I have a vivid ‘Crocodile Dundee’ moment locked in my memory that always makes me chuckle. Picture a young bush lad who’d grown up chasing cows on the frosty hills of Yackandandah, passing through the ornate entrance of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London. Kind friends have taken their colonial visitor Bill to hear George Frideric Handel’s famous Messiah – the whole works, full orchestra and choir.
 
Everyone is suitably dressed for a posh occasion - after all, this was where the most famous choral work in history had first been performed in England in 1743. When it crescendoed with the rousing Hallelujah Chorus, it was reported that Billy couldn’t contain himself. Sheer exhilaration swept him up into that mighty hymn and the young Aussie jumped up on his plush theatre seat and started punching the air in response to the thundering Hallelujah’s!
 
Mind you, Yackandandah Bill was not the first to rise to the occasion. It’s said that when King George I heard it, he too could not remain seated for the powerful Chorus and rose to his feet to honour the greater King. For over 250 years concert goers have followed suit. Composer Joseph Haydn is said to have heard it and "wept like a child" exclaiming, "He is the master of us all." Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart agreed. "Handel understands effect better than any of us – when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt … ”

It’s amazing how a fragment of story can glitter when it’s brought into the light of day. The other day a friend sent me a coffee table book celebrating some amazing characters who’d been quietly serving the remote areas of Australia for a hundred years. Its title gives the game away, ‘Never Too Far, Never Too Few’ – it’s the story of a group humbly calling themselves ‘Bush Church Aid.’
 
It was launched at a time of crisis in Sydney in 1918 - the Spanish influenza pandemic was gripping the post-war world. Everywhere Australians were withdrawing into self-protection mode while some in the Anglican Church took this initiative to reach out to the forgotten people of the Bush.
 
The photo of a strong-featured face grabbed my attention. It was the image of a confident woman, upright and looking straight into the lens, full of conviction.  And the bones of her story say she was. With her good looks and a noble name like Madaline Rose Delacour de Labilliere, she could easily be the heroine of a Mills and Boon romance.
 
She was in fact a romantic, but a lady of a much more robust stamp than a paperback hero.

Around 1880, the back-breaking labour of the heroic John Gribble carved ‘The Camp of Mercy’ out of the bush on the edge Murrumbidgee River near Darlington Point.  For several decades, Aboriginal people, fugitives from ill-treatment, fled to the camp he named Warangesda, a blending of the Wiradjuri word for ‘camp’ and the Hebrew word for ‘mercy.’ It’s been described as the only sanctuary available for them in NSW at the time.
 
Last weekend, former residents and friends gathered to mark the centenary of its closure. Among them was Reverend Cannon Shannon Smith, a sixth generation Wiradjuri and fifth generation Worimi descendant whose great-great-grandfather, James Murray, arrived with Reverend John Gribble. In an ABC interview she explained that a lot of the returning original Warangesda folk remained strong Christians. When once she was asked, ‘Who evangelised you?’ her unexpected reply was, ‘I was evangelised by the Rev J B Gribble in 1880, because he was the one who brought Christianity to my people … And here I am today, still going!’

 In 1940, out on the edge of the NSW Outback, Labour Party Whip Mark Davidson, the member for Bourke and Cobar, was almost a lone voice speaking up for the Aboriginal people in Parliament.
 
 “The aboriginal population of New South Wales has been dying out since the advent of the white man. They are in the minority, and it seems they are being treated as Hitler treats minorities on the other side of the world, although perhaps not so forcibly. They are being treated in a manner that will bring about their extinction.”
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Given the times, the Catholic member’s speech was strikingly brave and may have been prompted by an event 2 years previously in Melbourne.
 
On the night of November 8th 1938, Nazi paramilitary forces, members of Hitler Youth along with ordinary citizens, had spilled into city streets for a night of violence that launched the slaughter of 6 million European Jews.
 
The eerie sounds of shattering glass from 7000 Jewish owned businesses, the roar of flames consuming 200 synagogues, the cries of anguish from 30,000 throats as men women and children were herded into trucks destined for concentration camps, carried 16000 kms half-way round the world.

This ‘Kristallnacht’ became a word of infamy across the globe. But who cared? One Australian living in Melbourne knew more than just glass had been broken.

When my Tongan mate Puluno Efoti was invited to Parramatta as their Australia Day Ambassador, he was excited.  Why? Because it is giving him the chance to tell the story of a local girl who began a movement that transformed the people of his island nation over two centuries ago. She was one of the first-generation Australian kids who were derisively labelled ‘Currency Lads and Lasses’ - implying they were of inferior quality.
 
Parramatta girl Mary Hassall was one who proved them wrong. Mary was born in Sydney in 1799 to adventurous young parents.  These two had made the dangerous journey half-way round the world from Cornwall to Tahiti, planning to give practical expression to the Christian gospel among the native people as ‘artisan’ missionaries.
 
Mary’s father Rolland proved himself a man of bold character and a big heart and he needed both. Feuding Tahitian tribes forced the 29-year-old carpenter to retreat to safety with his young family to Sydney, only to be immediately beaten up by thugs, robbed and left penniless. Undaunted, he and his brother-in-law began travelling around outlying settlements preaching and setting up schools.

 New Year’s Eve, Sydney Harbour December 31st 2024  Robbie Williams and a chunk of the million strong crowd of revellers belt out the words of John Farnham’s stirring The Voice anthem, ‘We’re not gonna sit in silence, we’re not gonna live with fear!’ At the time I wondered ‘What resolutions sprang from that for 2025?’ There’d be a thousand possible I reckon.
 
Now that the smoke from $8M fireworks has drifted away, I’m asking myself what I’m going to use my voice for here in Oz. I decided if I’d had a chance to write a slogan across the Harbour Bridge that night, it would have been RE-STORYING AUSTRALIA.

 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.