I felt alive again, and I felt excited about being alive, excited about what I had done. I never realised this situation would change my life so much for the better. But I was conscious of the warning signs from my past life too. As satisfying as our efforts in Peraliya were, it was also a traumatic experience and I had put my body and mind through the grinder. I needed to unload all the grief and anguish that was inside me from what I had witnessed and felt.
I told Tracey I wasn’t feeling real good psychologically and I was going to take the bull by the horns and get some professional ‘debriefing’. I booked myself into Lingard Private Hospital for some psychological assessment and trauma counselling. As I’ve osaid before, I’d learned that the opportunity to share my grief and anguish to someone else can provide a massive release and this time I knew I needed it. I wasn’t going to allow myself to suppress all my emotions again, to get down to a deep depression again. I was at the clinic for a week and had some expert counselling, did rapid eye movement therapy and psychotherapy where they make you comfortable in a safe room and take you through the experience deep in your subconscious. It is tough – just ask anyone who has gone through trauma counselling – but you’re so relieved when you unload it. That all helped enormously in allowing me to get on with my life with a clear head, and after that week I felt ready to be the new Donny Paterson and make sure my experience in Sri Lanka had a lasting effect on me as well as the people of Peraliya.
Soon after I went down and joined Newcastle Wests rugby league club as head trainer for the juniors. The current club secretary, Mick Weston, has been very supportive of me, which I appreciate. Sports training is what I like to do most. I love the camaraderie and the enthusiasm of the young players, and their parents really appreciate what I do. The following season I became involved in the under-17 development squad of the Newcastle Knights, which put me in the picture for further advancement. And with other volunteer activities my days became quite full and productive.
The Newcastle Herald did a couple of stories on my adventures as a few people back home learned of what I had done. I’m not sure how the word got out but I also heard from the local television station, NBN. It was a bit bizarre but I got used to a bit of media coverage and felt that, hopefully, my story might inspire a few people to do that little extra for worthy causes. I don’t expect people to go 15,000 miles to make a difference – there is so much you can do in your own community.
The good thing about the second half of 2005, when all the family was reunited, was that Cory’s football came on in leaps and bounds. He played SG Ball (under 18s) again and was promoted to the Jersey Flegg (under 20s) when the SG Ball competition finished (the Flegg competition went two months longer). He was also chosen for the Australian Schoolboys side and played two ‘Tests’ against the Junior Kiwis. They won the first and lost the second, and when I look back now it was a pretty big honour for Cory to play in that company – from the Australian team these players have already become regular first graders in the NRL: Cory, Jarrod Mullen, Mitch Aubusson, Darius Boyd, Michael Jennings, Joel Moon, Mitchell Pearce and David Taylor; in fact Pearce, Jennings and Boyd have played State of Origin. The Kiwis had Greg Eastwood, Sonny Fa’ai, Isaac Luke, Frank-Paul Nuuausala, Sam Rapira, Setaimata Sa, Ben Te’o and Cooper Vuna.
In 2006 Cory played for the Knights in the Jersey Flegg (under 20s) competition and the Knights were beaten in the grand final 22–20 by St George Illawarra after being minor premiers, but individually he had a great season. He was picked in the New South Wales under 19s then in the junior Kangaroos, the Australian under-19s team, which was a massive honour.
Certainly, I had to reacquaint myself with my children and I was determined to become a better father. They got through relatively unscathed when I was ill, and I think that was because we had been honest and open about it and Tracey had been such a great mother to them. We never tried to hide my problems and Tracey never tried to hide me like my father did with my mother; we took it head-on as a family. And I believe having that family around me saved me. I would not have made it without them – in fact I don’t think I would be here now; I would be dead or in a mental institution with a fried brain.
I knew I had a lot of catching up to do after being away a fair bit while in the army, either on duty or later when I was in hospital for long stints, and then spending almost five months in Sri Lanka when the kids were in their teens and at an important stage of their development. When I was going through the bad phases of my addiction I was a terrible father – a ‘deadbeat dad’, as they say. I was hopeless physically, spiritually and emotionally; I wasn’t there for them and that hurts a lot. I remember lashing out towards the kids both physically and verbally; it was like there were two of me, Donny and Druggie Donny, as Tracey called that other side of me. There would be stretches when I was right then stretches when I’d fall down again and something would trigger me off and I’d have to get away from my demons.
