In spite of threats and a flight of poison arrows that killed his companions, John sustained a passion to communicate with the wild and warlike islanders on their own terms. He sailed around the islands preaching to the communities he discovered and setting up schools. He held a deep respect for the cultures and customs he encountered and put his exceptional linguistic powers to work collecting grammars and vocabularies and translating some gospels into the Mota dialect. In one four-month stretch he systematized and put into the printer's hands grammatical studies of 17 languages besides working up ten or more in manuscript.
 
He was unique in his determination to empower locals by training indigenous clergy rather than imposing British culture. He rated it seriously unfair and wrote, "I have for years thought that we seek in our mission a great deal too much to make English Christians of our converts…we encumber our message with unnecessary requirements."
 
At a large public meeting in Sydney March 1864, he stirred wide public support for the Melanesian Mission, with Anglican Churches agreeing to meet the annual expenses of the Southern Cross. It was Patteson's gentleness that drew him to the family of the enterprising Thomas Mort who became a personal friend and generous benefactor. Patteson’s strategy of empowering locals by training indigenous clergy surely appealed to Mort’s own vision of having management personally engaged with workers to make progress. (Thomas’ daughter Anne later plunged into life as the wife of the next bishop of Melanesia.)
 
Rather than imposing British culture with long-term white settlement, Patteson focused on taking Islanders to training centres and established the Melanesian Mission base on Norfolk Island. His most brilliant native scholar, Edward Wogala, distinguished him from the blackbirders. “He did not live apart, he was always friends with us and did not despise in the least a single one of us.”
 
By making St Barnabas a culturally integrated learning environment, the dedicated teacher redeemed the previously dark reputation of the infamous convict settlement. Dynamic and practical he had native foods such as yams grown, he taught his scholars to speak English, tend livestock and even play the game he loved - cricket! Girls came to the school so that family units could be formed and then couples returned to their home islands.
 
It seems the blackbirders may have deceived the native population of Nukapu by using Patteson’s name to gain a foothold on their island. Most likely, the kind itinerant bishop was clubbed twice in the head and stabbed three times as symbolic retaliation for the kidnapping of local men. The chief of the island pursued the murderer, who fled to the island of Santa Cruz, where the islanders killed him. The women of Nakapu, who knew and loved Patteson, were horrified by his murder and a group of them washed and prepared him for burial.
 
What makes it doubly sad is that throughout his 16 years of service, John Patteson was known through the islands, New Zealand and Australia as a staunch opponent of the slave trade.  But triumph came from the tragedy. Wide reporting of the bishop’s death in the British Press shocked the public and forced the government to act on his criticism of the slave trade by passing the Imperial Kidnapping Acts of 1872 and 1875. These brought the trade under control along the lines he had suggested.
 
The martyrdom of John Patteson and several of his native companions has been called the seed that produced the strong and vigorous Church which flourishes in Melanesia today. His legacy of training locals has continued.
 
Sydney remembered him with a noble sculpture in the beautiful downtown Christ Church St Laurence, but a more fitting memorial stands under the palms on the beach of the tiny island where he died at just 44 years old. Round the simple iron cross run these words.
 
“In memory of JOHN COLERIDGE PATTESON Missionary Bishop whose life was here taken by men for whose sake he would willingly have given it.”
​

But the handwriting and lack of punctuation took second place to warmth of spirit that spilled minor doings of life around his weatherboard miner’s cottage in Telarah onto the yellowing page. He’d been following Nancye’s family’s road trip to Sydney, praying over every stage. He knew neighbourhood kids by name, reporting with interest on the threads and scissors Joyce Baldwin had shown him that her mother had searched out for her new sewing basket. He knew she’d got all her sums right as well and might even do better than her brother Herbert.
 
I suspect my grandfather’s own lack of education made him urge the kids around him to make the most of their schooling.
 
Emphysema from his lifetime of work in dark mines weakened his lungs but hadn’t dampened his spirits nor his faith. His gift for telling entertaining stories drew children around him in the street on his way home from work. He brought the Bible to life for scores of kids in Cessnock and Maitland in a way that stayed with them for a lifetime.
 
