- I was born in the religious cult Gloriavale and spent my childhood there. This experience has had a profound effect on my life. I am David Ready, and this is my story. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2021 - The meeting was 14 against one. There was a threat of everything being taken away from me. I felt like a fish in a pool full of sharks. That night was four years ago, and I've come a long way since then. (TAPE REWINDS) I was born in Gloriavale. It's about an hour inland from Greymouth. Gloriavale is a religious cult. It's made up of about 500 people, about 50 families. We lived together on one farm. It's about 1000ha. They have dairy farms, deer farms, kitchens and schools. It's very isolated. It has mountains on three sides. There's no cell service. We all lived together in big community buildings. We'd all eat together in a dining room with tables joined end to end. Whole families would live in one room. So, in my family, there is 13 siblings. I'm number 12. The oldest is John. Then it's Virginia, then James, Beulah, and Angel, Melody, Seth, Luke, Sarah, Connie, Joyful, me, and then a younger sister, Prayer. I was very, very close to her. We went through school together. She was in the year below me. Prayer was born Down syndrome. Kids always, like, get her to say a word and she'd say it funny, and then they'd laugh and that would piss me off, so I was always in fights and was getting detention for her. She was an amazing person. We slept in the same bed for years. I can remember when I got my own bed. I think I was, like, 11. (LAUGHS) I was like, 'Yeah!' There'd be the main bed for the parents, and then everyone else would be in bunk beds. It was very crammed. There's no privacy. My parents met at Springbank, which became Gloriavale. I believe it was like every other marriage in there ` arranged. I definitely think Mum was pushed into it. Dad was not marriage material. A big leader was Hopeful Christian. When Hopeful was evangelising in the North Island, he had met my grandfather and nana. Then after my grandad died, Hopeful invited my nana and the kids to come down to Springbank and he would look after them, so Nana sold a house, came down and joined. - It was weird. There was... (LAUGHS) We landed in this paddock, and there's all these strange people there waving and looking all joyous to see us. And we were like, OK. - It was promised as a place of sanctuary. I think Mum's intention was to take us down there to be educated. - He's gonna buy us a home, and he's gonna look after us. And, yeah, that wasn't meant to be. That wasn't meant to be. - This old homestead here has been in the Green family for a long time. Actually, my grandmother used to live here. - My mother was Maori, Ngati Porou, born MaryAnne Green. But then Hopeful decided that everyone would change their name. So he changed his name from Neville Cooper, and she had her name changed to Sharon. Dad didn't change his name cos Clem is Christian somehow. I think our first surname was Disciple, but two other families I think had picked Disciple, cos that's the most Christian name there, so (CHUCKLES) there was a bit of competition for that one. And so we had to settle for Ready, which I'm cool with that. - Let us praise God. - The religious instruction at Gloriavale is hellfire and brimstone, like, from day one. I'd have nightmares about going to hell. If I have done something wrong, I wouldn't be able to sleep. I'd feel sick in my gut, and I'd be, like, tossing and turning, just terrified. If I disobeyed, I'd go to hell. If I question the leadership, you know, I was evil. - You're taught from as young as you can listen that this is the only place, the true Church of God, and if you leave here, you're going to hell. And if you hear that every week, it's pretty hard to not believe in it. - There'd been meetings where there was a hysterical, like, pack mentality in the room as, like, Hopeful was up there, just kinda whipping everyone up into a frenzy, and everyone's getting all psyched up and getting high on all these pack emotions. Very often, children were reduced to tears, and they do them late at night, and everyone's just like, 'I wanna go home.' All the clothes are exactly the same. It's a uniform. Long pants, a button-up shirt. It's blue. It's all blue. I hate blue. Your top button had to be done up. Your sleeves had to be all the way down to your wrists, and the buttons had to be done up. You couldn't walk around with rolled-up sleeves. All these little things are manipulating your choice and taking the choices off you, and it makes you more pliable. Girls wore, like, a dark blue dress with a belt around the waist, head covering. They say it shows the angels that they're in submission to the men. - It just bred men who felt like they could do basically whatever they felt because they were taught that the women were the ones who had to learn to be self controlled and be covered up. It's been hugely used as just a control mechanism on the women and to give men the right to do and feel however they want. - The girls