LIST OF STORIES ON THE OUTBACK HISTORIAN WEBSITE
This list of stories will continue to be updated.  The list includes the name of the particular character, the story title, the date of publication and categories related to the story. The quickest way to find a particular story on the website is to go to the Archives to find the month it was published.
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ARNOLD, Thomas             THE HEADMASTER WHO LIT THE OYMPIC FLAME   
August 2024                       Sport
ARNOTT, William              AUSTRALIA’S BISCUIT KING
                                             July 2024                            Business, Pastoral Care, Philanthropy
BOOTH, Brian                    IT’S HOW YOU PLAY THE GAME
                                             June 2023                           Sport
BOREHAM, Frank              A TALE OF TWO STORYTELLERS
February 2024                   Storytelling, The Arts
COOPER, William              A BRIGHT LIGHT IN DARK DAYS    
February 2025                   Indigenous, Leadership
DALBY, Mary Anne           ‘THE PEOPLE’S FRIEND’
                                             July 2024                            Pastoral Care, Social Services
DELACOUR DE LABILLIERE, Madelaine Rose     MORE THAN MILLS & BOON    
March 2025                       Bush Services
GRIBBLE, John                   WARANGESDA, CAMP OF MERCY
                                             March 2025        Indigenous   
HASSALL, Thomas             PIONEER EDUCATOR
                                             February 2023    New Colony, Education, Pastoral Care
                                             A GRATEFUL START
                                             February 2023    New Colony, Education, Pastoral Care
JONES, Fletcher                THE HOUSE THAT QUALITY BUILT
                                             March 2024        Business, Philanthropy, For Schools
LAWRY, Mary                    A BRAVE AUSTRALIAN GIRL                        
January 2025     New Colony, Social Services
LIDDELL, Eric                     THE FLYING SCOTSMAN
                                             July 2024                            Sport
MCKAY, Hugh, Victor       YOUNG AUSTRALIANS WITH BIG IDEAS
                                             April 2024                           Invention, Philanthropy
McILVEEN, Arthur             THE SALVO AT TOBRUK    
April 2025                           Anzac Day
MATTHEWS, Daniel          ‘MR MALOGA’
                                             March 2023        Indigenous
MORT, Thomas                 SIR THOMAS AND SIR BOB FEED THE WORLD
                                             May 2023                           Invention, Entrepreneur, Philanthropy
NICHOLLS, Doug               AN AFL CHAMPION
                                             May 2023                           Indigenous, Pastoral Care, Politics
                                             A COMPELLING DOUBLE ACT (Doug and Gladys Nicholls)
                                             May 2022            Indigenous, Pastoral Care
PARKES, Henry                  ONE PEOPLE, ONE DESTINY
                                             March 23             Politics
REIBEY, Mary                    THE WILD COLONIAL GIRL
                                             September 22     New Colony, Entrepreneur                          
REID, Bill                             BILL REID’S HALF FORGOTTEN MUSIC
                                             January 24           Indigenous, Pastoral Care
RIDLEY, John                     YOUNG AUSTRALIANS WITH BIG IDEAS
                                             April 24                Invention, Philanthropy
WALKER, Alan                   SIXTY YEARS OF COUNSEL
                                             March 23             Pastoral Care, Social Service
                                             THE WIND IN THE GUM TREES
                                             August 22            Pastoral Care, Social Services
 
 
                                             THE LOST STORY OF NAIDOC WEEK
                                             July 23                  Indigenous, Civil Rights  
                                             A VISIT TO CUMMERAGUNJA
                                             March 23             Indigenous, Education

It caused quite a stir in Bourke when Yarran, a young Aboriginal man appeared in the ANZAC march last week, leading a horse and kitted out in the famous uniform of the Light Horsemen of World War One. It was his father Uncle Raymond Finn’s way of reminding new generations of the part his great grandfather and other young indigenous men had played in strategic battles like the charge at Beersheba.
 
It’s sad that this chapter has been forgotten in Australia’s military history. About 1,000 Indigenous men fought in the Australian ranks in World War 1, but on their return, the government did not honour their contribution in the same way it did that of other servicemen. The Knight brothers of Bourke were among those who went unrecognised until recently.
 
