A few hundred metres up the steep track from the public car park, Holmes stops and looks about. "This is where they brought me," he says. "It was just getting light, and when I saw more of them coming out of the bush I thought, 'Hello, I'm in for a floggin' here.' " He gives one of his oddly timed laughs.

The bikies who snatched Holmes from his home that morning had something far worse than a flogging in mind. High on ice, the Lone Wolf outlaw motorcycle club members believed he'd swindled them in a $40,000 amphetamine deal a few days earlier and had worked themselves into a vengeful fury. But even when the torture began, Holmes kept silent. "I wasn't giving them nothing," he says. "I wasn't gunna cry, I wasn't gunna beg. Call it false bravado, or whatever, but the thought that was in my head was 'God hold me.' " He laughs again. "Just, 'God hold me now.' "

With his arms bound behind him, Holmes refused an order to drop to his knees on the track. So one of the bikies bashed him on the side of the head with a pool cue, fracturing his cheek. "After that," he notes, "I was on me knees all right."

Urged on by the others, Lone Wolf Aaron Scheers then used a box cutter to slice off Holmes's ear lobes, followed by his entire left ear. Scheers slashed Holmes's forehead from hairline to eyebrow, and cut a long perforation through his left cheek. "The others were all shouting out things like, 'Cut his Achilles! Cut off his finger!' " says Holmes. "They had a go at one digit" - he holds up a scarred finger - "and they kept talking about the nice little grave they'd dug for me nearby."

It's a lot more peaceful on the track today. When Holmes stops talking, my recorder captures the cry of an exotic bird rising with bell-like clarity from a gully below us. Holmes is by all accounts a different man now to the one he was on that day in November 2007, when Aaron Drew Scheers forced him further up the track towards the chosen "grave" site. "I didn't think I'd survive then," he says. "And I thought that after the things I'd done in my life, I probably didn't deserve to live."

But that afternoon, after an inch-by-inch struggle through almost impenetrable undergrowth, Holmes emerged into the same car park where the bikies had unloaded him from their vehicle eight hours earlier. Caked in blood and covered with leeches and ticks, he was wearing only the tattered remains of his Thai fishing pants - "They don't call me 'Hippie' for nothing!" - when horrified picnickers saw him stagger from the jungle and collapse unconscious before them. For weeks, Holmes - known only as "the earless victim" in media reports - refused to tell police what had happened to him or identify his attackers.

It was only after some of the bikies involved made admissions, and broke their so-called code of silence to identify others present during the attack, that Holmes made a statement to the Queensland police task force investigating the crime. "He came in and said he was either going to do something stupid [to the bikies involved] and end up in jail, or let us take care of it," said Detective Sergeant Terry Fergusson of Taskforce Hydra in 2010.

Since then the bikies involved have all been dealt with by the Queensland justice system. Aaron Drew Scheers, now 30, was sentenced to 13 years' jail in 2010 over the attack on Holmes (reduced to 10 years on appeal). Dyslexic and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder-diagnosed, the baby-faced Scheers was later placed in solitary confinement on a 22-hour-a-day lockdown under Premier Campbell Newman's controversial new anti-bikie legislation.

Late last year, when David Holmes learnt that Scheers had tried to take his own life, apparently as a consequence of the lockdown, he and others successfully pleaded with prison authorities for Scheers to be removed from solitary. "Obviously, authorities listen to victims," says Graham Hembrow, a chaplain with Prison Fellowship Queensland. "They made a decision on what they wanted to do with Scheers, then they went back on it, and I have to think David [Holmes] did have an influence on them changing their minds."

A father of three, Holmes, 44, has been cast as a reformed drug criminal who forgave his torturer after "finding God". But the reality, he tells me, is that he planned to kill Scheers for what he did and may well have gone through with it if police hadn't arrested the bikie just before they were due to meet, a month after the attack. "And thank God that happened," he says, "because I've got enough regrets in life as it is."

Before we met, Holmes had told me by phone he was sick of the "crap" written about the incident and wanted to give an honest account of what happened. He said the attack ended up changing the course of his life for the better, but that he'd never been comfortable described as a victim: "How could I be a victim, when I was guilty of so much more in my own life?"

