Frank's Story.
Finding North.

The Pastry

For no reason, I started vomiting the pastry I had just eaten over my new Corneliani suit.

It was a beautiful Melbourne morning. The sun was out, Toorak Village was alive, and I had stopped briefly for a coffee and a pastry at a small Italian hole-in-the-wall café before work. I had recently transitioned out of executive coaching and was now selling high-end Italian suits to successful men in Melbourne's most expensive suburb.

As soon as I opened the cash register for the day, I vomited. I hadn't felt ill. I felt vital. Life was good. There was no urgency, no bile — just pastry and saliva. I couldn't explain it. So I ignored it.

The vomiting became a morning pattern whenever I ate solid food. Because it wasn't violent or painful, I still did nothing. I assumed I had time.

On a day off, I saw my GP. I laughed as I described the symptoms. He didn't laugh. As I spoke, the colour drained from his face. He picked up the phone while I was still sitting there.

A gastroscopy followed within days. In recovery, the gastroenterologist showed me photographs. A ten-centimetre tumour in my oesophagus. Biopsy confirmed cancer within twenty-four hours.

When Vicki picked me up, she pulled the car to the side of the road. When I told her, we cried and held each other. It felt as though our future had been erased in a single sentence.

Weeks later, in pre-op, lines in, waiting for my surgeon, I was left with a question I had never seriously asked before:

The Smell of Difference

The first thing people noticed about me was the smell. Salami. Garlic. Onion. Dried fish. Vinegar. Things that lingered.

I was born on 2 February 1954 at Subiaco Hospital in Perth, Western Australia, to Rosina Bianchi — born in Costa Volpino, northern Italy — and Francis Andrew Marinko Senior, whose father had come from Split in Croatia. I was a child of two continents, neither of which was Australia.

I didn't know I was marked at first. Kids notice difference. And I noticed them noticing me. Other children leaned away slightly. Teachers wrinkled their noses without meaning to. My lunch never smelled like anyone else's.

I was a sickly child, strapped to hospital beds with asthma, fighting for air. My parents gave me the remedies they knew: onion juice, garlic juice, the folk cures of survival. By seven, the asthma had gone. By fourteen, I was big for my age.

My name didn't sound like theirs. I was called a wop, a dago, an Itie. I carried a faint European accent that didn't match the Australian vowels around me. Difference was handled in small ways — bags placed on seats, turned backs, jokes that weren't quite jokes.

I became acutely aware of myself: my body, my food, my voice. I felt ashamed. And angry.

So I learned how not to lose. I took up judo. By thirteen, I was a state champion. I became harder. Bigger. If I couldn't belong, I would dominate.

Then I enrolled in drama classes to fix my accent. Within a year I could speak in clipped English, even American tones. I memorised long soliloquies and performed them on stage. I learned how to act. And I was good at it.

Outrunning Stillness

Once I learned that I could reinvent myself, I kept doing it. New places. New people. New sensations. I told myself it was freedom. It felt like relief. As long as I was moving, I didn't have to stop and ask where I was headed.

Sport fast-tracked me into adult circles. The men introduced me to drugs. By sixteen I was experimenting with substances, guided partly by the writings of Timothy Leary and a fascination with what lay along the Silk Road. I made a list — methodical as ever — of substances I intended to try, with the aim of understanding my own mind more deeply. Over the next twenty-five years of travelling the world, I worked my way through it.

By nineteen I was working in the oilfields of Western Australia, earning significant money on Barrow Island. Long hours. High pay. Huge stimulation.

I followed the Silk Roads of Asia — Malaysia, Thailand, Laos — convinced that if I went far enough I might finally slow down. I developed a taste for opiates. Then I witnessed what dependency could do to intelligent, educated people. I knew I had to leave. I flew to London, went cold turkey in a grim hotel room for ten days, and kept moving.

Back in Perth, I took work in real estate, married Valerie, and built a life that looked stable from the outside. Our son Kane was born in 1978. Our daughter Khandis in 1984. The drug use never fully went away. It simply adapted, as I always adapted.

