An easy home-leg to complete the 1200km circuit. Quiet reflection, murmured conversation, a pause in the windmill town of Gilgandra - the starting point for the Co-ee Recruitment March of 1915. OJ Rushton told of organising the 500 km Kangaroo March in 2018 from Wagga to Sydney, which roused Australians to READ MORE...
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Without really knowing it, we’d been riding with Banjo Patterson’s drover Clancy these last few days, across ‘sunlit plains extended’ and in the marshes ‘about the Overflow where the reed beds sweep and sway.’ From Coonamble we were steadily advancing eastwards on the rugged Warumbungle ranges - Gamilaroi country. Volcanic outcrops filled the windscreen READ MORE... Bruce Feiler, a man who took a recent pilgrimage across the Middle East in the steps of Abraham, said the big thing that happened to him on his quest was that ‘my learning went from my head to my feet...the big transformation was being on the land...and finding the story in the geography itself.’ That’s precisely what was happening to READ MORE.. The pilgrimage took on the nature of a sentimental journey today. Actually, it started the night before when Colin Buchanan took time to talk to Russell and Robert’s grandchildren live on their phones. Distance shrank and two grandfathers shed tears of joy - the ink READ MORE... Out past the old North Bourke Bridge Jen Greentree’s gallery opened the eyes of our pilgrims to the moods and colours of the Outback. She paints stories of hope in ochres and blues, to defy the thinking that this is God-forsaken country. Later in the day they saw READ MORE... What do the Wright Brothers’ aeroplane, the Abbey and the Big Bogan, an ANZAC and an Outback Art gallery have in common? Absolutely nothing is the immediate answer. But then there is something. Contrary to popular opinion that the backcountry is READ MORE... The travellers met some lions today. The first wheeled himself out of a small museum in an electric wheelchair. Austin gently corrected me when I said he was stuck in the contraption. He told me he refused to think the stroke had invalidated him. This big-hearted man lovingly told us the stories of the young men of the Bush Brotherhood who had ridden bikes, driven T-model Fords through swamps and sand dunes shepherding the people on lonely READ MORE...
‘We need to share our stories, accept our stories, and write a new story together.’ - Billy Williams.
In recent years, the story of Bill Ferguson has been highlighted in the main street of Dubbo. While Martin Luther King and his 'I have a dream' speech is well known, Bill Ferguson and William Cooper and others who played similar roles on behalf of the Aboriginal people, are not. Paul and Riverbank Frank take as many opportunities as they can to tell the Bill Ferguson story in schools and groups of young people. Paul wrote this short story after speaking with Bill Ferguson's daughter Isabel. 'A curtain of steady late-winter rain swathes the evening sky. Dwarfed by the leaden expanse of cloud, three figures plod steadily along the sodden roadway, picking their way through the puddles. The man is a tall, erect figure, his muscular shoulders filling out his dark suit coat, water streams from the Fedora hat pulled firmly down over his eyes. The stripling boy struggles manfully with the battered suitcase, now and then swapping it from hand to hand, while his sister strides alongside her father, head held high, hair bedraggled, clutching a parcel of food wrapped in grease-proof paper. ( Read the rest by clicking on Read More.) Freddie Campion was a member of the Governor’s staff, the NSW golf champion of 1895 and an athletic horseman who loved to shoot. The neglect of the spiritual health of the Western people haunted him; he returned to England to train for the ministry. February 1902 saw him disembarking from the SS RUNIC in Sydney with two other passionate young Anglican missionaries, Charles Matthews and Reuben Coverdale. They were bound for Dubbo as the nucleus of a unique band of men who were to become known across the Western plains over the next century simply as ‘the Bush Brothers’. Click 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
October 2023
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