These days, the only visible signs of Holmes's run-in with the bikies are some faint scar lines on his forehead and cheek. Lean and muscular, with pale blue eyes and long, sun-bleached hair, he looks as though he might have stepped from the cover of a '70s Californian rock album. Yet despite his nickname, and the incense wafting through the Palm Beach flat where he lives with his 12-year-old son, Joshua, Holmes is no latter-day flower child.

During our time together he makes repeated references to his violent tendencies, personal demons and the "unspeakable" things he did during his former life as a drug dealer and standover man. "I'd go around in an SS Holden with a sawn-off [shotgun] under the seat, and a handgun right next to me in a special compartment," he says at his kitchen table. "And if people wanted to lease guns, or wanted to get money back from someone - not just drug people but business people, too - well, if I turned up, you know, it was generally considered time to pay up ..."

Violence came to Holmes' life early. He tells of being "beaten horribly, night after night" at the age of six by a woman he doesn't want to identify. This happened after his parents had parted and he spent a year living with relatives. "I kept thinking it was a bad dream," he says, "then I'd wake up and see all the blood and bruises."

By 11, reunited with his mother, he was selling newspapers on the streets of Brisbane's Fortitude Valley, then a haven for crooks who liaised with bent cops under the protection of corrupt former Queensland police commissioner Terry Lewis.

Holmes got into the action after besting the nephew of a local crime figure in a fight. Impressed, the Valley crooks recruited him as a delivery boy, running cash in brown paper bags to their associates on both sides of the law. "Being a paper boy was the perfect cover," he says. "I was pretty violent even then, and angry. I stood outside the Hacienda Hotel with my newspapers, watching the poor old Abos drinking themselves to death, the prostitutes shooting up in the car park, and the crooked coppers doing their rounds. For me, that was home."

By 13, he'd done his "first heroin robbery" (to avenge the rip-off of a mate's parents by their drug dealer); by 16 - while a student at the well-regarded Brisbane State High - he was moonlighting as a debt collector for his crime contacts, and learning to box at a Valley gym. "I supposedly have a high IQ," Holmes observes ruefully, "but I've never been much good at meeting the standards society sets."

Surfing and competitive swimming "relieved the monster within" for a while. "But by 17, it was too late: school was over and I was free. I left home and moved to Kirra [on the southern Gold Coast]. By then, I was growing pot and selling it to feed my own habit."

And so it went. Holmes got into motorbikes, had two daughters with a fellow surfer who soon moved on, leaving him to raise the kids and expand his "mini mull empire".

He says he tried to straighten up, but kept doing jobs for his crime contacts. Over the years, he became known within the underworld as an unusually violent and dangerous man. "I suppose I'm a sort of sociopath. I don't have much fear, and I have these massive feelings of love for family, but outside of that, nothing."

As the ice (methamphetamine) plague swept the Western world, he switched from growing cannabis to manufacturing amphetamines in league with others. By then he'd had a son to another partner. Holmes told his kids he worked at a screen-printing factory.

Along the way he became an amphetamine addict himself, "battling demons and nightmares, and always using some sort of drug to take my mind off things I'd seen and done. At one stage I was on acid for three months and no one noticed! The only time they thought something was wrong was after I came off it!"

Although he did a few "little stints in jail for this or that" earlier in his life, he was never charged with anything major. But now, as we approach the period when his previous life was "exposed" by what happened at Currumbin Falls, he grows more cautious, tempering his narrative flair with the occasional "allegedly".

Holmes had friends in the bikie world, including the Lone Wolf club, but says he was never a member of any gang himself. "I don't want to put myself above anyone, but I wasn't on the bikers' level. I was somewhere between them and the faceless guys, or money providers. And when I got involved in large quantities [of drugs] - very large quantities, allegedly - I didn't want bikers in my presence because they stank of 'look at me!' They brought attention I didn't want."

But in the end, Holmes' addiction made him "sloppy" and he began making bad decisions. This led to him agreeing to act as go-between in a $40,000 amphetamine deal as a favour to one of his Lone Wolf friends, then in prison. He says the money came from his imprisoned friend, who was out of favour with the drug provider - "one of the faceless men down the road". Holmes obtained advance samples of the amphetamines, which were approved by other Lone Wolf members.