Uncle Raymond told me how on 25 September 2018, Australia’s ambassador Paul Griffith, along with Israeli dignitaries, gathered to honour the Light Horsemen who fought the Battle of Tzemach. The following year, the statue “The Aborigine and His Horse”, was dedicated there on the shores of Lake Galilee.

“Thrive on thrills, and have GO!”   Brigadier Arthur McIlveen.
 
The worker hefting a crowbar making a hole for a telegraph pole snarled at the Salvation Army officer peddling past on a country road with an arm load of Warcry newspapers, “Go and work you loafer!” He’d picked the wrong man, because Arthur McIlveen was a bushman used to digging fifty postholes a day. The feisty Salvo dropped his bike, fronted the heckler demanding the crowbar and, in a flurry of dirt, proceeded to out dig him - much to the amusement of his workmates!
 
‘Pugnacious’ was the word used to describe the chaplain whom the Diggers at Tobruk declared the best known Australian during the bitter six month siege of April to December 1941.  Coming from the legendary 9th Division ‘Rats of Tobruk’, that was highest praise.
 
Arthur was known for covering dangerous miles between trenches just to be there handing out tea and coffee to men returning from bloody fighting patrols. As did other chaplains, he simply materialised out of the dust of battle carrying the wounded, offering comfort and counsel, burying their dead comrades, listening and helping them write letters home.

It’s a bit unnerving when you wake up one morning thinking “Y’know, I might have wasted nearly sixty years of my life!”  I mean, when I think about the amount of time and energy I’ve put into telling the Easter Story, I‘d have to be seriously deluded or certifiably crazy to have made the investment of my one precious go at life on this planet on a purely fictional event. So, I re-ran the movie in my mind just to check.
 
I first took the Jesus story on board as a kid because trustworthy adults around me lived as if the whole thing was true and they had found it worked in making sense of life.  Some hard-bitten cynics at university gave my basic faith a much needed workout, but an equally tough minded bloke showed me the evidence for the resurrection could stand rigorous inquiry. He took me with him to stand up in public spaces to debate the case with all sorts. It put muscle and sinew into my beliefs and gave me a road tested world view.

Since then, I’ve preached it on city streets and beaches, up and down the coast and into the Outback. I’ve acted it in plays to big audiences of young people.  I’ve told the story to kids in classrooms, I’ve sung it in churches, schools, universities and camps. I’ve spoken it on radio and written it into books and blogs, magazine and newspaper articles. I’ve held it out as bright hope at the bedside of dying friends and spoken it as comfort to family and friends standing over their open graves. I‘ve taught it as bona fide fact to men and women from countries all over the earth in classrooms and churches and seen it change their lives.

I have a vivid ‘Crocodile Dundee’ moment locked in my memory that always makes me chuckle. Picture a young bush lad who’d grown up chasing cows on the frosty hills of Yackandandah, passing through the ornate entrance of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London. Kind friends have taken their colonial visitor Bill to hear George Frideric Handel’s famous Messiah – the whole works, full orchestra and choir.
 
Everyone is suitably dressed for a posh occasion - after all, this was where the most famous choral work in history had first been performed in England in 1743. When it crescendoed with the rousing Hallelujah Chorus, it was reported that Billy couldn’t contain himself. Sheer exhilaration swept him up into that mighty hymn and the young Aussie jumped up on his plush theatre seat and started punching the air in response to the thundering Hallelujah’s!
 
Mind you, Yackandandah Bill was not the first to rise to the occasion. It’s said that when King George I heard it, he too could not remain seated for the powerful Chorus and rose to his feet to honour the greater King. For over 250 years concert goers have followed suit. Composer Joseph Haydn is said to have heard it and "wept like a child" exclaiming, "He is the master of us all." Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart agreed. "Handel understands effect better than any of us – when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt … ”

It’s amazing how a fragment of story can glitter when it’s brought into the light of day. The other day a friend sent me a coffee table book celebrating some amazing characters who’d been quietly serving the remote areas of Australia for a hundred years. Its title gives the game away, ‘Never Too Far, Never Too Few’ – it’s the story of a group humbly calling themselves ‘Bush Church Aid.’
 
