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Mabel Lui

The year was 1979 and Danny McFadden was in Geraldton, Western Australia, about 14,000km (8,700 miles) from London, England, where he grew up. He was 28, and awoke one day to four blank walls surrounding him.
All he could remember from the day before was suffering from delirium tremens (DTs), a severe type of alcohol withdrawal, and heading off to see a street-drinking friend.
As he slowly got up from the thin mattress on the floor, his mind was spinning: how did he get here?
He was in hospital, again. He had been admitted plenty of times after getting blackout drunk, but this visit would change the course of his life.

A nurse introduced him to Norm, a recovering alcohol addict. Norm ran the local rehab centre and invited McFadden to join weekly Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings.
He sat on a hospital bed contemplating the offer, when he had a moment of clarity.
“I wanted to see if life was worth living,” he says. “Maybe there could be a chance to have a life outside of alcoholism – maybe.”
Today, McFadden is 45 years sober, spending his time between Hong Kong, Australia and Ireland. He has transitioned from drunk drifter to accomplished lawyer, with a specialisation in mediation and dispute resolution.
He was once interim director of mediation at the United Nations in New York, and is currently the managing director of the Asia-Pacific branch of the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR). He is also an on-call regional mediator in Asia for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In 2024, he added memoir author to his list of accomplishments. His book Wilder Shores: Addiction Adventure and Second Chances provides a riveting and candid view of his life, from growing up with an alcoholic father and masking his own social anxiety with alcohol to becoming a full-time drunk and, finally, choosing to take a second chance at life.
McFadden’s story begins in London, where he was born in 1950 to Irish parents. Despite the post-war gloom, he enjoyed growing up in Kentish Town, a tight-knit, working-class community of Irish immigrants.
But his father’s drinking turned his home into a dysfunctional one.
“When I was 10, I said to myself, ‘I’m never going to be like my dad.’ But when I was 18, I knew I was,” he says.
The drinking started casually. He would drink with friends, but while they would spend the next day elsewhere, he would return to the pub. The drinking became constant, and he found himself in situations filled with casual violence.

One evening, a friend had a spat with a policeman and McFadden was arrested, even though he had not been physically violent during the encounter. He went to prison on a conviction of actual bodily harm, having pled guilty because he did not know any better.
He was 19 then. Following his prison stint, he returned to his former job as town librarian – he loved reading – but left for construction, “a rough and ready world” where “as long as you work, you can drink”, he says.
Soon, he felt his time in the UK was up. “What I then tried to do was run away from my problem,” he says.
He hitchhiked all around Europe in the 1970s, working blue-collar jobs in France, Israel, the Netherlands and Denmark. He never stopped drinking.
He returned to London, but his alcoholism only worsened. He would convince himself he did not need a drink, but then scurry to the store late at night.
“You start to lose your self-respect,” he says. “It affects people in different ways, but [you] start to become reclusive, start to avoid people, to lie to people, to cover up what’s going on.”
Feeling depressed, he chose to run away to somewhere new. Inspired by an Australian drama series, he went there.

He worked in construction in Perth, but soon left because he was drinking too much. He hitchhiked to Geraldton, where he spent his days mostly on the streets as a full-time drunk, to the point where he began hearing voices in his head.
“I didn’t want to wake up any more. I just wanted oblivion,” he says.
He had hit rock bottom.
It was that fateful hospital visit in 1979 that led him to turn his life around. By that time, he was suffering from DTs, chronic malnutrition and probable liver damage.
He knew he had to make a decision: “Did I want to live or to die?”
So he headed to the AA meeting that Norm had asked him to join. “I thought my life was over when I went to that meeting. I didn’t realise it was only just beginning,” he says.
He spent five months in Rosella House, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation hotel, where his behaviour began to shift.

A turning point was going to a shop and not buying alcohol. But a more solemn moment came when his street-drinking friend Teddy died, three weeks after McFadden had begged him to admit himself to hospital.
Then it was time to move on – not to run away from his problems, but in search of what his life could be. In Carnarvon, also in Western Australia, he worked in mining – and then as the town librarian, after having been sober for about a year.
“When they gave me the keys to the library, oh my god, I was so emotional … because it’s like I’m being given my life all over again,” he says.
Four years on, he enrolled in the modern Asian studies course at Griffith University, in South East Queensland. There, he began to address his social anxiety.

He had always been extremely shy, and he realised drinking had helped him cope with his discomfort in social situations.
He came across a book by Australian doctor Claire Weekes and began adopting some of the cognitive therapy tricks she described to overcome his nerves.
“[Before] I could not walk into a room without falling apart,” McFadden says. Fast-forward to today and he regularly gives lectures and talks to crowds numbered in the thousands. “That is just insane. I just laugh at life’s ironies.”
After his graduation, his career thrived. Having learned Mandarin while studying in Taiwan, he worked as an interpreter and then dove into real estate, at one point running the Australian branch of Taiwan’s largest real-estate firm.
In his late 40s, he returned to school to study law at the University of Queensland. He became accredited as a mediator and began working at CEDR, first as a consultant, then as a director from 2004.

He has also worked for the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade in Beijing – speaking to audiences in the Great Hall of the People in fluent Mandarin – and the Hong Kong Mediation Accreditation Association.
In these roles and as regional mediator in Asia for the World Bank and the IMF, he has mediated disputes and trained lawyers around the world, including in Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Guyana, Ireland and Switzerland.
People might be surprised to learn of his colourful, if difficult, past, but it has shaped who he is today.
His heartfelt advice for people who want to quit drinking is to talk to others, as he did at the AA meetings. It helps to deal with underlying problems and in accepting that you have a problem, he says – talking to people with the same problem helps you relate to, and learn from, one another.

His goal in writing Wilder Shores, he says, is to give hope to readers who may be fighting their own demons.
“I’d have loved to [have] read a book like mine, to realise I wasn’t alone.”
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Danny McFadden speaks at the “Mediate First for a Win-Win Solution” conference in Hong Kong in March 2014.  After becoming a lawyer, Danny McFadden became an expert trainer in dispute resolution. He frequently gives talks about mediation in Asia and beyond. Photo: Courtesy of Danny McFadden

McFadden works as a driller’s offsider at a quarry north of Carnarvon, Western Australia, after being sober for around six months. Photo: Courtesy of Danny McFadden

Since becoming sober, McFadden has become a dual-qualified lawyer in Australia and the UK. Photo: Courtesy of Danny McFadden

McFadden wrote Wilder Shores to give hope to readers who may be fighting their own demons. Photo: Amazon

Before McFadden began studying at Griffith University in the 1980s, he bought a second-hand Volkswagen Kombi and drove 3,500 miles from Carnarvon to Brisbane to “leave on a high”, as he writes in his book. Photo: Courtesy of Danny McFadden

McFadden in rehab at Rosella House. Photo: Courtesy of Danny McFadden

McFadden (centre) with fellow Griffith University students in 1984. Photo: Courtesy of Danny McFadden

McFadden (centre) at the International ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) Mooting Competition, which was held at City University of Hong Kong. Photo: Courtesy of Danny McFadden

McFadden now splits his time between Hong Kong, Australia and Ireland. Here he is seen planting trees in Ireland, one of his favourite pastimes. Photo: Courtesy of Danny McFadden

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Danny McFadden hit rock bottom in his 20s before discovering Alcoholics Anonymous. Now he works with bodies like the World Bank and IMF


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