The Turn

In 1995, an unlikely person introduced me to Landmark Education. I attended my first Landmark Forum that year, and it was like stepping out of a fog I hadn't known I was living in.

I realised that twenty-five years of drug and alcohol consumption had completely distorted my view of life and reality. From 1996, I stopped using drugs entirely. I never looked back.

With fresh eyes, I developed a financial software company — Mon-e Pty Ltd — that could lend money to strangers using a simple algorithm. I secured a licence with Cash Converters and built the system within their Australian network. In 2003, I sold my interest. The software went on to generate profits of $26 million per annum for Cash Converters to this day.

Then I addressed a shadow I had been carrying for two decades: I had not paid income tax for twenty years. I went directly to the Tax Department, lodged twenty years of outstanding returns, settled a debt of $600,000, and was declared bankrupt.

I started again. By 2004 I was in Melbourne, engaging the mentorship of Robert Hargrove, and building an executive coaching practice that has lasted to this day. By 2008, I was out of bankruptcy.

Vicki

In 2006, I met the love of my life.

Vicki Campbell is a country girl from Coleraine who worked in the fashion industry — a gentle, beautiful woman, inside and out. It was, strange as it sounds, love at first sight. I had finally met someone who enjoyed deep and meaningful conversation that had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol.

We have been together ever since. Vicki became an accredited coach in 2011 and an accredited yoga teacher in 2013. She has been alongside me through everything that followed — steady, generous, and unflinching in the hardest moments.

My children have both grown into remarkable people. Kane completed his MBA at RMIT and works for Telstra. He married Sophia Kwon in 2009, and they live in Melbourne with their son Lincoln. Khandis is a Research Fellow in evolutionary psychology at the University of Melbourne. She married Chris Blake in 2013, and they have a daughter Stella and a son Lucien.

The Peak — And The Collapse

At the height of my coaching practice, I had 25 clients: two major Melbourne universities, a barrister, a real estate agent, and coaches in Western Australia, the Netherlands, and India. Vicki and I moved to the Sunshine Coast of Queensland. I became a fly-in-fly-out executive coach — Melbourne on Monday fortnights for face-to-face sessions, back to Sunshine Coast on Friday afternoons. I was living the dream.

Then Covid struck.

Melbourne locked down. Both universities shed thousands of staff. High-priced consultants were no longer an affordable option. The work evaporated. We sold the house and moved back to Melbourne.

Retail wasn't a fallback — it was another reinvention. Vicki helped me find a role selling Italian men's fashion in Toorak. I was good at it. I enjoyed dressing men well. I earned strong commissions. Once again, life had found a way to steady itself.

Which is why I laughed when I told my GP about the vomiting.

The Scalpel

My surgeon, Mr Liang Low, was refined, impeccably dressed — I could have been his dresser — and ruthlessly calm. He gave me two options. Control: chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immunotherapy — a few more years living with the cancer. Or cure: the Ivor Lewis oesophagectomy. Six hours. Robotic surgery, then a thoracic incision. A reconstructed digestive system. He looked me in the eye and said plainly that my life would never be the same again.

Before surgery: five weeks of chemotherapy and daily radiotherapy to shrink the tumour. Five weeks to get my affairs in order. Five weeks to contemplate everything I had assumed there would be time for.

The quietest fear wasn't dying. It was leaving things unsaid. I went through my life like a ledger — names, moments, conversations. I wanted no emotional debt outstanding. No unspoken thanks. No unfinished acknowledgements.

By day thirty-five, there was nothing left to organise, no one left to call, no sentiment withheld. There was only love — and the surgeon's scalpel.

I woke in ICU with eleven tubes in my body. The pain was unlike anything I had experienced. Everything was discombobulated. I was grateful to be alive. Relieved. And quietly terrified of how much of my biology had been rearranged.

Lying there, wired and broken, I made a decision: if I survived, I would not drift again.

The Arc