“As I hold these bits of folded paper
I wonder what it is I keep them for.
A flimsy pen and ink connection
To a bloke who isn’t with us anymore.”
                                          Colin Buchanan
 
I heard my grandfather’s voice very clearly the other day, which was surprising since I’d never met him and his body had been laid to rest seventy years ago in a Maitland cemetery! In one of those quiet days after Christmas, as the old year shrivels away, I found myself in what used to be called ‘a brown study.’  That means you absent-mindedly drift into reflections on things past.
 
In this case memory was triggered by a three-page letter my widowed grandfather Jim Roe penned to his grand-daughter late in 1951. He wrote with a pretty neat hand considering he’d left school at 12 to join his father working in a coal mine under Newcastle Harbour at Stockton.

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
 

“If you want to commend your gospel to men, first of all do something for them they understand.” (Rev. John Flynn’s favourite saying.)
 
A century ago, ‘Tragedy Corner’ was an undefined space where the borders of South Australia, NSW and Queensland and the 5000 km long dingo fence, jostled each other. Scorching winds, summer heat and the fitful flows in the Diamantina River and Cooper’s Creek had made it a graveyard for exploring parties like those of Charles Sturt and Burke and Wills.
 
It was the tragic toll it took on families that caught the attention of the Rev. John Flynn in the war years, 1914-18. Twice he had received anonymous letters containing the white feather suggesting he was a coward for not going to the War. But he believed the remote Inland was his battlefield and threw himself recklessly into the effort to raise money for a hospital and recruit high grade nurses for the tiny settlement of Birdsville. The conquest of Tragedy Corner had begun.

​“Jessie Sinclair Litchfield (1883-1956) is well known in the Northern Territory yet barely appears as a blip on the radar of people south of Alice Springs.”
 
Sydney born Jessie Litchfield lived life in the Northern Territory as ‘a pistol packing momma’, often alone when raising children in isolated jungle mining camps. In time she became a crack shot with a rifle. She grew into an unflinching spokeswoman for the Northern Territory. She proved a prolific writer, authoring five books, plus numerous short stories and poems.

​These are first-hand experiences that have given me pause for thought.
 
I glimpsed the grim reality of war one quiet morning at Bogghi Bend on the Darling River near Bourke. For a brief moment, the 86-year-old veteran sitting opposite me melted into an 18-year-old-boy back in the Jordan Valley in Palestine fighting furiously side by side with men of the Australian Camel Corps, desperately thrusting his bayonet into the teeming ranks of Turks pouring over their trenches.
 
Private Harold Smith shook violently and tears coursed down his cheeks as he recalled the sheer terror of those repeated bayonet charges. Eight decades after the slaughter of World War One had ceased, 10,000 kms away in the Australian Outback, the nightmare still made an old man shudder and weep.

Yousif is a rare individual. He’s a refugee from Sudan in East Africa, a Fine Arts graduate, a trauma counsellor, and a recordist who has worked with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. Brutal wars and starvation have displaced over 12 million Sudanese in recent years and Yousif’s family were among those who escaped to Australia.
 
He credits Australian missionaries who came to the Numa Mountains in the South of his country in the early 20th century with restoring the faith that had first came to Nubia on the Nile River nearly 2000 years ago. They brought progress and change to a region long troubled by extreme violence and grave human rights violations. They established the education facilities, medical care and brought technical advances that gave him a start.
 
Now he is returning the favour. With Global Recording Network, he’s been audio-taping stories from the biblical narrative for the Arande people near Alice Springs and in the Yolngu Matha language on Elcho Island. He’s also delivering trauma counselling both here in Australia and for the people of his war-torn homeland.
 
It’s remarkable that the venture of those Australians to bring the Gospel to Africa nearly a century ago has boomeranged. Rising teenage sprint star Gout Gout is a South Sudanese Christian like Yousif. I think their proactive faith is reminding Australians of the valuable gift they received from missionaries who sacrificed so much to bring it to them.   

You know you’re living in The Land of the Long Weekend when you have a holiday called Labour Day! The old saying that ‘Aussies have a great facility for knocking off’ just isn’t true any longer – statistics say we work longer than almost anywhere in the world. So why celebrate the 8-Hour-Day?
 
Melbourne stonemasons were among the first in the world to achieve the 8-hour-working day after they walked off the job in April 1856 and the ripple spread across the whole country. These colonial block layers laid the foundations for one of the strongest trade union movements on the planet making the impossible dream of 'eight hours labour, eight hours rest, and eight hours recreation' a reality.
 
The victory was achieved without a reduction in pay or violence. These colonials set an international precedent, demonstrating that workers could achieve improved conditions through organized action. 

​

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.

Some friends dropped by this week and they pressed my buttons when we got talking about the power of connecting story to place. I was fascinated watching their faces animate as they told me how stories worn thin by familiarity took on new depth and meaning when they visited locations where the action had taken place. 
 
And that was only a virtual trip on screen! 
 
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of pilgrimage ever since I began road-testing The Poets Trek on red dirt roads at the back of Bourke thirty years ago. We were exploring ways to expand tourism and seized on an idea I’d experimented with when teaching kids at Pera Bore School. It was simply reading, acting out and filming the poems and stories the famous author Henry Lawson had composed in 1893 ‘on location’ around the Western Plains. I was excited when I saw the way flat words on the page leapt to life as imagination took a hold in the landscape Henry had walked. 
 
The kid’s dubbed it ‘Uncle Paul’s Outback Adventure’!

Preacher, author, activist and prodigious inventor, David Unaipon was a remarkable Australian. He braved the ignorance and prejudice of White Australia and, for decades in his quiet, scholarly, courtly way, he preached his truth and pursued an astonishing sweep of interests.
                                                                                                                                     Mark McGuinness

How did the gentle face of David, son of James and Nymbulda Unaipon of the Narrinyeri people, come to smile at thousands of Australians from the $50 note they swap daily at shop counters? How did an Aboriginal boy, educated in a humble mission school at the mouth of the Murray River around 150 years ago, come to be compared to one of the Western world’s greatest geniuses - Leonardo da Vinci?