Memorable moments: The great Kosciuszko meltdown

I am, by nearly all accounts, a mild-mannered person. I don’t raise my voice much and I certainly don't have a reputation for foul language. But that was before I took a camping trip to Mount Kosciuszko.

Lesson number one: never pitch your tent in a hollow in an area renowned for torrential downpours. By midnight, it felt less like a campsite and more like I was sleeping on a waterbed that was rapidly losing its structural integrity. Water was cascading through the entrance, and the world was pitch black.

Then, a cold spike of adrenaline hit me. I remembered my most precious possession—my non-waterproof iPhone—was somewhere on the floor of this newly formed indoor swimming pool.

I fumbled for my torch. Nothing. I fumbled for the phone, my hands splashing through the rising tide. As the panic set in, a side of me I didn't know existed suddenly took the stage. I began swearing with a ferocity, rhythm, and linguistic variety that would have stunned a dockworker.

The next morning, as we wrung out our sleeping bags, my friend Gavin was still in awe.

"My God, Graeme," he laughed. "I wish I’d recorded that. We could have published a definitive dictionary of the world's most creative swear words based solely on your performance last night."

I went into that tent a calm, spiritual seeker; I emerged the only man in New South Wales to have officially cursed a thunderstorm into submission.