In the meantime, the provider somehow discovered who was paying for the drugs and decided to replace the amphetamines with Epsom salts. This was what Holmes unknowingly delivered to the bikies: "Within 10 minutes of the drop-off, I got a text message from them saying, 'We've got a problem.' "

Holmes spent the next two days "hunting people and hanging them out of windows" in an effort to find out what had gone wrong.

He almost had it sorted, he says, when another Lone Wolf friend, Scott "Dutchy" Holland, tapped on the bedroom window of his Currumbin Waters home around 4.30am on Saturday, November 3, 2007, and told Holmes he needed to talk. "I had no idea what Dutchy wanted. I thought he musta been up the shit [on drugs] again, so I went outside."

Aaron Scheers, who'd been hiding, emerged behind the bleary Holmes and held a box cutter to his throat. The two bikies bound Holmes' hands behind him with duct tape and shoved him into the back of their car. "Young Scheersie didn't know much about the sorta things I did for a living," notes Holmes, "although I think I gave him a bit of a touch-up a couple of years before because he was such a smart-arsed young bastard. So he probably didn't like me much."

Scheers told police later that as they drove up Currumbin Valley Road towards the falls, he rang other gang members to make sure they'd be waiting at the agreed place. "I had no idea of that," Holmes laughs, "because I'd fallen asleep on the back seat. I thought, 'What's the worst these two can do?' "

When we leave his home and follow the same route to the falls in my hire car, Holmes seems somehow less formidable than he did while describing his exploits at the kitchen table. He talks about his devoutly Catholic "nan and pop", who lived with him and his mother and sister when he was a kid in Brisbane; how the old lady dutifully watered his dope plants in the backyard, believing they were tomatoes, and how, through his grandparents' influence, he'd come to accept the existence of God.

"Believe it or not," he says, "I actually wanted to be a priest at one stage."

The coastal urban sprawl gives way abruptly to a bygone world of once-thriving dairy farms, now marked by sagging, overgrown homesteads and rusty tin sheds. Twenty minutes after leaving Palm Beach, we're walking up the little-used track from the car park to the spot where three other vengeful bikies had waited for Scheers and Holland to arrive with their captive.

God hold me now.

The Lone Wolf who bashed Holmes with a pool cue when he refused to kneel was Benjamin James Dehnen, who later pleaded guilty to bodily harm while in company and armed, and was jailed for two-and-a-half years. The others present, according to Scott Holland (who turned police informant and made full admissions, claiming he thought they were just going to give Holmes a beating), were Ray Kenneth Brookes and James Desmond Murphy. Brookes and Murphy were both arrested over the crime, but later discharged.

Holland, whose charges were controversially "discontinued" after he turned informant, told police he returned to the car park after the torture of Holmes began because he couldn't stand to watch. "I can't remember whether Dutchy left after the first ear, or before they even started," Holmes tells me on the track. "But at the time I had the thought that he'd disengaged himself from the scene of a crime, as they say."

What was the pain like?

Holmes: "I've always had a high tolerance. It actually burned like shit, but I wasn't gunna tell them that."

He says that after his ears and face had been mutilated, Scheers began cutting off his index finger, then stopped, telling the others no one could endure that sort of pain and "not tell the truth".

Holmes pulls on his cigarette. "Something changed then. It was like it came over all of them at the same moment. Their faces just went white. I think they realised they'd got the wrong bloke, that it was a major f...-up, and that because of what they'd done to me none of them would be safe in the future."

The others left then, and Scheers took Holmes further up the track, bound him "like a mummy" with duct tape, and held the knife to his throat. "I said, 'Are you gunna knock me now?' And he looked at me and said, 'No, I just can't.' I saw the boy in him ... he was just a scared kid full of ice, following orders and trying to be part of the mob mentality. I told him, 'You better kill me right f...ing now, 'cause I swear if I jump outta this, I'll track you and every one of them down, and you'll all just disappear.' But he just shoved me into a hollow beside a big tree and ran off."

Holmes doesn't know how long he struggled against the tape, drifting in and out of consciousness. In the end it was all the blood that saved him, drenching the tape until he slipped free.

By then he'd rolled and stumbled far down into a gully, where he lay in a creek before making a final desperate effort to crawl up and regain the track.

"I prayed for the first time in ages," Holmes says. "I didn't make any promises because I was sick of all the promises I'd made myself through my life. I just prayed for the strength to make one last burst, otherwise I was gone."

