​It's been said that when people settle in a new country, to feel at home, they have to fill the unfamiliar landscape with their own myths and heroes. Andrew ‘Banjo’ Patterson was one of the poets who sang larger-than-life figures from the bush into the heart-scape of Australia over a century ago, just as our rough colonies were melding into a nation.
 
The image of the intrepid man from Snowy River hurling his horse down a steep High-Country slope has been etched into the minds of generations of Australians. Schoolkids still delight in telling the story of the bearded bushie from Ironbark tricked into thinking his ‘bloomin’ throat had been cut’ by a wily barber.
 
Banjo’s melancholy song of the lone swagman throwing himself into a billabong to escape the police lingers on as our unofficial national anthem and tugs at the heart strings of Aussies a long way from home. And, somewhere in the back-country of our collective imagination, the carefree drover Clancy of the Overflow still sings as he musters cattle on sunlit plains stretching away and away.

​Gunnedah sits at the junction of the Namoi and Mooki Rivers on the North West Slopes of NSW. It boasts two heroes of a very different kind. One is Cumbo Gunnerah, 'The Red Kangaroo' as he was called by his people, a great warrior and revered leader of the Gunn-e-dar people of the Kamilaroi tribe. He was born, lived and died a child of the wilderness, long before the white men came.
 
The other is Dorothea McKellar, daughter of native-born parents, who grew up protected and highly cultured, moving easily between three worlds - the society of Sydney's elite, her brothers' farms near Gunnedah and among family friends in London. She is best known for her bush poetry.
 
They couldn’t be more contrasting figures and yet they shared much in common. The Bush spoke to them both. The fabled war chief hunted far and wide across his native territory between the New England Ranges and the Warrumbungle Mountains – he read it like a book.
 
The accomplished city girl learned the beauties and terrors of her wide brown land as she rode the same mountains and Breeza Plains on horseback. Both were intelligent and proficient in several languages. In their own ways, both understood the spirit of the land.

​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)
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Yet, today he remains mostly unknown. 

​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. 

I didn’t realise that the story of a native-born piano would jump at me out of the clean-up we were doing to prepare for our Storytelling Centre in Dubbo. Octavius Beale’s masterpiece was sitting dusty and neglected in a back room and here I was, asking myself, “Do I really need that thing in here?” How ignorant! It was my colleague, OJ Rushton, who opened my eyes to this story of a unique Aussie icon.

I discovered that apart from being a traveller skilled at languages, President of the NSW Chamber of Commerce and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Beale, an Irish-born Quaker just happened to design the first piano purpose-built for Australia!
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The Quakers were a small Christian sect known for building industries focussed on caring for their workers. So, it was no surprise to learn that in 1893 Octavius established Australia’s first piano factory in Sydney and grew it into the largest, not only in the southern hemisphere but also the British Empire in the early 1900s. 

As I travel, I look out for the stories and symbols that shape us Aussies.  Observers say that during the first few years of our lives as we learn to talk, to read, to share in the common story of our people, we’re quietly absorbing a worldview.
 
Normally we’re not conscious of it. It’s like the lenses of our glasses, it is not something we look at, but something through which we look in order to see the world. On the road to Gundagai, I discovered a faithful hound, a popular song and an inspirational sculptor that had all played a part in telling us about ourselves.