It’s March 1870 and summer in Sydney is turning to autumn. In a churchyard high on a ridge at Ryde overlooking the Parramatta River, family and friends have gathered to lay to rest Maria Ann Smith, aged 69. The ancient words the family chose to have carved into her headstone tell the heart-story of this simple woman pioneer.

‘So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.’
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Maria, with her husband Thomas and five children, had arrived in the rough and ready colony of New South Wales with fifty other emigrant families packed aboard The Lady Nugent in 1838. Depressed wages in the fruit growing area of Sussex had led hungry agricultural labourers to riot in 1830 and the Smith’s hometown of Beckley was in the eye of the storm. The workhouses were so filled with paupers that the local parish decided the solution was to recruit 200 agricultural workers to emigrate to NSW. The Smith family had fallen on hard times and they seized on the offer to escape England by making the arduous 16,000 km sea journey to Sydney Town, in hopes of a fresh start.  READ MORE and WATCH…

You know you're near the end of the 380 km stretch of Mitchell Highway from Dubbo to Bourke when you break out of the mulga and box tree scrub onto the wide Darling flood plain. My first reflex is to sight the Mt Oxley mesa, often floating in the heatwaves on the Eastern horizon. It's a ritual that locates me somehow - a fixed point on the inner landscape composed of stories I have collected over four decades.
I’ve just completed a memoir tracking my journey as a historian and storyteller. The publisher asked about images for the cover and instinctively I thought of this lonely, flat-topped outcrop where the first European explorer had stood and surveyed the vast stretch of plains spreading West 190 years ago. Like Charles Sturt, I had arrived in Ngemba territory ignorant of the ancient songlines etched into the face of the country. And I knew little of the narrative overlaid by the wave of European settlers that followed Sturt’s footsteps.
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Strange how old melodies suddenly come to mind. And if they are hymns, somehow those cadences are not only locked into our grey matter, but into our souls as well. A childhood memory bubbled up of wheezy notes from an old pedal organ, leading our little congregation through a hearty rendition of ‘Tell me the old, old story of Jesus and his love.’
 
The words were there in my memory, but there were foggy patches so I googled. As I read them through I thought, ‘whoever wrote this understood storytelling.’ The fusty hymn came to life when I discovered the author was Kathryn Hankey, a girl with a passion for teaching children all across 19th century London. She was a social activist teamed up with the group fighting for the abolition of slavery with William Wilberforce. Her heart for sharing the story of Jesus saw her head overseas to serve as a nurse in South Africa.

We've had some pretty wild weather lately and travelling home through some heavy downpours, we decided to take time out in the town of Yass in southern NSW. It was a great opportunity to seek out a story. We headed first to the Tourist Centre, had a bit of a walk around town and then hunkered down in the local library for a while. Here's the story we discovered.

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 She​llal 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.

What motivated top corporate banker and former NSW Premier Michael Baird to leave those powerful worlds behind to manage HammondCare? The reason was simply the heart-wrenching experience of watching his mother Judy lose mobility and independence.  Mike shares the faith and vision of Robert Hammond , the legendary clergyman, who a century ago carved out a place in Australian history with his energetic determination to help those who could not help themselves.  
Today Michael is working to grow that dream to meet the increasing demands of Australia's ageing population for kindness and care.
Bob Hammond's remarkable story is very much alive.  LISTEN to more of Robert Hammond's story below.