​Why on earth would the man who was highly respected as a civil rights leader, cheered as a champion footballer, selected as the first indigenous State Governor, honoured with an MBE for his service to his people and knighted by the Queen, insist that his most important title was ‘Pastor’? 
 
It’s really intrigued me that the enormous publicity surrounding the two rounds of AFL football set aside in May to celebrate him, chose to call him only “ ____ Sir Douglas Nicholls’. Why the edit? Perhaps the humble descriptor ‘pastor’ was just too awkward for the hype.
  
That sent me searching for the reasons why the multi-talented Doug singled this out as the title that best described his career. Here’s what I discovered. 

​I was excited when a missing link in the fascinating story of Australia’s homegrown astronomer John Tebbutt surfaced this week. It’s an extraordinary lecture delivered to an audience of men at the YMCA in Windsor in 1878, where this world-renowned scientist detailed his conviction that the starry skies above our Great South Land shout the wisdom and genius of the Creator every night. It  was the product of fifty years close observation.
 
John Tebbutt was known for being meticulous in his search for truth and on that Monday night in July, nearly 150 years ago, he declared to an audience of young Australians in ringing tones, that the Author of the universe had visited our planet in none other than the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who had once majestically commanded the waves of Lake Galilee to be still.
 
I think 21st Century generations need to hear this brilliant scientist’s voice again. Click  Read More  to find the link to  my  original blog on John Tebbutt and also a selection of quotes from his lecture in 1878.

It’s 1918 and Brother John Consterdine is jogging steadily West out of Bourke in his sulky doing the rounds of a parish roughly the size of his home country, England. He’s got rations on board that should last him a couple of months. He is one of the young clergy known as the Bush Brothers who had answered a call to venture out to the very edges of settlement in NSW and Queensland.
 
Their university degrees weren’t guaranteed to win a hearing with station families or the shifting population of shearers, stockmen, well sinkers and fencers – mostly graduates from ‘The School of Hard Knocks.’ But, by nicknaming him ‘Brother Connie’, the bush people signalled they thought he wasn’t a half-bad bloke. Loneliness can make people inventive and Connie had turned the long tedious stretches through the Gidgea, Mulga and treeless salt pans of back country NSW into a rich university education of his own. He wrote,
    
When it is remembered that Australia is perhaps the only country in the world where a 1918 motor tyre may easily be punctured by a Paleolithic or Old Stone Age spear head, which in other countries would take deep digging to find and that these remains are fast disappearing, it will be easily seen how important and fascinating it is to collect what remains before it is too late.
​(Pictured are some of the Bush Brothers at their base in Dubbo.)