​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.  )

​You could say Easter arrived on the banks of the Baarka/Darling River on Feb 28th 1828 when Hamilton Hume sat in front of the perplexed Aboriginal tribe and threw down a branch as a sign of peace. The young home-grown explorer was a man of faith, as was expedition leader Captain Charles Sturt. Together, they relayed compassion for a people who they saw were afflicted with smallpox. Their impeccable record in relating to the native people wherever they journeyed mirrored the teachings of Jesus.
 
Easter has arrived on the Western plains in many different forms since then. Those who brought it weren’t all saints, but they were real. 

In 1856, two dispirited young Germans headed to their home base in London from Lake Boga near Swan Hill, their mission declared a failure. Andreas Täger and Friedrich Spieseke had left Germany five years earlier, fired with a passion to teach the Christian faith to the Aboriginal people of Australia.
 
Encouraged by Governor La Trobe, a fellow member of the Moravian Brethren Church who shared the vision and set land aside at Lake Boga, they set about building a mission station to both protect and educate the Wemba Wemba people. Their ambitions were high and their spirit genuine, but many things conspired to erode their manful efforts.
But were they failures?
​Click on Read More to hear more of the story of Lake Boga.

Recently, when I attended  a  Cornerstone Community gathering in Swan Hill, I was privileged to witness a baptism at Lake Boga. Young men are still stepping out to take commitment to  Jesus seriously .

​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.

​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. 

Tracking stories around town with year 9 students from Dubbo Christian School recently, one smart young girl interjected, “But, there’s no point just putting murals on walls or placing statues in the main street unless someone tells you the story!”
 
Exactly!
 
More than half a century ago Richard Neihbur, a shrewd observer of culture, noted the same thing - that our key stories need to be written fresh into the heart of new generations.  ‘Culture is a social tradition which must be conserved by painful struggle not so much against non-human natural forces as against revolutionary and critical powers in human life and reason.’