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!’

​I was encouraged by the way the remarkable story of William Arnott ‘the Biscuit King of Newcastle’, fired interest. For me, telling the tale of the penniless convict’s son who built a business employing 800 workers, took on a surprising twist when I realised its threads were woven into the tapestry of my Dad’s family history.
 
Two years after 20-year-old William arrived in Maitland on the Hunter River in 1851, my great-grand mother Marianne stepped off the barque Lady Anne, a child immigrant from Portsmouth. Her family settled beside Newcastle Harbour at Stockton. She later married and mothered five children.  
 
Mary Ann Dalby loved serving people. For the next fifty years, while raising her family and sharing in the running of a shoe business with her husband, she maintained her commitment to organisations that touched the lives of the needy. Suffering the loss of two infant children only seemed to deepen her compassion.

The majority of Australians in the past century and a half have sunk their teeth into one or other of a SAO, a Monte Carlo or a Tim Tam. But I guarantee most of us wouldn’t know a cracker about the battler who created the legendary ARNOTT’S biscuit empire.  It’s one of the truly great stories of Australian industry, but more than anything, it’s an inspirational narrative of a man who refused to give in to repeated disasters.
​Click the link to READ and WATCH to learn more.

The Hunter River at Morpeth

This is the unique story of two radical experiments on the same piece of ground on the red soil plains 20kms West of Bourke.
 
It’s 1887. Picture a cluster of burly, sunburnt men watching anxiously day after day as the bit of their American oil drill wound deeper and deeper into the red soil at the back of Bourke. Then, hats were thrown high with an exuberant shout as water from 300 metres below gushed fifty meters into the air. The American boring team had struck the Great Artesian Basin – 1.7 million square kms of life-giving liquid lying untapped beneath a fifth of the continent.
 
Ninety years later in 1978, I arrived at Pera Bore with my family – about 70 kms South of Kerribree Station where that dramatic first deep artesian well had gifted entrepreneur William Walter Davis ‘liquid gold’ to prosper his sheep station. Ahead of us lay an experiment that we hoped would prosper Australia. 

​You could say Easter arrived on the banks of the Baarka/Darling River on Feb 28th 1828 when Hamilton Hume sat in front of the perplexed Aboriginal tribe and threw down a branch as a sign of peace. The young home-grown explorer was a man of faith, as was expedition leader Captain Charles Sturt. Together, they relayed compassion for a people who they saw were afflicted with smallpox. Their impeccable record in relating to the native people wherever they journeyed mirrored the teachings of Jesus.
 
Easter has arrived on the Western plains in many different forms since then. Those who brought it weren’t all saints, but they were real. 

In 1856, two dispirited young Germans headed to their home base in London from Lake Boga near Swan Hill, their mission declared a failure. Andreas Täger and Friedrich Spieseke had left Germany five years earlier, fired with a passion to teach the Christian faith to the Aboriginal people of Australia.
 
Encouraged by Governor La Trobe, a fellow member of the Moravian Brethren Church who shared the vision and set land aside at Lake Boga, they set about building a mission station to both protect and educate the Wemba Wemba people. Their ambitions were high and their spirit genuine, but many things conspired to erode their manful efforts.
But were they failures?
​Click on Read More to hear more of the story of Lake Boga.

Recently, when I attended  a  Cornerstone Community gathering in Swan Hill, I was privileged to witness a baptism at Lake Boga. Young men are still stepping out to take commitment to  Jesus seriously .

​If you’ve heard ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ played on the gumleaf, you never forget it. I first heard it standing under the ghost gums that stood stark white against the ochre walls covered in the rock art of the Ngemba people. I was leading a tour group at Mt Gundabooka, a rugged range that lies like a goanna on the horizon South of Bourke.
 
The musician was Bill Reid, a pastor of the United Aboriginal Mission, who winked at me from under the tilted brim of his Akubra, quietly selected a leaf, cupped it between his knotted shearer’s hands and began to play. The intrigued tour group eagerly gathered around. That moment is etched in my mind – Pastor Bill, white haired and erect, playing a song of Christian faith in a canyon that had echoed to clapsticks and corroboree of Aboriginal people for many centuries. 

 When travelling, I’ve developed an eagerness to unearth buried faith stories in the towns I pass through. It can be a rough, ready and random process at times, but that’s the fun of it.  Recently,  taking a break in Young, the cherry capital of NSW, I was startled to read that a leader of the Australian Chinese community had declared about a chapter of local history, “This is our Schindler’s List!”
 
Now that’s a big call for a small-town story.
 
A quick flash back will give this context. In 1982 Australian novelist Thomas Keneally published Schindler’s Ark, a powerful piece of historical fiction about Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi Party who became an unlikely hero by saving the lives of 1200 Jews during the Holocaust. 1n 1993, Stephen Spielberg turned it into the highly successful movie Schindler’s List.
 
So, what could that Chinese man possibly be talking about? 

This weekend’s AFL indigenous round is named for Sir Douglas Nicholls. Australian Football’s webpage makes a significant comment about the champion Fitzroy footballer, “Arguably one of the most famous, and undeniably among the most important, Australians of the 20th century, Doug Nicholls' most significant accomplishments transcended football.”
 
What were they?
 
A few weeks ago, I stood in the humble weatherboard schoolhouse at Cummerugunga where a young Douglas had hidden under the floorboards for fear of the police who were taking the young girls away to the Cootamundra Girls Home. In later life, he said that Jesus’ message of forgiveness enabled him to rise above bitterness.