Sarah Kanowski

We brought some of those animals home, but we're 15, 20 kilometres from our car.

So you bring some meat home and that goes into the freezer.

We weren't a very well-off family, so usually the meat would be in the chest freezer for the next three or four months, which mum was thrilled about, helped the budget.

So they had fallen in love quite young and they did what a lot of New Zealanders and Australians do, which is they just packed up a backpack and they left and they went off to Europe and travelled.

This is, you know, the late 70s.

And in their travels in Greece, they actually, just because it was cheap accommodation, they came across a hippie commune, but a hippie commune with a slight difference.

They were very fervent Pentecostal Christians.

And these were sorts of Christians who believed that they could pray for miracles.

They could pray for food if they'd run out of food.

And we've heard these stories, almost these family myths.

My parents wouldn't say they're myths.

My parents would say, we saw this, this happened.

And where they would pray for fish and thousands of fish would jump off the beach onto the sand or a gangster would come in to break up the commune and with a polio twisted leg and

These Christians would pray for that gangster and his leg would untwist him right in front of their eyes.

And these were stories that we heard as kids growing up of these miracles that mum and dad had seen as these hippies and backpackers.

And it was like magic for us.

We held hands every night and prayed.

If something was happening at school, mum and dad would come in, tuck us in and pray for us.

We followed the rules, the Ten Commandments.

We didn't swear.