Proper True Yarn

Part four with Michael Crossland starts with the promise kept. Years after losing his mum’s money in the GFC, he bought her a beautiful little home and put a pink ribbon on the door, told her he’d rented it for 12 months, then told her the truth: it was hers. No, he wasn’t rich. The bank lent him the money and he pays the mortgage every week.

Four weeks before he finally got his scans done, a surgeon speaking at the same health forum pulled him aside and said something didn’t look right about his throat. Four tumours. Your tomorrows aren’t guaranteed. And when his mum rang the second he walked out of that appointment, Michael got to use her exact words, 20 years later: the doctor told me everything’s going to be okay. He finally got the chance to carry the burden for her.

Then he postponed the surgery. If he was going to die, the book had to be finished so his wife and his mum were looked after. That book is now a bestseller in six countries with hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to charity. Surgeons removed three of the four tumours, but the fourth was wrapped around his vocal cord, the very thing that puts food on his family’s table. And just when you think that’s the story, he ends the episode with one line about finally walking in his mum’s shoes that sets up the biggest episode yet.
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Then came the part he calls one of the hardest of his story. When his parents separated, Michael invested his mum’s share of the settlement in a high risk portfolio to try and buy her a home. Six weeks later the global financial crisis hit and he lost everything she had, the money of the one person who’d sacrificed her whole life for his. What followed was rock bottom at a caravan park, bacterial meningitis, fluid on the brain and Bell’s palsy, learning to walk and talk again, and the darkest stretch of his life, with his wife refusing to leave his side.

Out of it came his why. Michael and his wife went to Haiti after the earthquake, rebuilt a school that now teaches 270 kids, and met an eight year old boy eating out of a bin who’d lost his whole family. Michael rebuilt his orphanage from the ground up, became a father figure to 44 kids, and that little boy has just graduated engineering with honours in the top 10 per cent of university students in the world. And as Knuckles says, we’re not even halfway through this story.
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Part two with Michael Crossland picks up where the trial drug left off. The doctors said he'd never go to school, never play sport, and if he reached his teenage years it'd be a miracle. His mum told him everything was going to be okay and sent him to school anyway.
School turned out harder than hospital. No hair, no eyelashes, bandages over the burns, a nebuliser at every recess, and not a single day he didn't cop it from the other kids. Then, laid up after his first heart attack at just 12 years old, a get well card arrived from his class. Buried in the nice messages were four words he can still see clearly today: hope you die, Steve. What that card taught him about whose words get to weigh you down, and what's really in your cup when life bumps you, became the foundation of everything he now shares on stage.
From a 22 student primary school to a 1200 student high school, from being told he'd never play sport again to making the under 16 Australian baseball team two years later, Michael ends up on a full ride scholarship in Texas at 17, telling American girls his cancer scar came off a crocodile's tail. Six months in, he slid into second base, woke up in hospital, and at 18 it was all over. And as he says, that's only the start of it.
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This week Knuckles sits down with Michael Crossland, one of Australia’s most in demand inspirational speakers, who made the trip up from Coffs Harbour to share the parts of his story he never tells on stage. Fair warning, Knuckles was in tears two minutes in, and this is only part one.

Diagnosed at 11 months old with stage four neuroblastoma and sent home with a 96 per cent death rate, Michael’s life was shaped by his mum’s decision to see it as 4 per cent full instead of 96 per cent empty. Chemo started on his first birthday. Then came the 11 hour train rides between Sydney and Coffs Harbour, an 11 kilo tumour wrapped around his heart, and his mum carrying him into surgery because the doctors told her it might be the last time she held her little boy alive.

When the treatment stopped working, the family signed onto an experimental drug being trialled on 25 kids around the world. Within a day they were all in the burns unit, wrapped in bandages and laid in ice baths, burning from the outside in. Within 90 days, 24 of the 25 were gone. Michael was the only survivor, and he’ll tell you he’s one of the lucky ones, not because he lived, but because he wasn’t his mum.

Find Michael’s speaking work and his bestselling book Everything Will Be OK at michaelcrossland.com

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The tables get turned this week as Knuckles puts Zak Palmas, the man behind the cam, in front of it for some proper true yarns from growing up on a cane farm outside Ingham, North Queensland.

First up, the story of two 16 year old mates who couldn’t find a car to get from a bush doof into town, so they took a lawnmower instead. Twenty minutes of road, a pair of L plates, and a phone call to the cops later, both of them were done for drink driving and ended up on the news.

Then the big one. Zak was slashing water furrows in the dry season when a worn slip clutch threw sparks into a trash-covered paddock, and by the time he noticed, the tractor wheels were already hot. What follows is a flat-out sprint, a one-man water tanker hookup that should’ve been impossible, and every farmer in the district turning up unasked to cut breaks and save the uncut cane. His dad’s favourite tractor didn’t make it, but as the boys say, you can get another tractor, you can’t get another life.

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