Parse XML and put the content into ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>>

I'm currently working with XML parsing but I'm a bit lost on it since first of all I'm more of a fan of JSON than XML. Well anyways I need to got this working so I check out on this link the how to and created a method to do what I need. Basically I just need to pass all of the content of the XML into an ArrayList disregarding the other tags which I won't be using. Here's the code so far:

public ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>> StringToArrayList (String data) throws Exception{
        ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>> arrayList = new ArrayList<HashMap<String, String>>();


        XmlPullParserFactory factory = XmlPullParserFactory.newInstance();
        factory.setNamespaceAware(true);
        XmlPullParser xpp = factory.newPullParser();

        HashMap<String, String> hashMap = new HashMap<String, String>();
        String tag = "";

        xpp.setInput(new StringReader (data));
        int eventType = xpp.getEventType();
        while (eventType != XmlPullParser.END_DOCUMENT) {


            if(eventType == XmlPullParser.START_DOCUMENT) {
                //Document start
            } else if(eventType == XmlPullParser.END_DOCUMENT) {
                //Document end
            } else if(eventType == XmlPullParser.START_TAG) {
                //Get the tag name then set it into tag String variable
                tag = xpp.getName();
            } else if(eventType == XmlPullParser.END_TAG) {
                if(xpp.getName().equals("start")){
                    //Add the hashMap into the list since the start tag now end
                    arrayList.add(hashMap);
                }
            } else if ((tag.equals("tag1")) && (eventType == XmlPullParser.TEXT)) {
                hashMap.put(tag,xpp.getText());
                tag = "";
            } else if ((tag.equals("tag2")) && (eventType == XmlPullParser.TEXT)) {
                hashMap.put(tag,Uxpp.getText());
                tag = "";
            }

            eventType = xpp.next();
        }

        return arrayList;
    }

and as for a sample my XML looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<content>
  <start>
    <tag1>Tag1 Content 1</tag1>
    <tag2>Tag2 Content 1</tag2>
  </start>
  <start>
    <tag1>Tag1 Content 2</tag1>
    <tag2>Tag2 Content 2</tag2>
  </start>
  <start>
    <tag1>Tag1 Content 3</tag1>
    <tag2>Tag2 Content 3</tag2>
  </start>
</content>

And now instead I got a value of [{tag1=Tag1 Content 1,tag2=Tag2 Content 1},{tag1=Tag1 Content 2,tag2=Tag2 Content2},{tag1=Tag1 Content 3,tag2=Tag2 Content 3}] Instead I got [{tag1=Tag1 Content 3,tag2=Tag2 Content 3},{tag1=Tag1 Content 3,tag2=Tag2 Content 3},{tag1=Tag1 Content 3,tag2=Tag2 Content 3}] And I'm lost on it. Can someone point out how to solve this? And if there is a much simpler way that what I did hope you can help me with it and I would very much appreciate it. :D