Looking Back: A Memoir of Spiritual Life and Homicide by Japaljarri Tara Takoda pdf epub fb2

Looking Back, A Memoir of Spiritual Life and Homicide is a chilling autobiography of a life gone terribly, tragically wrong. Japaljarri Tara Takoda, a convicted murderer, painter, poet and spiritual practitioner, looks back from the confines of Port Phillip Prison, one of Australia's toughest maximum security prisons, and tells a story that will shake the stoniest of hearts and ask the hardest of questions about the meaning of justice, innocence, guilt and complicity.

At the centre of Japaljarri's book lies a father-son relationship that will ultimately lead his father Phillip Ovalsen to a $350,000 insurance payout, an e-mail bride, a luxury yacht, and a life lived by alibi and stringent denial. For the son, his trail will be marked by a paternal entrapment so machiavellian that it will lead to what he believes is the murder of his beloved grandmother; unspeakable guilt; the fleeting happiness of marriage and children; a cruel crushing separation; a confession of the "murder" six years later; and the final irrevocable act of imprisonment.

Amidst the tumultuous journey encompassing Japaljarri's life is a spiritual past. Discovery of Japaljarri's healing and psychic abilities, living with Aboriginal elders in the Australian desert, and practising with a native American Indian Medicine Man, are part of this extraordinary story.