are just slaves. They just absolute slaves. They're worked 10 times harder. They have completely tyrannical overseers, and they have no future except to get married and have kids and work. - Boys have more liberties and more opportunities. They have more spaces that they are allowed to be in. - We were always in the bush, milking cows, feeding calves, chasing ducklings. Yeah, just typical boy stuff. - We used to work out together at night, which you weren't actually allowed to do in there, so we had to do it secretly. (LAUGHS) My family and David's family, were always close, and David was my similar age, so would hang out a lot. As the only two Maori families in there, we were put in our own little circle almost. - In Gloriavale, it was very racist, and we always had to` it was always pick between God and being a Maori. My father was very anti-Maori. He pretty much just beat it out of us through domination and violence. (WHACK!) 'The only culture you can accept is the one I give to you.' Beatings were super common, super common. (WHACK!) But I think that was... that was an expression of the control the Gloriavale leaders had on him. The leaders could get a kid beaten by their parents, which is` it's messed up. (WHACK!) - David experienced a lot of extreme discipline growing up. I can say that's one thing for being a girl. We got some hidings and physical abuse, but felt like, oh, it was nothing compared to... compared to them. - My oldest brother always told me that I got it the least. So taking that into consideration, I reckon, yeah, if I got it easy, then... help. My brothers were really good with horses, so I grew up learning how to train 'em, learning how to ride 'em, learning how to talk to 'em. And I loved that. That was a huge just stress relief and just time out. No other people around. There's no drama or bullshit with animals. It's just... It's just clear. - You just feel free and one with nature, really, which I think definitely would have helped him mentally. - There was one day, it was me and Val, we were milking cows. We're playing a game of tag and had run off into the paddocks and stuff. - When we got back, his brother came out and I thought, 'Oh not, here we go.' - Yeah, he was pretty pissed. And, yeah, he lined us up and gave us all a whipping. Tore my back up. I had welts and scars, and I was all cut up, had blood dripping down my legs. On my back, just the heat was incredible. You know, I was, like, 14 years old. I'm like, 'There's something wrong here.' Like, 'This is not a healthy... This is not a healthy interaction between brothers.' I knew it wasn't my brother. My brother did it, but he was a vessel. He was a vessel for a culture that had been bred into him. But I was pretty angry. I was like, 'This is not on.' Like, 'We need a fix this.' * - I was a teenager living at the religious sect Gloriavale, trying to make sense of the life I'd been born into. The main theme of the outside world was that it's an evil place, it's not safe. If I listen to the radio, the evil spirits in the music were gonna come in to me. If I watched movies that hadn't been sanctioned by the leaders, you know, I was a rebel and going to hell. Pretty much anything... anything that broke the rules was an instant hell offence. There was no, like, degrees of, like, yeah, this is kinda bad, you know, maybe you shouldn't do it. It was just, like, straight to hell. And that just` it wears off eventually. It's like, I don't believe you. - We'd take the rubbish out every second night or something, so what they used to do is kinda unhook all the radios in the vehicles, so you couldn't listen to the radio. And we'd drive down to the dump and unload the dump, light it up, and then get the radio working and listen to the radio, and, yeah, have a little party, I guess. - And like, go through the rubbish and see what people are chucking out. One time when we were doing the rubbish, some church people from Timaru had come up and put a whole lot of theology books in the community library teaching grace and forgiveness, basically. And the leader was like, 'That didn't come from us. It's heresy.' So they wanted them all destroyed, but they just threw them in the rubbish, and so we're sitting down there, reading them. As a child, I thought they were omnipotent. But then as a teenager, like, 'You guys are so full of holes.' I was kinda working with the refrigeration guy, and he was quite heavily up there with the computer stuff. In Gloriavale, there's no internet access for the common people; it was only a specific few. I wanted to see what was on the other end of that screen. Maybe it could tell me something about the world that I didn't know. So I was always looking at him on his computer and watching him punch in his password just day after day after day after day until I reckon I figured it. (KEYBOARD KEYS CLACK) I get up early in the morning, like, an hour early, and I'd go and watch, like, music videos, cos, kinda, music was kind of the big interest in there for me. Downloading movies and, like, passing them around. Worldly