The tiny brick house sits on a hill from which the pastoral landscape rolls away across valleys and ridges as far as the eye can see. In the distance the mound of Mount Franklin looks like a loaf of bread rising from the earth. To get here you drive deep into country in north-west Victoria and then onto dirt roads. Down on the plain below, the roof of a farmhouse sits among trees. Otherwise you are quite alone here.

On a clear day the view is panoramic as the clouds change shape, the light shifts, and weather patterns unfold. But today is a day of white sleet and a stabbing wind that roars through the trees. Inside, a wood fire blazes as the house rattles and shakes in the insistent storm.

A passing stranger might be startled to see a small Chinese man loudly singing Italian opera as he plants his garden. It makes him feel better, he says. “Otherwise I would go mad.” But no one passes here.

On a bad day he might be crying and morose as he tends his vegetables.

“I don't like too many people,” explains Philip Leung. “After what happened to me I just want to be by myself.”

He retreated here a year ago, wounded and traumatised. He has withdrawn from society and sought solitude in an attempt to come to terms with being on the receiving end of what some might call a substantial miscarriage of justice - creating Australian legal history as the only person to be tried three times for the same homicide.

For Leung, eight terrifying years of court cases and prisons began on an unremarkable Easter Saturday morning in 2007. Following an argument over carrot juice, his partner of six years, Mario Guzzetti, fell down the stairs and died at their Alexandria terrace house and Leung was arrested for murder.

After his third trial, he was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to a minimum four-and-a-half years' jail.

“It would have broken a fellow with less emotional strength. It was an abject tragedy,” says Winston Terricini SC, the barrister who represented him all the way through.

Leung had to keep believing that justice would prevail; it was the only way he could make it through.

“You need to fight for your innocence,” he says. “If you don't help yourself no one can help you.

“I always felt very confident that one day they would clear my name. There was no doubt in me. I told my friends when they came to visit me, don't worry sooner or later I will be cleared.

“Because I was innocent, it is just for some reason they put into a place I don't belong. I knew Mario was helping me all the time.”

After three years in prison, and three days before Christmas Day in 2014, the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal overturned Leung's conviction, quashed his conviction and he was acquitted.

The Hon Justice Christine Adamson noted that “the appellant had loved him [Mario] and had not wanted him to die.”

Leung's self-sufficiency - his ability to shut down and survive - can be traced back to his childhood and the early chapters in his episodic life. “I lost my parents very young,” he notes. “It made me very independent.”

He was born in Quangdong province in 1960, 24 kilometres from the border of Hong Kong, during the Cultural Revolution when children as young as three would be taken by truck to work in the rice paddies. His father had fled to Hong Kong when he was a baby to get a job to support him and his four sisters. His mother told him there was nothing to return to.

After she died of a stroke, he made five attempts to cross the Shenzhen River into Hong Kong to try and find his father. Each time he spent considerable time in the water to escape the border guard – once for 15 hours. When he got there the British would throw him into the crowded stockades and send him back.

When he finally made it, aged 14, he was overjoyed to find the father he had never met, but that didn't last long. “He was a typical Chinese parent, they want you to do what they want. He asked me to be a mechanic … He was just a stranger, really.”

There was no talk of school and the work was tiring. After a fortnight, Leung said he wanted to stop. His father lashed out. “I ran away and never went back.”

In 1984 he was sent to work in New Zealand, carving jade. In 1988 he came to Australia and earned a certificate in Jewellery Design and Manufacture at Randwick TAFE.

In 2001 Leung, then 41, met Mario Guzzetti, 66, at an opera function. Guzzetti was a retired printer who had worked for the Italian-Australian newspaper La Fiamma. They moved in together in 2003, initially to Guzzetti's Homebush house, before buying the Alexandria property.

Leung was an aesthete who made his own brocade jackets. He and Guzzetti had a season ticket for the opera, going every Tuesday and always sitting in the same seats.

“They may have had arguments,” says Terricini, “but it was a loving relationship between two people who enjoyed similar interests.” They led a gentle, cultured life. Leung was learning Italian. A former partner described him as “almost monkish”.

Guzzetti's photo hangs on the wall. Leung still talks to him. He is very thin, wiry, with a shining healthy face, and seems a lot younger than 55.

He extends an effusively warm welcome, but over several hours, as he is forced to remember, he will range from excitably animated with fragile hope for the future to weeping and decimated; he is haunted.

People in the district wonder why he always keeps his gate locked. But Leung is a man for whom the world has ceased to be a safe place. He knows bad things can happen without warning and how suddenly an ordinary life can shatter.

Leung was so distraught he wouldn't let ambulance officers near the body he cradled in his arms the morning Guzzetti died, rocking back and forth. His shock was so great that he couldn't accept what had happened. “I don't know who came to the house in that time, the police or the ambulance, I don't remember at all.”

Even when he was taken into custody and charged with murder he kept telling the police: “'Mario is not dead, he is in hospital.' I still couldn't believe it.”

