Emma

"Hauraki mightn’t have been Gibbs’ idea of a perfect investment, but it impressed his three teenage girls enormously; it was ‘cool’, and the pirate mythology of the station fitted with their image of their father. ‘Dad had always been a pirate in our minds,’ Emma says. The skull and crossbones flag fluttered above all of the Gibbs boats when sailing; fun, mischief, guns and sailboats were part of the family folklore."

"In November 2003, while the tests continued, Gibbs took off for another overseas adventure; this time to war-torn Afghanistan. Societies exposed to extreme regimes continued to fascinate him. Since visiting North Korea in 1999, he’d explored Bhutan, the closed society in the Himalayas, and Albania, the small country that for most of the twentieth century had tried to turn its back on modernity. In 2003, the great issue of the moment was the War on Terror, with Iraq and Afghanistan the primary theatres of the great struggle. Quite aside from the opportunity to witness Afghanistan’s contemporary travails first-hand, Gibbs was attracted by the rich layering of history that he expected to find in a region that had provided the traditional crossroads for Asia for millennia. In London Emma had met Robert Pelton, a Canadian journalist who specialised in books and articles about the world’s most dangerous places.[14](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477408-606132179-14) Gibbs proposed a deal; he’d pay Pelton’s airfare to Afghanistan if he showed them around. Thus began one of his great adventures."