It was no accident that Joseph and Mary journeyed to their ancestral home in Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. For a thousand years that obscure country village had nurtured the most powerful family story in history – one that was far from perfect. Nevertheless, God’s design from the beginning was to bring blessing through families and at the end of history to bring all His children home. As my own family gathers for Christmas, I’m deeply grateful for what’s been handed down to us.
 
As the Outback Historian, I’m wrapping up the year with snatches of stories I’ve tried to make visible and some glimpses behind-the-scenes with friends who’ve loaned their gifts. I’m convinced that the face of Jesus will emerge as we work hard to bring to light remarkable stories of innovative Australian men and women of faith.

​When I moved my family from Bourke to Broken Hill in 1988, we found ourselves plunged into a very different slice of Inland Australia. Gritty, grassless and gravelly, it bred people of a different kind – like artist Pro Hart, considered ‘the father of the Australian Outback painting movement.’ This rough-and-tumble ‘Michelangelo of the scrub’, splashed his novel artwork on the Rolls Royce he drove down Sulphide St and on the covers of the New Testaments he freely handed to stranger and friend, with equal relish.

The historians who scripted Ken Burn’s award-winning American documentary series The Civil War, told me their secret was simply ‘telling the big story through the little story.’ That meant tracking the lives of individual soldiers through their letters and photographs to create a highly personal window through which to look at a mind-numbingly large and graphic story.

When Reg Nancarrow entered the world in outback Bourke in 1887, there was nothing to suggest this boy would die half a world away in Belgium, leading headlong advance of Australian troops over what one eyewitness described as ‘a carpet of corpses’ at the battle of Polygon Wood.
 
By the time he left for the war in 1915, the thirty-year-old bush-bred lieutenant was a popular sportsman around Orange and his first-hand reports from the Front were being eagerly followed by readers of The Orange Leader as a kind of virtual experience of what ‘their boys’ were going through.

​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.

​Picture a small, moustachioed Frenchman sitting alone for a whole night in a solitary vigil in the darkened chapel of Rugby School in England. Baron Pierre de Coubertin had made a pilgrimage across the Channel just to sit before the tomb of Rugby School’s visionary Headmaster and it had a powerful effect. He wrote, “My eyes fixed on the funeral slab on which, without epitaph, the great name of Thomas Arnold was inscribed. I dreamed that I saw before me the cornerstone of the British Empire."
 
That night of reflection lit the flame for the modern Olympics.
 
Twelve-year-old Pierre had discovered the charismatic headmaster through reading a French translation of Thomas Hughes’ novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays in the 1870’s. Hughes himself was an enthusiastic product of Rugby and his best seller spread the gospel of Thomas Arnold’s brave educational experiment far and wide. 

On a fiercely hot 11th of July 1924, the event that took the Paris Olympics by storm was the astonishing gold medal run by sprinter Eric Liddell. On that day, against the odds, ‘The Flying Scotsman’ as he was known, fully embodied the Olympic motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” He had copped a wave of criticism at home when he declined running in his favoured 100m event because it was scheduled on a Sunday, which for him was set aside for God.
 
He was transformed into a larger-than-life hero when, given an alternative to run in his less favoured 400m, he won by seven metres in world record time. Over the following century this unlikely story of muscular Christianity has grown in the telling, impacting people of every kind all over the world.
 
Now in 2024, as the multi-billion-dollar international sporting extravaganza opens in the ‘City of Love’, it’s remarkable that the most enduring image from the 1924 Games is that of Eric, head thrown back, blitzing the field, proving on a cinder race track that principle mattered more than patriotism. 

​I was encouraged by the way the remarkable story of William Arnott ‘the Biscuit King of Newcastle’, fired interest. For me, telling the tale of the penniless convict’s son who built a business employing 800 workers, took on a surprising twist when I realised its threads were woven into the tapestry of my Dad’s family history.
 
Two years after 20-year-old William arrived in Maitland on the Hunter River in 1851, my great-grand mother Marianne stepped off the barque Lady Anne, a child immigrant from Portsmouth. Her family settled beside Newcastle Harbour at Stockton. She later married and mothered five children.  
 
Mary Ann Dalby loved serving people. For the next fifty years, while raising her family and sharing in the running of a shoe business with her husband, she maintained her commitment to organisations that touched the lives of the needy. Suffering the loss of two infant children only seemed to deepen her compassion.

The majority of Australians in the past century and a half have sunk their teeth into one or other of a SAO, a Monte Carlo or a Tim Tam. But I guarantee most of us wouldn’t know a cracker about the battler who created the legendary ARNOTT’S biscuit empire.  It’s one of the truly great stories of Australian industry, but more than anything, it’s an inspirational narrative of a man who refused to give in to repeated disasters.
​Click the link to READ and WATCH to learn more.

The Hunter River at Morpeth