The bronze sculpture of Private John Simpson and his donkey carrying a wounded Digger to safety, stands sentinel at the entrance to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It’s probably Gallipoli’s most poignant symbol of heroism and mateship. That image of Simpson laying down his life for a friend, has been a vital part of the mythology told to Australian school children every ANZAC Day. It makes self-sacrifice larger than the story of war itself.
 
Many may not know it echoes the story of the Good Samaritan that Jesus devised to illustrate the heart of true humanity. He took it a step beyond mateship. His hero was a Samaritan – not a mate, but a despised cultural enemy. Jesus deliberately chose to picture a foreigner using his donkey to rescue the victim of a gang-bashing, left lying on a lonely stretch of road. It was the man’s need he saw, not his creed. It’s been such a potent story, the phrase ‘good Samaritan’ has become a common way to describe anyone doing a good deed.

​I was recently writing a piece for The Western Herald in Bourke when I stumbled onto a century-old Christmas postcard that whispered a remarkable story. Unlikely as it may seem, the card links Australia’s most famous naval engagement to its most inland port. I’ll try to piece a narrative together from the fragments that remain.
 
When war was declared in 1914, the 33,000 people of German origin living in Australia were forbidden to leave the country without a permit and ordered to report to police. Many of them were Lutheran Christians who had originally migrated seeking religious freedom and created hard-working farming communities in South Australia’s Barossa Valley.
 
 As the casualty lists from Gallipoli lengthened during 1915 and anti-German feelings grew more intense, the Great War came home to remote outback Bourke. German civilian prisoners of war were shipped to Australia from Singapore, Ceylon, Borneo, New Caledonia, Fiji, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. A hundred or so were deposited in empty houses in the town.

I remember being gripped when I first read Trooper Ion Idriess’ first hand accounts of the Light Horse in the Sinai desert in World War One. You can feel the breath of bullets sheering the emu feathers from his slouch hat as he and his mates galloped away under the rifle fire of the Turks. It was stirring stuff for a young bloke to absorb!
 
But there were mentions of something intriguing that happened to those young Australians on the long draining rides between battles. The hooves of their horses were kicking up the centuries of dust that covered adventures recorded in the Bible – in a very real sense they felt they were riding with the ghosts of Moses, Joshua and Caleb. The chaplains alongside the men became the storytellers bringing that history to life. Events that had remained locked inside a leather-bound book with gold-edging that belonged in church, suddenly became real.
 
Idriess told a very Australian story that happened when, led by amateur archaeologist Padre Maitland-Woods, the troopers carefully dug up the mosaic floor of an ancient church to ship back to Australia as a prize of war! The padre enthusiastically reported to the Army Records Division they’d also found the bones of a saint and got a request back asking for Trooper A. Saint’s dog tag as they had no record of him!
 
The She​llal mosaic is on display in the War Memorial in Canberra. It contains Jesus’ words ‘I am the True Vine’. I like to think of it as a tribute to the chaplains who brought the life of the True Vine to the young ANZAC’s. Chaplain David Garland was one of them and this is his story.

Young men from small towns across the country answered the call to go to war in 1914. Among them was an unlikely group of clergymen. This is the story of how they too became part of the Anzac legend.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bB87O_ic-5o&t=312s​

A few thoughts from The Outback Historian   Paul Roe    Anzac Day 2020