This is the unique story of two radical experiments on the same piece of ground on the red soil plains 20kms West of Bourke.
 
It’s 1887. Picture a cluster of burly, sunburnt men watching anxiously day after day as the bit of their American oil drill wound deeper and deeper into the red soil at the back of Bourke. Then, hats were thrown high with an exuberant shout as water from 300 metres below gushed fifty meters into the air. The American boring team had struck the Great Artesian Basin – 1.7 million square kms of life-giving liquid lying untapped beneath a fifth of the continent.
 
Ninety years later in 1978, I arrived at Pera Bore with my family – about 70 kms South of Kerribree Station where that dramatic first deep artesian well had gifted entrepreneur William Walter Davis ‘liquid gold’ to prosper his sheep station. Ahead of us lay an experiment that we hoped would prosper Australia. 

 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.

​John Ridley launched himself at life. He was a flour miller at 15, a self-taught scientist and inventor, and a preacher at 18. At 34 he arrived in South Australia and inside three years he had installed the colony’s first steam engine, bought shares in the Burra mine and invented a machine for stripping wheat that revolutionised grain harvesting across the country. He refused to take any money from his invention, seeing it as a gift to aid the growth of the new colony. More than anything, he understood the priority of promoting its spiritual life and was an energetic lay preacher with an eye for a larger harvest. He used his prosperity to make gifts to evangelical churches and missions in Australia and overseas.
(To learn more watch the video and  click Read More below.  )

​Just before the turn of the twentieth century, a young Australian and a young English immigrant landed in the South Island of New Zealand, both destined to become remarkable storytellers. At thirty, Henry Lawson had already carved his name into the minds of Australians hungry for a storyteller who could speak to them about themselves with an authentic, native voice.
 
Tragically, his stay in ‘Maoriland’ as he called it, was a disaster and his personal life spiralled down into alcoholism from this point on. He was bitterly disappointed with the critics’ reception of his torrent of writing. Just the same, a century or more later, his poems and short stories are still being studied by school children across Australia.
 
Twenty-five-year-old Frank Boreham arrived in Dunedin, an unknown English clergyman with a sharp eye for characters and an untried gift for crafting the humblest event into a tale of cosmic significance. The pulpit of his tiny congregation of craggy Scots in Mosgeil on the Southern-most tip of ‘The Land of the Long White Cloud’, became the springboard which launched him as ‘the greatest Christian essayist of all time.’ (Gordon Moyes)
​
Yet, today he remains mostly unknown. 

​If you’ve heard ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ played on the gumleaf, you never forget it. I first heard it standing under the ghost gums that stood stark white against the ochre walls covered in the rock art of the Ngemba people. I was leading a tour group at Mt Gundabooka, a rugged range that lies like a goanna on the horizon South of Bourke.
 
The musician was Bill Reid, a pastor of the United Aboriginal Mission, who winked at me from under the tilted brim of his Akubra, quietly selected a leaf, cupped it between his knotted shearer’s hands and began to play. The intrigued tour group eagerly gathered around. That moment is etched in my mind – Pastor Bill, white haired and erect, playing a song of Christian faith in a canyon that had echoed to clapsticks and corroboree of Aboriginal people for many centuries. 

​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’m really energised by people who are stepping out to discover our Australian faith stories ‘on location’. I was intrigued when my friend Mawson Skidmore told me how he had plunged students from his English as a Second Language course into a firsthand experience of the Aboriginal’s civil rights struggle at the Cummeragunja ‘scholars hut’ that sits almost forgotten on the Murray River near Echuca.    Listen to his reaction.

“My impression after getting to know a few of these stories was – ‘Why didn't I know anything about this?' - they are pretty amazing and are not peripheral  in the history of the nation (although peripheral in the told history). The teacher of the second class I took with mine up to Cummeragunja had the same response.   I wrote and thanked the Land Council Head (Hadyn Love) for organising for someone to come and show us around the school house and the cemetery and let him know some of my musings…that the schoolhouse should be a National Monument - it's a story that should be told and told well.

We watched your clip on Daniel Matthews today [see other resources at the end of this blog] - and it is like what you were saying - there's a fair bit of darkness to much of that story (which shouldn't be shied away from) - but at Maloga and Cummeragunja and the people that went out from there, there are flames of light and hope.”