Charles Lomu

And when lunchtime came, everybody brought the pots out, the lunch boxes out.

Everyone brought it out.

We all sat under a tree and everyone was passing the food around.

And I'd never seen that before.

I thought, wow.

This is a whole different experience.

I felt it was fulfilling for me at that time in my life because I was going through, you know, a time where I was a bit haywire and it grounded me again back to the roots that my grandma taught me about.

What brought you back to Australia?

Well, what brought me back to Australia was I went for a holiday in Tonga and my father and my siblings and my mother went to Tonga as well.

We all agreed to meet there for holidays and then...

Without my knowledge, they arranged for me to have a ticket to come back to Australia.

So I came back to Australia because there was an opportunity to return to representative football again.

So I came back to Australia to play football.

I tried to just try to do my best with the circumstances.

And I discovered really quickly that there were a lot of unresolved issues.

it was just expected that I was supposed to slot back in and just go.

And so I felt like all of those unresolved issues just came up.

I couldn't keep them down.

And so because of that, my father and my mother and I agreed that I should leave home because my father was worried that my example might rub off on my siblings.

So I left home and...