movies that, you know` like Transformers 1, 2, 3, 4. The leaders seemed to think it would put my soul in jeopardy, but I was like, 'It's just a movie.' Like, 'It's just art.' Like, come on. I was having a lot of questions regarding the leaders and the way this community was being run and the way we were acting as people towards each other. That all came to a catalyst the night my sister died, Prayer. My mum and Prayer had a couple of my sister's children in isolation rooms just because there was a bit of sickness going around, and Mum was looking after them. The pin between the door handles had been taken out, so that didn't work, and there was access through a window. And I went past the window, and I heard just raised voices and commotion in there. (MUFFLED SHOUTING) Prayer was choking on a piece of meat. I jumped in the room through the window, straight away, went to the Heimlich manoeuvre. Just boom, boom, boom as hard as I could, then I pushed her down and smacked her on the back really hard. She's like` She understood I was helping her, but she was like, 'You're hurting me.' Mum's crying and trying to, like, urge me on and trying to help me. And then Prayer turned away. She a few steps and, um, fell unconscious on the floor. And I knew I needed help, so I jumped out the window and ran inside. I got dad. He came running back. We jumped in there. He told me to go get a pair of pliers, cos you know, we couldn't get it with our fingers. You know, we had pliers down her mouth, holding her jaw open as hard as I can. It was so strong, the reflex. - Almost there. Almost there. - I felt like I was breaking her jaw. He told me to go get the first-aid people. A lot of panic and desperation. Someone sent me to get a defib, oxygen bottle. Ran to another building, grabbed that, ran back, just exhausted, gasping for air, trying not to cry. We're trying to put a tube down her throat, past this piece of meat. A lot of broken images. I don't know if I remember everything clearly. And then the first-aid people just said it's over. Um... We had one job ` get that piece of meat out. And we failed. The whole community usually attends all the funerals there. There's no real grieving. It's kind of expected that everyone just sucks it up and gets on with it. Two of my aunties had come down from the North Island. - It was a really sad occasion, but we actually got to meet her kids. - Yeah, we did. - For the first time. - I was super, super stoked that they had shown up, made the trip down and were getting to see Prayer's life even though they had never met her because they had been cut off from Mum, and I think Mum hadn't seen her sisters for about 40 years. Gloriavale doesn't like outsiders, and they don't like outsiders coming to funerals and expressing emotion and care. The next day, it's back to work like normal. Like, I was expected to be there. No one cared. There was to be a coroner's investigation into the death of Prayer, so they called a meeting to make sure everyone told the same story. It was handled very heavy-handed. They refused to take any responsibility for what happened inside that room. Mum and myself, neither of us got to actually say what happened. They portrayed the management of the isolation rooms as, like, a perfectly run operation. And that is not true at all. Mum had been up the whole night before doing all her own washing. They weren't making sure Mum and the kids were being looked after in this isolation room. They didn't manage it properly. They didn't give food to them on time. They removed the door handle, so that didn't work. Mum was looking after four young kids, her Down's Syndrome daughter, 60 years old, climbing in and out a window carrying sheet loads of washing up to the laundry, washing it, drying it, bringing it back down. She hadn't slept at all the night before. OK? - The community just wanted it to be closed. Simple. Nothing. - That experience was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back. - David started doing a lot of... investigating I think is a good word for it. He just felt like if the leadership could show so little care, then maybe some of the things that we heard as whispers growing up, maybe are some of those` is there truth to them? - I think I knew that Hopeful had been convicted of sexual assault and had served time. - ARCHIVE: 67-year-old Christian has been sentenced to between one and five years on each of the 10 convictions of indecent assault. - But I'd been told it was false charges; he was basically being persecuted for his faith. So I started digging around the community, talking to people. Who knew what about the leaders? Are these stories true? I had to dig quite hard, and people did not wanna talk to me about them. - The first thing he, like, told me about was.. the sexual abuse allegations against Hopeful were for real. And he told me some of the, like, the stuff he was actually, like, convicted for. And I was like... 