DANIEL FLITTON April 2, 2010

WORK often takes Paul Ronalds overseas, at least eight times a year. Airports, hotels, bland convention centres, taxi hops from meeting to meeting, it's all standard fare for the modern business set. And sometimes, not.

Ronalds once found himself on the border of Thailand and Burma, meeting victims of a crime he thought long banished from the world. ''For a guy coming from Australia, that modern slavery was still going on was a shock,'' he says. Usually confident and animated, he mumbles and his voice breaks while telling the story of six Burmese women cruelly exploited. Some five years on, the memory of what he found on that trip still rankles.

The background to how Ronalds got to that place is important...