I knew from my Dad that his mother and father were chronically kind, in spite of being poor.  So, it’s no surprise to hear Jim tell how friends had gifted him a package of fresh fish for his lunch or that neighbour Mrs Baldwin had insisted on coming over to wash all his linen and scrub his floors while he entertained the baby.  Others were picking him up for a fishing holiday weekend.
 
Standing on the brink of a new year, Jim Roe’s humble letter spoke to his grandson out of the past, reminding me to appreciate the simple things, to be thankful for daily bread from the Father’s hand and to bring life into the lives of those around me.
 
Thanks Grandfather. I hope I can report I’ve done the same when we meet next.

”Not all of us can do great things but we can do small things with great love.”
Mother Teresa
 

 Lou Reese, who drove Grace Francis and Catherine Boyd on the last leg from Brisbane in 1923, was hugely impressed watching them treat illnesses during the journey to Birdsville. He wrote to Flynn, ‘If ever angels came on earth, I’d say these were two.’ Others in the Corner country remained unconvinced; “We don’t want no bloody missionaries round here!”
 
Conditions were crude – but the two women won the hearts of their neighbours by cheerfully setting up camp in a refurbished pub built with hewn stone, mud walls and an iron roof. The nearest telephone was 400 km away, so they were the decision makers on the cases that they treated. These nurses soon became known as ‘the border sisters’ or ‘Flynn’s boundary riders’, covering long, hard miles as they tackled ‘Tragedy Corner.’
 
Grace’s experience nursing wounded soldiers on the Western Front in France, equipped her with diagnostic skills and she made a deep impression by being the kind of ‘angel’ who didn’t mind getting down and dirty. When a rotting horse carcass threatened the town water supply, she rolled up her sleeves and removed it.

​The children suffering with inflamed eyes caused by Sandy Blight (trachoma) particularly distressed the two women. It had the potential to cause blindness but their careful treatment was soon saving the sight of bush kids.
 
When John Flynn drove into town in 1925 on the long circuit that was to take him through Bourke and Cobar, the nurses showed their records for the first 14 months of their stay. The pioneering padre was brought to tears as he scanned the records of the 2000 patients these women had treated without a doctor’s help. The saving of children’s eyesight moved him in particular. The combination of intrepid Christian faith and unflagging kindness in ‘the angels’ he’d recruited was changing the character of ‘Tragedy Corner.’

Following John Flynn’s urging to generate a sense of family, they brought the children together in a Sunday School and offered sewing classes. They arranged table tennis competitions, organised picnics and laboured to create a tennis court, drawing the scattered community together. They were in the centre of the action at the Birdsville Races and their ‘Brisbane Home’ became a popular gathering place offering cups of tea and a library. 
​
​The creative nurses announced a Christmas party. They appealed to their city contacts to send gifts and mobilised a team to prepare food. On Christmas Eve 1923, sixty-four people gathered around Birdsville’s first Christmas tree – a desert ash. Sister Francis reported great excitement among kids who’d never seen a decorated tree or received gifts from Santa. “They are all satisfied it is the best Christmas yet in Birdsville,” she reported.
 
These ‘angels’ functioned without wings. More often than not, medical supplies and equipment arrived painfully late by camel train from Adelaide. The two women treated a steady stream of bush folk with broken limbs, wounds, diseases and rotten teeth, often making arduous trips on rough tracks by car or buggy. Flat tyres, breakdowns and bogging were all in a day’s work.

