​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.

​Every December, I sit down with Ebenezer Scrooge, “…a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, clutching, covetous old sinner” as Charles Dickens described him. The image of the lonely, tight-fisted miser growling “Bah, humbug!” at anyone daring to draw him into the spirit of Christmas, is etched deep into the imagination of the Western World. Along with dozens of other equally vivid characters, Scrooge made Dickens the rock-star storyteller of the 19th century.
 
The 100-page story A Christmas Carol has been credited with launching the modern celebration of feasting and family that dominates the year’s end all across the globe. What’s mostly forgotten is the fact Dickens designed it as a parable of redemption and I’m sure that’s the magnetism that has tugged at me every Christmas for fifty years or more.
 
It's a ghost story with a difference.