The Heart of Hartley

I’ve driven the Great Western Highway hundreds of times between Bourke or Dubbo and Sydney and shot past tiny Hartley village thinking ‘I must pull up there one day’ and never have. Last weekend, tracking from Victoria Pass across the valley to Lithgow, I decided ‘This is it!’  The bright sunshine of a crisp winter day made the honey-coloured sandstone of the Courthouse and St Bernard’s church just sing. And they sang two stories that touched me.
 

​I’ve driven the Great Western Highway hundreds of times between Bourke or Dubbo and Sydney and shot past tiny Hartley village thinking ‘I must pull up there one day’ and never have. Last weekend, tracking from Victoria Pass across the valley to Lithgow, I decided ‘This is it!’  The bright sunshine of a crisp winter day made the honey-coloured sandstone of the Courthouse and St Bernard’s church just sing. And they sang two stories that touched me.
 
It took the sweat and toil of 800 convicts to carve the great highway West across the rugged Blue Mountains in the 1830’s. Increased traffic and settlement also saw crime escalate and by the 1840’s the courthouse was busy as the law brought bushrangers, horse thieves and those accused of lesser crimes to trial. Words scribed into the wall of the female cell clearly echoed St Paul’s urging from his first century prison, ‘I have learned to be content in whatever state I am in’. I wondered if the woman that wrote them had heard her mother read the story of Paul from the Bible to her children as she gathered around the fireplace at night. It seemed she recalled them as a way of dealing with her own imprisonment. She christened the jail ‘THE HOUSE OF CONTENT.’ Then she added a short encouragement for those who followed: ‘BE CONTENT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE.’   
 
The beautiful simplicity of the Church and Presbytery, tucked into the hillside opposite, were symbols of another story living in the same valley at the same time. A newspaper report on the completion of the building in 1847 explained that it was mainly the contributions of the poorer Irish settlers that got the job done. It said, ‘each has given his mite’ – referring to the poor widow whom Jesus had seen slip a few pennies in to the offering box hoping to go unnoticed. He commended her as being the real deal when it came to faith. The journalist obviously sensed that story was still alive in that place of worship in Hartley Vale.
 
I rejoined the stream of vehicles heading West, heartened by the humble folk of Hartley who had left tangible evidence of the faith that sustained them.