After he reached the car park and passed out, at about 2.30pm, some surfers put him on the tray of their ute, tied him down with leg ropes, then took off for lower ground, where their mobile phones would work and they could call an ambulance. "I woke up halfway through that bloody trip," says Holmes, "saw that I was tied up and thought, 'Oh f...! The bastards have got me again!' "

Four days after the attack, a park ranger found Holmes's left ear on the track near the crime scene. By then, he was under guard in a Brisbane hospital, still refusing to tell investigators what happened: "The [Australian Crime Commission] set up court in a hospital room, wheeled my bed in and told me I had to talk or I'd be up for contempt. So I said I was mowing the lawn and musta hit a rock, har, har ... In the end they just let it go."

Holmes's phone rang hot with calls from underworld figures offering to deal with the bikies, but he refused to talk with them, either. "Police were tracing the calls," he says, "and they were like a who's who of people who should never be spoken of. One of the coppers told me, 'Mate, just stop this right now, or there's gunna be a bloodbath!' I knew then that my old life was over, and I had to shut everything down real quick."

A month after the attack - when "everyone else involved was talking [to police]" - Holmes finally spoke to investigating detectives. He says he identified only Scheers and Holland, and that the detectives told him they were aware of his "intentions" for revenge. "I said, 'Well, you better move quickly because people are gunna start disappearing.' "

It was soon after this that Scheers offered, through a third party, to pay him "compensation" for what he'd done. A meeting was set up between the two of them at a Currumbin hotel. "Scheersie would have disappeared that day," Holmes tells me at his kitchen table. "But 20 minutes before he was due to turn up, while I was waiting in the pub, it came over the news that he and the others [his attackers] had all just been arrested."

But he'd intended to kill Scheers? Holmes smiles. "Allegedly," he says.

Holmes did a re-enactment of what happened at Currumbin Falls with police, but later left a message for investigating detectives saying he wouldn't testify at the committal hearing because his family had been threatened and he needed to "disappear". "But there were no threats," he says now. "Just a lot of money coming through for me not to turn up in court."

(It came out later that Holmes took a $20,000 bribe from Scheers to hide out for a week while the committal hearing took place in August, 2008. In March 2010, when Scheers pleaded guilty to kidnapping and grievous bodily harm against Holmes in the Southport District Court, three years was added to his sentence for attempting to pervert the course of justice.)

None of this - including the fact that Scheers's mother, Christine, was caught up in charges (later dropped) over the bribe he accepted - seems to have had much effect on Holmes at the time. "Business is business," he tells me. "That sort of stuff was all part of the life I used to lead. I'd lost my livelihood, and been exposed to the world, so it didn't seem like a bad idea to get something in return."

What about the fact that Scheers might have killed him that day at Currumbin Falls, but didn't?

Holmes shrugs. "He was just a poor dumb kid. I had friends in jail who wanted to deal with him, but I got word around that no one should hurt him."

Did the money that Scheers paid him have anything to do with that? Holmes: "Yeah, yeah. Otherwise he was in for a bit of a hard time, yeah."

Christine Scheers tells me she was grateful to Holmes for helping to get her son out of solitary confinement last year - "I spoke to him and thanked him for it" - but declines to make any further comment. Aaron Scheers is understood to be eligible for parole in 2016.

It took Holmes almost a year to beat his amphetamine addiction. During that struggle he sometimes sat in his car outside the houses of the other bikies involved in the attack and thought about killing them. "I'd be loaded up [high] and ready to go," he tells me in the picnic area at Currumbin Falls. "But somehow I'd developed a conscience" - he laughs, heartily this time - "and I just went, 'No, go home.' And I'd drive away, thinking, 'What the f...'s the matter with me?' "

A few years ago he joined a charismatic church, got baptised in the stream we can hear gurgling nearby, and gave testimonials about his evil past and the healing powers of the Lord. He says he's still a believer, but the appeal of the "holy-moly church stuff" wore off, and he now spends his time counselling young offenders and drug addicts, and surfing with his son.

Holmes sees a psychiatrist regularly, and still wakes up occasionally with "this ball of rage in the pit of my stomach". But he can control it now, and revels in seeing his family and being accepted as an ordinary person. "In my old life," he says, "there was no peace, just no peace anywhere. So what I feel mostly is relief, because after all those years of hiding in plain sight, I don't have to hide any more."