Australia should be proud of the fact that Lifeline began here as the initiative of the Rev Sir Alan Walker. This Methodist minister was fearless at speaking out on things that matter and relentless at working on solutions to the things that trouble us. My friend Ian Palmer who volunteers as a telephone counsellor sent me his reflections on what this 24/7 service has meant for us over the past six decades and OK’d me to share it. It’s an amazing story.
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The scene is a small house set between the sea and the Australian bush. Picture a lone man wrestling in prayer between tall, white gumtrees in the moonlight. It’s 1953 and the country is just beginning to recover from the battering of war. The forty-two-year-old Methodist minister’s name is Alan Walker and he’s full of fear at setting out on a nation-wide mission. His convict ancestor had arrived in Botany Bay in 1810 and 20 years later, through the preaching of a travelling Methodist, his alcoholic son John decided to follow Jesus and began preaching in the Windsor district with powerful effect.
And now his great-great grandson Alan - the thirteenth evangelist from that line – is praying for strength. A sudden rustling of the gum leaves in the night-wind made his spirit soar. A vivid image of Jesus challenging Rabbi Nicodemus to allow the wind of the Holy Spirit to flow through his life, gave the shrinking preacher the courage he needed to undertake the preaching ministry to his native country, half a world away from Israel. His preaching had a powerful effect – just as his great-great grandfather John Walker’s had in Windsor 150 years previously. Decades later, Labor parliamentarian Bill Hayden dubbed Alan Walker, ‘The Conscience of the Nation.’ Others called him ‘Mr Methodist.’ What did that mean? On Friday 1st August 1980, a simple three-word message broadcast on 6000 Flying Doctor transceivers sent a ripple of sadness across inland Australia. ‘Traeger is dead.’ Alfred Hermann Traeger died as he had lived - with quiet dignity behind the scenes. He shunned praise, but he has as many memorials as Nobel Prize winner and inventor of wireless telegraph, Guglielmo Marconi.
He was a revolutionary, but just didn’t know it. Painfully shy electrical mechanic Alf Traeger was working at his bench in an Adelaide workshop in June 1925, when a thin, bespectacled man burst in and asked, ‘Have you still got that generator?’ The surprised ham radio enthusiast sold his homebuilt machine to the preacher, who immediately strapped it to the side of his heavily-loaded Dodge Buckboard and set off on a rugged 2400km trek to Alice Springs. That startling moment launched of one of the most important partnerships in Australian history. 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 Shellal 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. When Australian scientist Professor Graeme Clark, the inventor of what’s known as the bionic ear, was asked what he’d learned on his long journey of discovery, he quoted Winston Churchill’s words, ‘Never, never, never give up!’ It’s 1945, in the days when Camden was a rural area on the fringe of Sydney. Picture a young boy in the town pharmacy, watching his father’s daily struggle to communicate with his customers because of severe deafness. That image helps explain why, when the local Methodist minister asked ten-year-old Graeme Clark what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied ‘an ear doctor’. READ MORE below. He’s been dubbed ‘the historian of the Australian Soul.’ Walking the streets of the Rocks area with Professor Stuart Piggin, poking down alleys full of history, READ MORE...
Community Access Radio Station 2WEB was barely a year old when I stepped into the Bourke studio in 1979. In those early days the name Western Educational Broadcasting meant you could surprise the outback audience with almost anything. The Brekky program with a unlikely mix of Slim Dusty, the Beatles, a community announcement about a lost dog with 3 legs, one eye, answering to the name of ‘Lucky’, followed by the BBC News, then climaxing with Let’s Learn Japanese and poetry readings from Geoffrey Chaucer. No complaints about variety!
It's been a busy couple of months!
In February something dawned on me listening to John Dixon in St Phillip's church in Sydney reviving the moment when words from the Bible were read out on Australian soil for the very first time. READ MORE... Bill Ferguson is one of Australia’s unsung heroes. I think he qualifies (along with his friend William Cooper) as the ‘Martin Luther King of Australia’, but for a long time he was forgotten by secular historians and uncelebrated by Christians. Someone left this description. ‘He stood tall, with a calm and reliable manner, his strong Presbyterian faith supported his pride in his people.’ He led the Day of Mourning protest on Australia Day 1938 which has been described as the first clearly identifiable beginning of the Aboriginal political movement.
It was a raucous bush poetry night at the North Bourke pub on the banks of the Darling. ‘This one’s for you Roey’, Mal shouted... READ MORE
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AuthorJoin The Outback Historian, Paul Roe, on an unforgettable journey into Australia's Past as he follows the footprints of the Master Storyteller and uncovers unknown treasures of the nation. Archives
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