Outside, the eucalyptus trees disappear into winter rain. On the 20 acres he bought he has planted olive trees in memory of Guzzetti, who hailed from Verona. Leung is almost self-sufficient with his vegetable garden - on a shelf are jars of pickled eggplant and zucchini. He chops the wood for his fire. In front of the house he has planted trees and flowers, fenced in with chicken wire since kangaroos ate his early attempts. A bronze face he made rests on a tree stump.

He is nearly happy when he talks enthusiastically about his camellias and roses, his plans to fix up the house; put on a veranda and build a Chinese pergola. “I like a nice garden, and I like to be creative. It is good for me to do it from scratch. And plant all the trees, it is a challenge.”

It is so quiet here, something he appreciates after prison. “Always things happen, always arguing.” He has started drawing again, and shows me delicate sketches of the branches of trees around the house. When the stumps of the yellow box trees he cut down because they were too close to the house are dry he will use them for sculptures.

He admits that he is lonely and would love to have animals to keep him company, chooks, llamas. “I love animals, especially the chicken and the pig. Because we had pigs when I was little on the farm, they are nice, they understand you.”

All of this should be healing work, good, honest, hard, physical work, but it is not. Leung is profoundly damaged. Unquiet. The pain is too intense, sometimes, for one person to handle.

“I need to see a psychiatrist,” he tells me. “It has really changed my life and made me suffer. Not just the jail part but being accused. For the rest of my life I don't think I will ever recover.”

Leung was the first person to be re-tried under the double-jeopardy law introduced in NSW in 2006, allowing the Office of the Director of Pubic Prosecutions to appeal a verdict directed by a judge.

“He was unlucky,” says Terricini, “that this occurred at a time when they needed a case. This piece of legislation of double-jeopardy that allowed Leung to be treated like this was completely unnecessary and a typical knee-jerk reaction of politicians.”

The cause of Guzzetti's death was never fully determined. An autopsy found that he had received a blunt-force injury to his head and neck, which could have been caused by a blow or hitting it on a wall or staircase.

He had hypertension, scarring of the liver, fluid on his lungs, an enlarged heart and three partly blocked arteries. There were bruises and torn skin all over his body which could have been caused by a fall down the narrow, winding staircase of their 1880s terrace house or an attack.

The Crown alleged that Leung had used the bowl part of the juicer he had utilised for the carrot juice to strike Guzzetti three times with enough force to make him topple down the stairs to his death.

But Leung says: “In the trial they said the heart was enlarged. I really think it was something to do with the heart. He had high blood pressure. Also he was 71. Even if you are very healthy, you are 71.”

Before his first trial started in April 2009, Leung was offered a deal of manslaughter in exchange for a guilty plea. Facing 20 years in prison he refused, saying, “I didn't do it.” Throughout his ordeal he never wavered in believing that his innocence would set him free.

In May 2009, Justice Stephen Rothman directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty of either murder or manslaughter, as the act of causing death was not proved beyond reasonable doubt.

The DPP appealed. In April 2011, with no new evidence presented, Leung faced trial again, this time for manslaughter.

On April 28, Justice Michael Adams noted that not all of Guzzetti's injuries could be explained but that he could find no new evidence on which a jury could properly convict. Leung believed he was “finally free” to start living again.

Again, the DPP appealed.

What tortures Leung most is the sheer injustice of what happened. The lack of any kind of mitigation for what he has been through, battling a nameless, faceless system.

“They never apologise, they treat you like a piece of shit,” he says. “Nobody helps. They victimise you and pretend it never happened. After I came out that law is still there and nobody has questioned it. It is always on my mind. How did that happen?”

And he offers a telling explanation of what it feels like to be on the wrong side of the law, to be helpless and caught in the machinations of an alien world.

“They were using me like a guinea pig to test their new law, or a scapegoat. It is just an abuse of human rights. It was like a game, some wealthy people try to have a bet. You know that sort of game, to see who is cleverer than the other. They don't care who the person is who suffers for their political games. I was a puppet.”

During his time waiting for his third trial, scared and unable to sleep, Leung became so stressed and depressed that a concerned ex-partner wrote a letter to the NSW Attorney General saying he thought he was having a nervous breakdown.

In November 2012, still with no new evidence, a jury took two days to reach a verdict. The look on the jury foreman's face when he delivered the verdict of guilty is imprinted on Leung's psyche. “I see that face. And I will remember for the rest of my life his smiling at me.”

He wasn't well suited to the shock of prison. “Even some of the officers told me they didn't think I belonged there.” He survived by closing down and keeping to himself. “I didn't say much because I really didn't know if I could trust anybody in there. I had to live day-to-day. I had no choice. I thought I would kill myself many, many times.

“But if I died in jail they would think I was guilty. I just kept my head down. I tried to pretend I didn't see or hear all the nasty things that happened.”