'Are you serious?' - I found out that Hopeful had been grooming and sexually assaulting and abusing young girls and boys for decades. I found out that there had been a teacher in the primary school that had been sexually assaulting a girl in his class. Hopeful sitting in on couples having sex, like, early in the marriage as, like, 'the... 'counsellor' kind of thing. Like... a lot. And no one said anything. - That information is false. - And he's like, 'Mum and Dad were involved in some of that stuff.' Like... our p... our par... our parents?! He's like` You know, like forced to ` forced to take part in some of these things. I was like, 'Oh...' - So I went to him with it. - Ah, David. - He was very defensive about it, and I knew I was on the right track. And he ended that meeting, and he slammed his hand on the table, and he's like, 'Right, that's it,' and he gets up and walks away. I was 16, and I had just stood my ground with the alpha dog in that place, and it was kind of terrifying. (CHUCKLES) But I kinda felt good. The next morning, me and Dad went over to see Hopeful. He looks emotionally and physically strained, and he sees, you know, 'I couldn't` I couldn't sleep.' And then he set about explaining and 'apologising' very weakly. And then he was almost bragging about how he had helped this person and help that person with their sex life and this couple with their sex life by him being there. Promptly went and told all my friends. I was just like, 'We struck gold!' I'd kinda lived my whole life there in submission. And I was holding people accountable for their actions, and it felt good. All this past coming out and getting repeated to everyone. They hated it, and they were very angry about that. * - I had lost all fear ` all fear of authority, all fear of leadership. The next thing that happened, I was called into an SS meeting. That's the acronym for Shepherds and Servants. That's what they call themselves. And they were there to just to beat me back into line. I was sat down, and they sat in a semicircle around me. The meeting was 14 against one. 'You're not showing humility. You're being proud, and you're not obeying us.' I felt like a fish in a pool full of sharks. I got the feeling that they had done this many times before; they had dealt with many young fellas questioning and causing problems, and they had` they were very well equipped to thump them down. There was a threat of everything being taken away from me. 'You're gonna have to leave here, and we're not gonna let you see your family again. 'You're gonna be cut off or you just apologise. Toe the line.' And we went` we went for hours, well into the night. I didn't care any more. They were gelded, broken men that had a history full of lies and abuse, and I had no respect for them. So at the end of it, we came to an impasse, and they said, 'Well, you're gonna have to go.' I was like, 'Well, no, I don't. Like, this my home. Like, you're gonna kick me out of my home?' And they're like, 'Well, yes, because we actually own everything. 'Everything here belongs to the trust, and we are the directors of the trust, so we can throw you out.' Spent the last day with Mum, and she gave me a, like, 10 pages of things she had written to help me integrate into society. It was, like, basic stuff like, don't waste power, how to be a good employee, work hard, show up on time, present yourself well. She had stayed up the whole night and written it. It had fresh tears on it. Yeah, there was a lot of love. Dad drove me to a bus stop in Rotomanu, said our goodbyes and jumped on a bus for the first time. So, we drove over Arthur's Pass to Christchurch. I was wearing my Gloriavale clothes. I put a baseball cap on, cos they don't have baseball caps in Gloriavale, but I had nicked one from somewhere. I dunno. (LAUGHS) So I put that on, felt pretty badass. I rolled my sleeves up too, (CHUCKLES) undid my top button. They dropped me at the airport. I never been to an airport before. I was feeling pretty excited and stressed at the same time. - MaryAnne rang me to say is it OK if David come and live with you? And I said that's fine. I was buzzing. I was happy. Yes, no problem. They put him on a plane and sent him to Napier. I don't know why, but they didn't think Gisborne had an airport. David was in his (CHUCKLES) Gloriavale uniform. And he looked happy. He looked really happy to be with us. And I said, 'Sorry, David, but I don't know why they sent you to Napier, 'but it's, like, a three-hour trip back to Gisborne.' - So we drove to Gizzie with Auntie Jac and my cousin Jules. Listened to Maroon 5 and the radio, and that was pretty wild. My daughter Jules went and bought him some nice jeans and gave him some clothes just out of love. Like, 'Here, take those blue things off,' and he was quite happy to. And he was` He looked quite sharp in his jeans and his shirts and things like that. - Everyone showed me a lot of love and a lot of care. These are my family, but we didn't know each other, and they... they just took me` they took me into their homes and they showed me so much love. - He did everything, except he couldn't cook porridge. And I said to him, 'I'll teach you how to make porridge.' 