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David Bain has spoken lovingly about his murdered family at an international justice conference in Perth.
The 39-year-old smiled as he described their life in Papua New Guinea before they came to Dunedin in 1988, saying it was a "Pacific paradise" filled with family trips to the beach and church events.
"Life in Papa New Guinea was a child's ideal. We grew up in a paradise where running around in nothing but a pair of shorts and sunscreen was the norm," he told the crowd of international criminal expert and media today.
"It was all just one big playground".
However, Bain became sullen as he recounted the morning in 1994 when he returned from a paper run to find his family murdered in their Dunedin home.
He said he went into a state of shock when he found his mother
still in bed with blood pouring down her face and may have fainted
before going from room-to-room to find the rest of his
family.
"I found my brother Stephen curled on the floor of his room.
I saw Laniet in bed and Arawa also on the floor of her room,
twisted into an unnatural position.
"I then remember finding Dad on the floor in our lounge and then the impression of black hands taking away my family."
Bain was exonerated in 2007 after serving 12 years for the murder of his parents and three siblings in Dunedin in 1994.
In 2007, the Privy Council quashed his convictions on the grounds of a substantial miscarriage of justice and ordered a retrial, which took place in Christchurch in 2009, where a jury found him not guilty.
Bain attended the International Justice Conference along with other Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, who was convicted of murdering her two-month-old daughter while on a campaign trip in 1980, despite claiming that a dingo had eaten her baby.
Creighton had her conviction overturned in 1988 and received $1.3 million in compensation from the Australian government four years later.