They delivered babies, offered palliative care to the dying, prepared and wrapped the dead, read the burial service and then comforted the bereaved. This tough experience ignited a lifelong passion in them to help John Flynn spread the wings of his impossible dream of an airborne medical service across the skies of Australia.
 ​
 When the time came for Grace and Catherine to depart, people travelled from all across ‘Tragedy Corner’ to express their gratitude to the ‘angels’. In the words of author Ivan Rudolph, “The ‘bloody missionaries’ had been successful at Birdsville and left behind them a legacy of love and healing that prevailed right into the following millennium.” (Flynn’s Outback Angels, Vol 1. Casting the Mantle)  
 
John Flynn made it clear that this vision of stretching a ‘mantle of safety’ over the whole Australian continent was his way of following in the steps of Jesus as described in this eyewitness account. “That evening, after the sun was down, they brought sick and evil-afflicted people to him, the whole city lined up at his door! He (Jesus) cured their sick bodies and tormented spirits.” (Mark 1:32-33)

​She earned a reputation as a feisty Darwin journalist known for her fighting words. “A self-trained photographer and historian…she crusaded for Darwin, which she envisaged as 'the Great Front Door of Australia', and for Territory self-government.” (Barbara James https://www.loststory.net/australianwomen/jessie-litchfield)
 
But it was on June 3rd 1909 that Jessie loosed the shot that still reverberates across the Australian continent. Sitting on a meat case in a hessian walled shack under an iron roof, looking out across mud flats of Darwin Harbour’s West Arm, the 26-year-old mother fired off a stirring letter to her Presbyterian Church in distant Melbourne.
 
The self-taught researcher reeled off statistics which painted a grim picture of spiritual and social neglect in the 1.3M square kilometres Northern Territory. In particular, she was shocked and saddened by the use and abuse of Aboriginal girls and women by the lonely white male population. “I know that drink, drugs, and lubras are responsible for nine out of ten hospital cases and also for seven deaths out of ten,” she wrote. The sad fate of many ‘half-caste’ children caught between cultures grieved her. Her church’s absence spoke volumes.

Her passionate plea, published in The Messenger, called for a hard-working man ‘committed to the cause of Christ’ to serve the people of the remote North. It struck a chord in a young John Flynn on his way to Korea as a missionary. Her bold words “sounded a challenge that was to haunt him for years.” (Apostle to the Inland, Scott McPheat, p 42) Jessie turned his gaze back to see the needs at the heart of his own country.

​Flynn’s wide-ranging imagination was fired and he carried her letter everywhere with him as he set about stirring coastal Australians to reach out to care for the Inlanders. That solitary woman’s voice speaking out of isolation, jolted him onto the path that led him to pioneer the legendary Flying Doctor Service as a means to secure family life, etching compassion across the rugged face of remote Australia.

​The phenomenon of a nation born only half a century before with the clink of convict chain gangs, transforming into a ‘workers’ paradise’, was fuelled from a surprising source. It’s forgotten that a significant number of the pioneers of the union movement were men with an active Christian faith.
 
When the new national headquarters of the Australian Workers Union was opened in Melbourne in 2003, it was named for William Guthrie Spence. Few remember that this remarkable man - variously described as a founder of the nation, the number one labour saint and the greatest union organiser in Australian history, was a man of deep Christian conviction.  In back-country Victoria, he was welcomed by working-class Methodist communities as an inspirational preacher and Sunday School Superintendent.
 
The sound of gunfire from the Eureka Stockade uprising of 1854 in Ballarat made an impact that stayed with William all his life. Toiling as a shepherd, a butcher-boy and in shearing sheds and mines gave him a deep sympathy for the struggles of the working men and their wives. Largely self-taught, he studied Jesus, St Paul and a number of leading 19th century thinkers including Karl Marx.
 
This mix of experience and ideas blended a passionate world view which saw him launch the Australian Miners Union in the 1880’s where he proved an outstanding organiser. When he founded the Shearer’s Union in 1886, and then amalgamated smaller unions into the Australian Workers Union - Spence said bushmen saw it as their own kind of religion, a matter of mates banding together to throw off tyranny. He always advocated moderate action.
 