'Oh, the ladies make the porridge.' I said, 'No, you are in this world now, mate. This is the real world. 'Men will do what women do in the real world, so you'll learn how to make porridge.' And he's never forgotten. (LAUGHS) - Aunty Jac showed me so much love, put up with a lot of my shit, because I've still got a lot of GV arrogance, kind of men are dominating everything; I know everything; just running my mouth on every topic; and no perspective on... maybe you should shut up and learn something when someone else is talking. - I took him up the coast to meet his nan and my son and that part of the family. - I found him a little bit arrogant and I thought, 'Ooh-ooh, this is gonna be quite hard.' - A lot angry. It was` So anger. - There was a lot of anger. Mm. A lot of anger. - I could understand the anger. - Mm. - I wanted to come into this new environment and be... be capable of not getting abused like I had for the rest of my life. - Used to sleep with a knife under his pillow. - Yeah. - I said, 'What's that for, David?' 'Protection, Auntie. Be ready to spring up when somebody comes in.' I said, 'It's just Uncle Graham and I here; you'll be fine.' You know? - Yeah. But they'd also been ingrained with a lot of negative... input about Maori people ` that we're all violent, we're all wasters, we're all pros` the girls are all prostitutes, the boys are all in gangs. - Very stereotypical, yeah. - In Gloriavale, I'd been grown up being indoctrinated against Maori, and I was told they were subhuman, they didn't even have a written language. Everywhere I went, I was welcomed as family, and I was given love, and I was given care, and it was just amazing to me. Just` These people that didn't know me were so welcoming because I was a relative. Seeing where my mother was from and seeing where my people were from, it started to grow a lot of pride in me. I got a job on a dairy farm. It was interesting going into a work culture. Even though I had been in Gloriavale working, I had never had someone who was paying me every week. And so then, 'If I'm paying you boy, like, this is the standard you need to bear.' That was a new environment. I had a lady over me, which was also a bit of a shock. I had to suck it up, and then I decided, 'Nah, this is the best thing for you, David. 'Whatever your biases and prejudices are, this is a beautiful opportunity you have.' The early days of being out of Gloriavale was a lot of conflicting emotions. I'm wanting to learn the rules out here. I'm wanting to adjust myself into life. I'm wanting to succeed at life. I'm also wanting to go back and see my family. A lot of delusional ideas about what I should be doing. Like, you know, maybe I should go back to Gloriavale and, like, keep trying to change it. Super lonely. I'd grown up in a room with my whole family my whole life, and now I was in a house by myself. I pull out mum's notes every so often and bawl my eyes out over them. I'd get home from work at night and just sit on a couch in a dark house and brood and plot and scheme and imagine all kinds of revenge. - The owners of the farm said he was a very, very good worker, but rang us up one day to say, 'You need to talk to your nephew about his anger problems.' I said, 'David, since you want to hit something, I'm going to introduce you to a boxing coach. 'You're gonna to take it out on that boxing bag.' The coach said to him, 'You're a very fit boy.' I said, 'There's a lot of adrenaline and that, yeah, get it out of him.' - I had a lot of anger and a lot of rage, and I would just burn that up in the gym and just train hard. I was angry about the helplessness. Why can't I see my mum? It made me furious. I was determined to train and to get skills where there would be no one that could say whether I could see my mum or not. And they wouldn't able to stop me. * - I'd been out of Gloriavale for about a year, and I was still trying to figure out what the heck just happened. I was very, very angry about the death of Prayer. I was raging about all the injustices and all the assaults, and nothing had been done. - When I saw David again when he left, he was still quite upset about his sister passing away. It was actually the first time I'd seen him cry. And he was upset about what had happened and how they lied so they wouldn't get in trouble. And I remember him` talking to him about it, and he just blamed himself for it. He was saying, like, 'I should have done this better 'or I should have run faster to get her oxygen or something.' I really felt for him in that time. - I came down to Fairlie and started working for my cousin Eli. He was contract milking a dairy farm. Me and Val lived together in a cottage on the farm, working together. He had a horse here, and I started working with that, and I hadn't worked with a horse in a fair while, and it felt super good to be on a horse again. As soon as I got down south, I joined the gym again, a Muay Thai gym in Timaru. I started training there. It was good training, very brutal, very hardcore. And I used that to just pour out all my anger and all