed in front of her. She didn’t say anything, but like the silence and just like… the chasm, like, you know, the anti charisma she was radiating was actually just deafening and I was just kind of really taken aback by her anti presence, if we call it that. 

So I just thought, Oh my God, what is happening here? So I decided to take a little tour of the house and I spot a flat screen TV. I was like, Oh, cool. Some semblance of something I recognise and Scary Terry comes in and is like, that’s only for special viewings. And I was like, okay, not going to argue, you really scare me.

And then twig man was like, but actually if you really want to watch something, we’ve got a whole selection of things you can watch. It was two towering bookcases of pseudo scientific propaganda. Like it’s the only way I can describe it. And they were massive. And at that moment I felt like Samson, you know, from the Bible. Oh, is he from the Bible? I can’t remember. Mythological figure, Samson, you know, between two pillars, you know, those two, those towering bookcases became the pillars of my shame and the fear of harm. And I was holding them up and I was just trapped between them. And I thought if I move, my temple of sanity is going to collapse on me, I’ve just got to get through this somehow. 

So what follows next is just several groundhog days of being just this floating automaton through this. Weird retreat. You know, we had excessively long, excessively early, excessively long break of dawn walks. We had, you know, a meal regime that even, like a rabbit would twitch its nose at. Like, the hell, that’s not gonna keep anyone alive. 

There was so many, there’s so much time of enforced stillness in our room and just not being engaged with anything to do with the outside world. And there was, it was terrible reception there too. So we had our phones, but we could barely use them. I don’t actually really remember much of it, which, you know, when you’re talking about a cult like dynamic like that, people like want the gory details. 

But I think the trick is, is like… you’re more malleable when you’re bored. So, you know, they hook you in with the thrills, but you’re more malleable when it’s actually boring. You know, you’re so desperate to be molded or stimulated in some way. So it was five days of that. And I, all I remember now, and I still kind of feel it when I think about it is this massive tension headache that I was holding for about five days. 

Just everything, you know, from the waist up was just crushingly tense. You know, not to mention sort of the discomfort of, like, barely being fed, barely being allowed to do anything. But, you know, at that time, and again, because of the place in my life I was at, I was telling myself, well, you deserve this. 

Because, you were in bad enough shape here in the first place, and anything you do to change your life, it’s necessary. So, deal with it. Day six or day five comes to an end and it only occurred to me that I was actually sharing this experience with other people on that day. So yeah, we’ve been going through these whole, these things together and Yeah, it had only occurred to me like, Oh my God, there are actually five other people there. 

And we only really got to know each other on that last night before they were all going. You know, after dinner, we’d found ourselves all huddled in a room just talking and getting to know each other. And they were saying stuff like, you know, Oh my God, how weird is this family? Did you notice that when they said this? 

And you know, quite universally, they were like, Thank God we’re getting out of here. And then one of them turns to me and goes, like. I don’t know how you’re going to last three weeks because I was meant to stay a lot longer. And it turns out that statement was all I needed to have a full blown panic attack. 

Like, I don’t know what happened. I just started heaving. I couldn’t breathe. I was just in this spin cycle of emotions like rage, terror, fear, shame, despair, just over and over. One of the, the, one of my fellow group members had to bring me back to earth. She, she put her hand on my tummy and my head, took me through some breathing exercises just to get me to sort of not fly away. 

I was really, really, in a very tender spot and they could see like just how much I was suffering. So they begged me to leave with them the next day. So day six, crack of dawn, I hitched a ride with one of these guys and got back on that train back to Canberra and the conversation I was having with myself on the train was you idiot. 

Like, what did you think was going to happen? So it was a pretty intense experience. And you know what happened to me in Canberra is a whole other story, but you know the irony of something like this happening to me is not lost on me, you know as was brought up in my introduction. I’m a researcher in terrorism and extremism and I look at intense social groups like that all the time. 

So, we look at stuff about cults. We look at stuff about biker gangs. We look at stuff about, you know, all sorts of intense social groups that do things for a very specific purpose. And I’d essentially fallen trap to something like that too. But 2020 was the first time I’d actually made that through line between where I am now and that experience. 

And as a result of being able to make sense of that now, I took away two really big lessons from that. I can share now with more force than a textbook. And for free. So, lesson one really is this idea that, you know, intelligence and desperation doesn’t equal your ability to sniff out bullshit. It actually equals your ability to convince yourself you’re smelling roses. 

So, I always hear a lot of people say, you know, when we’re looking at people doing really wild things. You know, I wouldn’t do that. Like, oh, how could you be so stupid to fall for something like that? How could you, you know, I would have done this differently. I’d never let that happen to me. And I always think, well, actually in the right circumstances, no one is better. 

And the reason for that is essentially something called motivated reasoning. You know, and this is the idea that you’re motivated by your emotions in your reasoning. So it’s not so much about logically deducing. Information or the world around you. It’s more about using your emotions to justify, what it is that you’re trying to, uh, I guess fulfill in your own life. 

And it’s the same pattern we see in extremist groups, conspiracy theories, cults, terrorist groups. That motivated reasoning thing comes in up time and time again. And we often deride people for not being smart enough to see it. But really, it’s actually far more complex than that. And I’d even offer that. 

The smarter you are, potentially the bigger risk you are at falling to prey, falling prey to something like that. Because when you’ve got emotions that are so intense, you’ve got the vocabulary, the mental flexibility, you’ve got. You know, you know the right ways to make these things make sense. So, it’s an unsatisfactory answer, but it’s something that forces us to look a bit deeper. 

Because the things that attract people to these movements, it’s personal and social, more than the beliefs they supposedly stand for. So that’s one thing. And then the second thing that I learned was, even when something’s clearly wrong, sometimes you actually need permission to leave, either from the people around you. 

Or permission to leave or to come back to something and the fact of the matter is if I didn’t meet those kind of strangers that were able to tell me, hey, this situation is really messed up. I might have endured that unnecessarily and I, I can safely say I could have succumbed to a really sad common ending, let alone try and even begin and to find that new beginning I was so desperate to look for.  

So, you know, if, if 2020 gave me a hard truth about myself, it certainly gave me a new challenge and a new question to ask myself for the rest of my life that underlies every interaction I have. And it’s just simply one question, whose good person will I be? Thank you very much.  

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