​Picture a small, moustachioed Frenchman sitting alone for a whole night in a solitary vigil in the darkened chapel of Rugby School in England. Baron Pierre de Coubertin had made a pilgrimage across the Channel just to sit before the tomb of Rugby School’s visionary Headmaster and it had a powerful effect. He wrote, “My eyes fixed on the funeral slab on which, without epitaph, the great name of Thomas Arnold was inscribed. I dreamed that I saw before me the cornerstone of the British Empire."
 
That night of reflection lit the flame for the modern Olympics.
 
Twelve-year-old Pierre had discovered the charismatic headmaster through reading a French translation of Thomas Hughes’ novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays in the 1870’s. Hughes himself was an enthusiastic product of Rugby and his best seller spread the gospel of Thomas Arnold’s brave educational experiment far and wide. 

On a fiercely hot 11th of July 1924, the event that took the Paris Olympics by storm was the astonishing gold medal run by sprinter Eric Liddell. On that day, against the odds, ‘The Flying Scotsman’ as he was known, fully embodied the Olympic motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” He had copped a wave of criticism at home when he declined running in his favoured 100m event because it was scheduled on a Sunday, which for him was set aside for God.
 
He was transformed into a larger-than-life hero when, given an alternative to run in his less favoured 400m, he won by seven metres in world record time. Over the following century this unlikely story of muscular Christianity has grown in the telling, impacting people of every kind all over the world.
 
Now in 2024, as the multi-billion-dollar international sporting extravaganza opens in the ‘City of Love’, it’s remarkable that the most enduring image from the 1924 Games is that of Eric, head thrown back, blitzing the field, proving on a cinder race track that principle mattered more than patriotism. 

Tracking stories around town with year 9 students from Dubbo Christian School recently, one smart young girl interjected, “But, there’s no point just putting murals on walls or placing statues in the main street unless someone tells you the story!”
 
Exactly!
 
More than half a century ago Richard Neihbur, a shrewd observer of culture, noted the same thing - that our key stories need to be written fresh into the heart of new generations.  ‘Culture is a social tradition which must be conserved by painful struggle not so much against non-human natural forces as against revolutionary and critical powers in human life and reason.’

I’m really energised by people who are stepping out to discover our Australian faith stories ‘on location’. I was intrigued when my friend Mawson Skidmore told me how he had plunged students from his English as a Second Language course into a firsthand experience of the Aboriginal’s civil rights struggle at the Cummeragunja ‘scholars hut’ that sits almost forgotten on the Murray River near Echuca.    Listen to his reaction.

“My impression after getting to know a few of these stories was – ‘Why didn't I know anything about this?' - they are pretty amazing and are not peripheral  in the history of the nation (although peripheral in the told history). The teacher of the second class I took with mine up to Cummeragunja had the same response.   I wrote and thanked the Land Council Head (Hadyn Love) for organising for someone to come and show us around the school house and the cemetery and let him know some of my musings…that the schoolhouse should be a National Monument - it's a story that should be told and told well.

We watched your clip on Daniel Matthews today [see other resources at the end of this blog] - and it is like what you were saying - there's a fair bit of darkness to much of that story (which shouldn't be shied away from) - but at Maloga and Cummeragunja and the people that went out from there, there are flames of light and hope.”

​When you drive streets in Maclean lined with tartan telegraph poles and hear the skirl of the bagpipes echoing in the main street, you know the town is definitely a stronghold of Australia’s Scots history. And mine for that matter. Over two million of us claim Scots ancestry – my grandchildren have the blood of the Baird, Carey, Murray and McDonald clans in their veins.
 
So, I spent a day or two there recently, looking under the ancestral kilt to see why big numbers of Scots moved here in the mid-1800’s. I was heartened to discover that the claim we Australians make for having one of the best lifestyles in the world, could well have been built on a bedrock of purposeful duty to God mined out of bare hills and heather half a world away in Scotland.

Aunty Pat Doolan is one of those rare people you meet in life who radiate goodness. As a result she’s been a game-changer wherever she’s lived. You can’t help being touched by her rare blend of determination and kindness - that’s how she’s got things done. She leads by being a servant and she never wavers in declaring her faith in public. ​