My ridiculous life

Part 1 Going to Turkey had been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember. My Great Grandfather had been at Gallipoli for a short time and had he not taken a piece of shrapnel to the eye and been sent home early, there’s a very high likelihood I wouldn’t exist today. There are very few war stories that are more part of the Australian discourse than that of Gallipoli. The combination of learning about it every year in school and knowing that it was responsible for the glass eye my Great-Grandad would playfully remove to gross out my Mum as a child made it a place I was determined to see in my lifetime. I also knew that my Grandad would not get to see the place where his Dad fought with his own eyes, and I was keen for someone in the family to personally ...

Part 2 … Read Part 1 On my first day there, I organised to go paragliding over Oludeniz, which remains one of the most awe-inspiring experiences of my life. We drove to the top of a mountain in a rickety old truck, I was strapped to man whose name I didn’t even know (flashbacks to the night before – nah jokes), but he was wearing wings, so that was a good sign. We ran off the side of the mountain and glided into the air like a giant pterodactyl. The clear blue sea and pure white sands below were indescribably beautiful, and I took a lot of photos. When we got closer to the ground, the guide said he would do a trick for me. He pulled a lever and we dipped and spun around in the air. In a mere moment, what had been a lovely, calm and reflective ...

I can’t tell you where it began, my obsession with the human mind. In general, I have always been fascinated by the way people think, what motivates them consciously and subconsciously and the way our environment influences the lens through which we view the world. My obsession in this area has broadened over the years, but for a long time it was almost exclusively focussed on criminality and all that goes with that. It’s not just crime and the people who commit it that enthral me, but how we as a society choose to deal with criminality. The way that we weave systems of control and justice into our cultures and accept, at least at a broad societal level, that this is the way we will discipline those who commit sins against our collectively agreed formula of life. So profound was my obsession with this subject, that I got myself ...