When I came home from Sri Lanka it was clear in my mind that I wanted to feel good about myself so I could be a better person for them. As someone once said, ‘You have to love yourself before you can truly love someone else.’ I learned how to love myself from my experience in Sri Lanka. My perceived failure as a soldier really drove me into a deep depression; that was the phase of my life that I was determined would be over, although it is only natural when you suffer from clinical depression that there are always going to be some bad days. It’s hard having a small family with no cousins around and none of Tracey’s family nearby, and me only having Christeen, who has no children, in Sydney. So it has been hard for the kids and they needed two loving, supportive parents.
With the reunion of the volunteers on the first anniversary of the tsunami, I was away from the family again for four weeks through Christmas, New Year and our nineteenth wedding anniversary, which wasn’t much fun for Tracey. But I got to take Karah, who was then fifteen, with me. It was pretty special to take her inside the other world I had lived in during those months away and to give her some perspective on how fortunate our lives were. I introduced her to a lot of people from the village and naturally to the volunteers who had gone back for the reunion. Chinthu, Kumara and Dinesh were delighted to meet her.
Alison and Oscar had been back there from July to early November but they made one more trip to honour our ‘date’. So did Bruce, James, Dr Sebastian Pluese, some other volunteers I got to know well – Peter Nossiter and his wife and son Rob – and Rob’s girlfriend, Jo. I was emotional as usual when we first met up – but I took the mickey out of everyone, too, don’t worry. As I gave Alison a hug Oscar yelled, ‘That’s the go; that’s the gooooooo!’ Ah, the old catchcry will never be forgotten. It was emotional enough catching up with the other volunteers but to see the villagers again, and the children running around yelling out, ‘Donny, Donny,’ was a bit overwhelming. I felt part of the community again, like a shepherd that people would follow.
It was great to catch up with what everyone had done in those few months apart. Unfortunately many villagers were still living in the temporary shelters and not much progress had been made. Many houses were still half built. They obviously didn’t get any more aid from the leading non-government organisations. Not that we received any cash handouts from the authorities the whole time we were there either, but we had a lot of goods and services provided and some money here and there from private groups. It looked like a lot of that had dried up.
There were all these official ceremonies as part of a national day of mourning, and the Sri Lankan president, President Mahinda Rajapaksa, attended the one in Peraliya along with government ministers and the like; there was a hell of a lot of crying and wailing, which reminded me of the sounds we heard the first day we got to Peraliya. A year on, it came back to everyone and it showed that a lot of the villagers had never got over what happened, and probably never would. The security was pretty tight with a heap of police and army there to ward off a possible opportunistic terrorist attack, I suppose.
The place was certainly greener and a lot of the vegetation had regrown, including mangoes and bananas. The temporary shelters were looking pretty weathered though – some of the roofs had rusted in the sea air – but they were still the only homes many of the people were likely to have for a while, although quite a few new homes had sprouted up. The hardest thing was that too many people were no better off, and some were in fact worse off with all the volunteers, medical help and external food supply gone.
Seeing a young boy called Nuwan broke our hearts. He’d badly burned his legs when he chased a ball while playing cricket and fell into a burning rice pit. He was in hospital for three months. The bandages put on him in hospital had all stuck to his skin and he was in a really bad way, all infected; he was living with his family – his father is blind – in a temporary shelter we’d built with hardly any food and ants all over the place. It was pathetic. Alison went to check on him and left some money for food, but she knew once we left he’d be in a bad way again.
It was good to see Chamilla doing well. She’d set up a pretty well-stocked café in the 100-metre zone selling all sorts of stuff, including warm bottles of Coca-Cola, and I reckon she did a good trade that day with the biggest crowd the village had seen for a long while.
An extraordinary thing Oscar was able to achieve four months earlier was organising a soccer game between the Tamil terrorists and Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan army; that’s unbelievable. The two groups had been involved in a civil war for over twenty years, although there was supposed to be a truce then, and the traditional resentment for each other was very strong. But Oscar, through an organisation he set up called Football Without Boundaries, was able to get government approval and support plus the backing of the Football Federation, Ministry of Sports, the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) to make it happen. The game took place at Jaffna, right up the northern end of the country, a city which is very much a Tamil stronghold, deep in their heartland.
