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!’