my frustration on the mats and just leave them covered in puddles of sweat. I think I grew and developed a lot of healing. Daily training and daily discipline was very good for my brain. One day, it was week after my first fight, Maddy walked in the door. The first night Maddy was in there, I was holding pads for her, so... that was cool. (LAUGHS) I like the look of her straight away. Yeah, we got to know each other, training together. - When I first met David, he was pretty intense. I never realised he was from Gloriavale until I had a wee stalkie on Facebook. There was a photo of all of his family. I was like, it's quite a few there. (LAUGHS) Some nice clothing. - I didn't know how to talk to girls. I think I had tried on a couple of times. I wanted a relationship and someone that was going to be with me, but I had no idea how to culture that and grow it. - To be honest, our relationship in the early days probably... probably wasn't the healthiest. So, both pretty young, pretty clueless about... everything. Neither of us had ever been in a relationship before, so we didn't know anything about the dynamics. There was sometimes where it was very hard, and I was like, 'What have I got myself into here?' It's just, like, everything full on. Like, he doesn't really go anything small; it's just everything is, like, go big or go home. (CHUCKLES) - I think about a year and a half after I'd left Gloriavale, I found out that my sister Joyful was getting married in Gloriavale. She would have been probably 22, and she was marrying a 17-year-old. His name was Obedient. So I wanted to express to her everything I knew about Gloriavale and why it was not a great place to get married and have children ` probably the worst place in the world to raise children. - David came to me with this idea. He told me his sister was getting married in there and he wanted to go pick her up. And I was fully into it. I was like, 'Yeah, let's go get her.' - Jumped in my Ford Falcon, and we drove over to Gloriavale. We drove in, and I got her and stuck her in a car, and then (IMITATES WHOOSHING) drove off. - She calmed down reasonably fast and felt safe. We told each other, 'OK, we'll meet back at this location.' - Val drove off with Joyful, and then I went up to the community, cos the plan was to get Mum as well. I knew she would come if we had Joyful. - They're lost causes. - Unfortunately, the leaders showed up in force as they always do, and there was a lot of talking and yelling and manipulation. And mum was being harassed, and Hopeful was holding her hands and telling her she had to stay. Just being a creep. Yeah, that was pretty enraging. Mum wasn't gonna come. So, yeah, I had to get out of there. So I jumped in a car with one of my brothers. He was gonna take me out. We drove out. We were being followed by another vehicle from Gloriavale, and we drove down this bush track and lost them. And my brother turned the truck off, and he turned to me and says, 'I wanna see Joyful.' This was the same brother that had whipped us both years earlier. I didn't want anything to do with what he was, uh... (CHUCKLES) he was gonna do to me if I disagreed with him. I was like, 'OK.' And my brother tried to get Joyful back. - His big brother, he hopped out of the truck and went straight to our car and said to his sister, 'Oh, come back with me.' And I looked at David. I was like, 'This can't be happening.' So... (LAUGHS) We run and jumped on his big brother. - We were weeds, skinny little weeds. My brother was a big, strong, powerful 25-year-old man. We can't fail or we're dead. - Wrestling this full-grown man, so it felt kinda cool, to be honest. It was like, 'Yeah, we beat him.' And then we went. - Joyful was pretty chill. She knew she wasn't in danger. And I just explained to her then, like, 'This is` You're not being kidnapped forever. 'I just wanna talk to you about the place you're raising children in.' (SIREN WHOOPS) And just outside of Sheffield, we were stopped by police. The cops are on the phone with the West Coast police and my brother and sorting it all out, and we're there for an hour or two and... - They teach in there that the police are real bad. So she was` thought, 'Oh, I'm safer to go with you guys than the police. - Joyful signed a statement that she was happy to go with us, and then they let us go. Spent the whole next day talking to Joyful and just breaking down every bit of evidence and every argument and every moral obligation to not live there I could think of, and at the end of the day, she decided to go back. I think that speaks to the brainwashing that happens in Gloriavale, where even my own sister, that when confronted with so much evidence and so much disgusting filth about the place she was gonna have children in and how unfit it was for children to even live there, she was still gonna do it. She wanted the devil she knew instead of the devil she didn't. * - To leave Gloriavale is... it's physically easy, but mentally hard. - It took a while to overcome all of the... the anger and hostility towards the leaders, mostly. - I