You know you're near the end of the 380 km stretch of Mitchell Highway from Dubbo to Bourke when you break out of the mulga and box tree scrub onto the wide Darling flood plain. My first reflex is to sight the Mt Oxley mesa, often floating in the heatwaves on the Eastern horizon. It's a ritual that locates me somehow - a fixed point on the inner landscape composed of stories I have collected over four decades.
I’ve just completed a memoir tracking my journey as a historian and storyteller. The publisher asked about images for the cover and instinctively I thought of this lonely, flat-topped outcrop where the first European explorer had stood and surveyed the vast stretch of plains spreading West 190 years ago. Like Charles Sturt, I had arrived in Ngemba territory ignorant of the ancient songlines etched into the face of the country. And I knew little of the narrative overlaid by the wave of European settlers that followed Sturt’s footsteps.
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Strange how old melodies suddenly come to mind. And if they are hymns, somehow those cadences are not only locked into our grey matter, but into our souls as well. A childhood memory bubbled up of wheezy notes from an old pedal organ, leading our little congregation through a hearty rendition of ‘Tell me the old, old story of Jesus and his love.’
 
The words were there in my memory, but there were foggy patches so I googled. As I read them through I thought, ‘whoever wrote this understood storytelling.’ The fusty hymn came to life when I discovered the author was Kathryn Hankey, a girl with a passion for teaching children all across 19th century London. She was a social activist teamed up with the group fighting for the abolition of slavery with William Wilberforce. Her heart for sharing the story of Jesus saw her head overseas to serve as a nurse in South Africa.