The game almost didn’t happen, though. A week before it was scheduled to go ahead in August, the ceasefire ended when a sniper assassinated the Sri Lankan Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, in Colombo. That came less than two weeks after the superintendent of police in Jaffna was killed and mutilated after he went to inquire about the death of a Tamil youth in a barber shop, supposedly accidentally shot by a policeman as he put his gun away to get his hair cut. A state of emergency was declared, a curfew issued in Jaffna and the violence pretty much escalated after that. When I heard all that it sort of brought home to me how unstable Sri Lanka can be. The next month a 21-year-old man was playing cricket in Peraliya and a member of a rival tribe from Telwatta, the adjacent village, walked up to him, pulled out a pistol and shot him in the head in cold blood. Nothing was done for fear of further recrimination.
Anyway, incredibly both sides still agreed to use the sporting match as an act of goodwill and peace. It was postponed for a few days but eventually went ahead at the Jaffna army base. The Tamils won 3–0 but players from both sides mixed after the game and the players even hugged after the match. The next day Oscar’s team from Galle played the Sri Lankan army and won 5–0; I’m sure Oscar had the competitive juices flowing and was one of the star performers.
Unfortunately a week or two after that Oscar was hit by a bus while riding a motor scooter near Galle. He had his leg in plaster for six or seven weeks; he had broken his ankle pretty badly and had a few gashes that needed stitches too. He’s probably lucky to be alive; the only road rule in Sri Lanka is the bigger you are, the more right of way you have – and no one wins when they take on one of those buses!
A lovely Dutch girl, Marjolein Brasl, had also had a motor accident after she went back for a while and she was in even worse condition. Apparently one truck was overtaking another one, both coming in the opposite direction, and forced her motorbike off the road. She broke both her arms, I think, and had to have a bone graft from her hip. She was in Apollo Hospital in Colombo, where I was cared for after I’d collapsed, for quite a few weeks. That was sad news; she is such a wonderful girl, Marjolein.
It was never entirely safe even walking along their roads with the crazy attitude of their drivers. One of the NGO workers, Richie Sixsmith, was also nearly killed while walking home one night when he was hit by a motor cycle carrying a family of four. The father, who was driving, was killed and his wife and children were in a bad way. Richie spent quite some time in Apollo Hospital before being flown back to the UK.
The tsunami warning centre was operating well, the medical centre was still going strong and the school looked like a real school again.
We returned home in late January 2006, and over the next few months I got more and more involved with the MiVAC Trust, which is an initiative of some ex-Australian army engineers and Vietnam veterans who had cleared landmines in Vietnam and had seen first-hand the devastation caused by these indiscriminate weapons. The Trust now includes ex-service personnel from other conflicts, humanitarian aid-workers, members of peace-keeping forces and many concerned civilians. It was started by a Tasmanian, Rob Woolley. The patron is Colonel Sandy MacGregor, one of the most amazing men our country has seen. He was the first soldier to go down the infamous South Vietnamese tunnels during the Vietnam War and received the Military Cross. He was an amazing leader of men who underwent a far greater trauma after the war. In 1987 three of his daughters, along with another teenager, were killed with a shotgun by a paranoid schizophrenic in the other girl’s home. Sandy has written several books on self-help and finding purpose in life. He has become devoted to meditation and teaches others, including leading business people, how to handle stress. Incredibly, he decided to meet face to face in jail, and forgive, the man who killed his daughters as a means to helping him move forward in life; can you imagine doing that?
MiVAC has been responsible for some great work in different parts of Asia and the subcontinent. In Cambodia it provided materials for a fence to be built around the perimeter of a school which was bordered by a minefield, thus enabling children to play safely without straying into dangerous areas. Too many had been killed after wandering into minefields. It has also built a waste disposal storage area at the Sunrise Children’s Village. MiVAC also funded twelve wheelchairs for Cambodian landmine survivors and other amputees in the Siem Reap Province. It was great to see MiVAC help Sri Lanka, too, by funding – with an equal amount provided by the Royal Commonwealth Society, Tasmania – the rebuilding of an orphanage after a demining project had been completed.
Meanwhile I was definitely a new person with new confidence, new drive, a new set of values and new ambition. As time went on I took on new initiatives and began doing some public speaking about my experiences. To think that that one decision, on Boxing Day 2004, would lead me to having such a life-changing experience, and that I would feature in a documentary movie and then have this book published – well, I’m not sure how many times I have said it in these pages but it’s all beyond my wildest dreams. But maybe we don’t dream enough about what we can do in life, eh?