definitely think Maddy provided a lot of healing for me. - Many hours of conversation and tears and just... Yeah, there was a long time that it felt like we weren't making any progress. But... I guess, eventually... You keep talking, keep working, something's gonna... something's going to happen. - The next big evolution in my life was... having a son. The first time I saw Tua, I was hit with a sense of gratitude that this child was free We can make it rain. (IMITATES WHOOSHING) - When Tua went to was born, David kinda, like, cried for the first three days. Like, every time he looked at him, he's just like, 'Wow.' - Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! - (CHUCKLES) His little legs. - Come on. - I'd cry myself to sleep cos I was so happy. He was my representation of freedom. He was the only piece of me that wasn't tainted with cult culture and cult experiences. (PIG SQUEALS) Toes! Living on a farm and living in the country is a very healthy environment for me. Watch their mouthies. I get to spend a lot of time with my boy. I can take him out on the farm any time I want, catching the sunrises every morning, milking cows, being around animals. I feel very safe in the country... and very, very at peace with the world. I always had a vision of standing on my marae one day and just soaking it in and feeling everything through the ground and through my eyes and ears and nose, to experience and imagine the mana and the love. - Te Rahui Marae is where my dad is from. We're Greens, so the Green whanau is Tikitiki Marae Te Rahui. - I'm your mother's cousin. This is really big. This is huge. - Yep. I'm feeling tardy for not getting up here sooner. (WOMAN PERFORMS KARANGA) - VAL: It'll do something to him. Like, I remember the first time I went home, back to my marae. I remember just crying, actually. It felt like something I'd missed out on. (MAN SPEAKS TE REO MAORI) - David, tena koe. Tena koe for making the stand, making the stand and saying this is not the way. - It'll help him understand who he is more. (ALL SING IN TE REO MAORI) - PARE: The boy that I met today, cos I haven't seen him since he left Taupo, is a completely different boy. - Told you. Mm. - SOFTLY: It's good to meet you. - Just watching him in the powhiri and watching his emotions and reactions, he was touched, and he knows that once you have that welcoming home that this is your roots, and it's very powerful for him. - WOMAN: Haere mai. Haere mai. - Hinerupe Marae in Te Araroa is where my mum is from and where my mum and dad got married. - I really appreciate everybody coming out to welcome our cousin back to his kainga. Hoki mai te kainga, cuzzie. Welcome you and all your family back home, here. - Kia ora. - Thank you. - Thank you. Hello, bro. - I have a lot of respect for my ancestors. And I'm grateful. I'm very grateful. And learning about their challenges and their problems that they faced in their days, and I think this is a part of... this is part of honouring them. I'm proud of who my people are. They have showed me nothing but love and kindness, so I will have their back any day. - He has a place of belonging. I said, 'Not only the price of belonging, David; you are turangawaewae. - It's your land. - Mm. A place to stand. - These are his roots. These are your roots, David. You know, This is where you really belong. Your family are not lost. We are all here for you. We're here for you, and for all of the children that come out of Gloriavale that belong to my sister. We're here for them. - CONSTANCE: There's now, what, that's three brothers, three sisters. So there's seven of us now on... the out, free at last, finally. Maybe not in our minds yet, but we're... we're working on that. - At the moment, there's more of us out than there are in there. A while ago, a few of my sisters came out with their families. John came out. So it's been awesome to be able to reconnect with my other siblings and basically heal the damage that Gloriavale did to us. Yeah, I wanted to name my son Tuakana after my granddad, who I never met. He drowned saving his brother. And my mum had always talked very highly of her father. And I wanted to give honour to my ancestors. - That shows the true meaning of how he's grasped the family, he's taken it, cos my dad is Tuakana; that's his name. (MAN PLAYS GUITAR, SINGS IN TE REO MAORI) - To have a family again is... it's amazing. I feel like the prodigal son welcomed back as if I always belonged here and I never left. - David's come a long way. He's a lot more open-minded, patient, like, actively working through his trauma, forgiving, kind, just... Yeah. He's a bit of a legend. - I think Prayer has taught me the benefit of the simple things. Every day I think of her and I'm reminded to be happy. She could have fun with anything. She changed my life in so many ways, and I'm very grateful for her. I still have a long way to go, but I'm proud of how far I've come. I am David Ready, and I am a cult survivor. (GENTLE MUSIC) Captions by Julie Taylor. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2021