He insisted that unionism was first and foremost an expression of the radical worldview incubated by Jesus in a carpenter’s workshop. ‘Spence almost effortlessly made the connections between the teachings of Jesus and … socialist ideals …  Unashamed of his allegiance to Christ, Spence frequently spoke from the union political platform of his debt to Jesus… At a crowded public meeting at Bourke, Spence declared: “Individualism has brought the worst and most selfish natures in humanity to the front. The New Unionism is simply the teachings of that greatest of all social reformers, Him of Nazareth, whom all must revere.”’ (Lindner)
 
For William Spence it was a matter of doing what Jesus would have him do for the downtrodden of society – stirring a fresh wind to blow away the musty theology common in many churches. He dreamed of Christian faith in overalls that sweated alongside people in the workplace.  'It is useless', he said, 'to go on preaching from Sabbath to Sabbath asking men to be better but … the New Unionism is to deal with those evils in a practical manner'.
 
Sadly, the Christian contribution of evangelicals like Spence never became part of Labour Party mythology. Many of the churches retreated into middle class respectability. On the other side, a recent historian commented, ‘As the Labour Party departed from its spiritual roots, its capacity to enlarge the whole population’s opportunity for liberty and justice and to recruit politicians who were sustained by such ideals, was seriously impaired.’ Piggin 469.
 
Back in 1856, the Stone masons’ union had put forward three main arguments for wanting a shorter working day. The first was that Australia’s harsh climate demanded reduced hours. The second was that labourers needed time to develop their ‘social and moral condition’ through education. The third was that workers would be better fathers, husbands and citizens if they were allowed adequate leisure time.
 
On this 8-Hour Day holiday, I want to salute industrial chaplains and people like my mate Bruno Efoti of Tradies Insight in Dubbo, who are putting their faith into Hi-viz gear in the workplace to skill young men and women in being those better parents, partners and citizens of Australia.

Bourke has generated remarkable stories from its very beginning. Over the space of forty years, my eyes have grown wider and wider as I’ve met and read about the people who’ve lived on the red Western Plains of my home state. They’ve taught me lots about Australia and myself.
 
I’ve been inspired watching Stanley and Lucy Drummond driving prodigious distances to gather crippled or blinded kids living in isolation to take them to Sydney for treatment and a beach holiday. Then seeing the way their infectious faith prompted former stage coach driver Sid Coleman to learn to fly and buy a plane to put wings under their dream of air ambulances lifted my spirits. And what about the visionary couple’s audacity in recruiting barnstorming aviatrix Nancy Bird to pilot nurses out to remote outback villages in her Gipsy Moth bi-plane?
 
Extraordinary!
 
That’s just a couple of the twenty-five stories I’ve gathered into this collection. I love the humility and simplicity of these people who quietly got on painting heroic deeds on the vast canvas that stretches beyond Bourke. I’ve felt honoured to tell their stories and hope they find a place in your heart and imagination too.
 
There’s a local saying that “Once you’ve crossed the North Bourke Bridge you’ll come back.”
This is only a handful of Bourke yarns – there’s a heap more waiting to be told sometime soon.
‘Bourke and Beyond’ can be purchased from the Back o’ Bourke Exhibition Centre or on The Outback Historian website.

​I watched that humble dry-run develop into a robust road trip that gave roots and wings to lines of poetry written a century earlier. Journalists, musicians, dramatists, lawyers, farmers, artists, engineers, truckies, poets and photographers became animated by the journey. Young and old, tradies and professors were not only drawn into the old lyrics, but were inspired to write, sing, paint, recite stuff from their own experience. 

It was an astonishing learning curve. 
​
So, it triggered my dreaming about a “Grand Design” for a pilgrimage. Why not Botany Bay to Alice Springs? Right now, I’ve got a small team of enthusiasts who are joining the dots that will compose the route for an app that will lead pilgrims on a journey into Australia’s forgotten faith-story. I envisage school groups, grey nomads, bus tours or mates out for a road trip joining a narrative adventure following the footprints left by Jesus here under the Southern Cross.
 
The end goal is the multi-million-dollar 20m steel cross built on Memory Mountain in response to a vision given a local Aboriginal elder. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-22/haasts-bluff-cross-monument-central-australia-ken-duncan/101528352)
 
I’m planning to have some sections of the pilgrimage ready for 2026.  It’d be great to hear any thoughts you have on the idea!
 
(Chapter 11 in my book Tell Me Another explains more of my thinking on the power of pilgrimage.)