His friend and stalwart supporter Ron Johnson remembers taking a phone call en route to visiting Leung. “It was from the prison saying he had gone into hospital, that he had a bad cut on his forehead and difficulty with his ribs. He had been beaten up but he told them he had walked into a post.”

Leung recalls, “I said I hurt myself. If you say to the manager somebody attacked me and there is involvement with the police I would probably be locked up in the isolation cell for 24 hours a day.

“In jail they don't care about you. They think you are a criminal. All the attacking and abuse I got in jail was because they all knew who I was. It is pathetic the way they treat gay people.”

Other prisoners would steal the radio, kettle and belongings his friends had sent him money to buy. “It is very tough in there. There are so many smartarses who try to make your life really hard. The ones that harass you, you can tell are not educated and come from troubled families. I never forget what that experience was like.”

Leung was in the library at St Heliers Correctional Centre at Muswellbrook on December 22, 2014, when the call finally came. His appeal had been decided in his favour, after four anxious months of waiting. “And then the manager said, 'You can go home.'” The woman responsible for signing his release form came into work on her day off to set him free.

The train arrived at Central Station Sydney at 1am. He wandered the streets, revelling in his freedom. “I had nowhere to go. It was so late, I didn't want to go to my friends and wake them.”

The pink terrace house in Alexandria was his, but the Public Trustee had the keys and its office was closed for the Christmas holidays. Leung could not go home. Without any money he found himself living rough.

Eventually the department of housing got him into a hostel for a week. But when they wanted to put him in a place in Blacktown he refused to go. He wanted to be near his house, so he lived in the park for 10 days.

Guzzetti had set up a trust fund for himself and Leung. But while Leung was in prison, someone had taken $140,000 from it. “He had thought it was safe money that no one else knew about,” says Johnson. The ANZ bank would not divulge where it had gone and Leung's solicitor advised him not to pursue it. The house was an asset but he was broke.

Once back in the house where he had been so happy with Guzzetti, the memories came flooding back as he experienced the confusion of grief.

“I just kept looking at all his things and the furniture and crying all the time. I loved our house in Sydney very much. But there were too many memories, especially of what happened there.

“I talked to myself, but I was talking to Mario even if he was not there. I told him: 'I don't know what to do.'” The tears slide down his face. “Do I move out or do I stay here? In my mind there were all these conflicts. I didn't want to go but if I continued living there it would be terrible.”

After he had been in prison he felt that people looked at him differently. He felt like a pariah.

Guzzetti, says Leung, had often dreamed of leaving the city. “He would always say 'Let's go and live in the country.' In a way I took his idea. I told him I was going to move.”

Friends had lent him money to pay the lawyers when legal aid ran out, and he had to repay them. Some were demanding more than they had lent him.

He sold the house for $100,000 less than it was worth rather than have people traipsing through to look at it. “I didn't want it to drive me crazy. I just wanted to move on.”

And so he finds himself here, in the country. On the nights when he is too sad to sleep he goes out into the night with his torch and walks. It is pitch black, but he isn't scared of nature. It's “nice and quiet”.

Leung is a proud man who doesn't want to burden people with his sorrow.

“When I see people I smile,” he says. “I don't want people to worry about me. I don't want them to know how much I suffer. Maybe one day I will end up in a psychiatrist's hospital.”

When he and Mario were together he never touched alcohol, now he self-medicates. “I drink bottles and bottles,” he says, indicating a pile of empties. “Quite often I end up asleep on the floor.”

Indeed, before everything went so horribly wrong his friends knew him as a purist vegan and teetotaller who lived on fruit and was scrupulously clean. It is because he suffers from psoriasis which is exacerbated by stress. “It can come everywhere, my face, my scalp. Beef and prawns are the big enemies that I can't touch.”

He suffers lingering sorrow about his father and the gulf between them. “I could never find my Dad's love. In Chinese culture the father never shows any emotion. If I wasn't gay and had children I would never be like my father. We are all human beings who need love.”

A vicious attack in a gay nightclub in 2005 where he was stabbed with a pen and lost his eye has left him with nerve damage and a bad back. “The specialist told me I need to learn to live with it because there is not much they could do.” Guzzetti had nursed him through when it happened, massaging him, taking care of him. Now Leung is so distrustful of authority that he won't go to Centrelink to get a disability pension.

When he swerved to avoid a kangaroo and hit a tree the expensive car he bought was written off. The nearest supermarket in Daylesford is 20 kilometres away and he seems in no hurry to get a new vehicle. A neighbour picks up groceries for him and a friend comes from Melbourne on the weekends with supplies. But still, it would be a daunting prospect to be marooned here with no way out.

It is hard to leave him here alone on his hill with his curious and unpredictable mixture of vulnerability and toughness; sadness and wild bursts of joy, resilience, his hurt, his remarkable odyssey of a life. When he is happy he sees the beauty around him.

You hope it will keep lifting him up. “Actually,” he says brightly, “I am writing a musical about my life.” I think he means opera; it has been nothing if not operatic.