It was launched at a time of crisis in Sydney in 1918 - the Spanish influenza pandemic was gripping the post-war world. Everywhere Australians were withdrawing into self-protection mode while some in the Anglican Church took this initiative to reach out to the forgotten people of the Bush.
 
The photo of a strong-featured face grabbed my attention. It was the image of a confident woman, upright and looking straight into the lens, full of conviction.  And the bones of her story say she was. With her good looks and a noble name like Madaline Rose Delacour de Labilliere, she could easily be the heroine of a Mills and Boon romance.
 
She was in fact a romantic, but a lady of a much more robust stamp than a paperback hero.

Around 1880, the back-breaking labour of the heroic John Gribble carved ‘The Camp of Mercy’ out of the bush on the edge Murrumbidgee River near Darlington Point.  For several decades, Aboriginal people, fugitives from ill-treatment, fled to the camp he named Warangesda, a blending of the Wiradjuri word for ‘camp’ and the Hebrew word for ‘mercy.’ It’s been described as the only sanctuary available for them in NSW at the time.
 
Last weekend, former residents and friends gathered to mark the centenary of its closure. Among them was Reverend Cannon Shannon Smith, a sixth generation Wiradjuri and fifth generation Worimi descendant whose great-great-grandfather, James Murray, arrived with Reverend John Gribble. In an ABC interview she explained that a lot of the returning original Warangesda folk remained strong Christians. When once she was asked, ‘Who evangelised you?’ her unexpected reply was, ‘I was evangelised by the Rev J B Gribble in 1880, because he was the one who brought Christianity to my people … And here I am today, still going!’

 In 1940, out on the edge of the NSW Outback, Labour Party Whip Mark Davidson, the member for Bourke and Cobar, was almost a lone voice speaking up for the Aboriginal people in Parliament.
 
 “The aboriginal population of New South Wales has been dying out since the advent of the white man. They are in the minority, and it seems they are being treated as Hitler treats minorities on the other side of the world, although perhaps not so forcibly. They are being treated in a manner that will bring about their extinction.”
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Given the times, the Catholic member’s speech was strikingly brave and may have been prompted by an event 2 years previously in Melbourne.
 
On the night of November 8th 1938, Nazi paramilitary forces, members of Hitler Youth along with ordinary citizens, had spilled into city streets for a night of violence that launched the slaughter of 6 million European Jews.
 
The eerie sounds of shattering glass from 7000 Jewish owned businesses, the roar of flames consuming 200 synagogues, the cries of anguish from 30,000 throats as men women and children were herded into trucks destined for concentration camps, carried 16000 kms half-way round the world.

This ‘Kristallnacht’ became a word of infamy across the globe. But who cared? One Australian living in Melbourne knew more than just glass had been broken.

When my Tongan mate Puluno Efoti was invited to Parramatta as their Australia Day Ambassador, he was excited.  Why? Because it is giving him the chance to tell the story of a local girl who began a movement that transformed the people of his island nation over two centuries ago. She was one of the first-generation Australian kids who were derisively labelled ‘Currency Lads and Lasses’ - implying they were of inferior quality.
 
Parramatta girl Mary Hassall was one who proved them wrong. Mary was born in Sydney in 1799 to adventurous young parents.  These two had made the dangerous journey half-way round the world from Cornwall to Tahiti, planning to give practical expression to the Christian gospel among the native people as ‘artisan’ missionaries.
 
Mary’s father Rolland proved himself a man of bold character and a big heart and he needed both. Feuding Tahitian tribes forced the 29-year-old carpenter to retreat to safety with his young family to Sydney, only to be immediately beaten up by thugs, robbed and left penniless. Undaunted, he and his brother-in-law began travelling around outlying settlements preaching and setting up schools.

 New Year’s Eve, Sydney Harbour December 31st 2024  Robbie Williams and a chunk of the million strong crowd of revellers belt out the words of John Farnham’s stirring The Voice anthem, ‘We’re not gonna sit in silence, we’re not gonna live with fear!’ At the time I wondered ‘What resolutions sprang from that for 2025?’ There’d be a thousand possible I reckon.
 
Now that the smoke from $8M fireworks has drifted away, I’m asking myself what I’m going to use my voice for here in Oz. I decided if I’d had a chance to write a slogan across the Harbour Bridge that night, it would have been RE-STORYING AUSTRALIA.