Young Australians With Big Ideas

​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.
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A quarter of a century later, Hugh Victor Mackay took harvesting to a new level with his Sunshine Combine Harvester. Home-schooled with seven brothers in back country Victoria on a sturdy Scots diet of the Bible, sermons and John Bunyan, Hugh worked the farm with his father and brother in Drummartin. By 1885, when Hugh was just 20, they had completed their proto-type – based on machinery being used in California.
 
The Sunshine Harvester Company expanded phenomenally during the long drought at the end of the century. By mid-1904 McKay's overseas trade made him the largest manufacturing exporter in the Commonwealth. The Age eulogized him as 'a man with an intense faith in his own vision, and with a determination of character and bigness of heart that enabled him to take all obstacles in his stride'. 
 
It’s not surprising that another young Victorian innovator caught his attention – John Flynn, with his dream of covering Australia with an air-born ‘mantle of safety.’ Hugh Mackay gave substantial finance which got the Flying Doctor Service off the ground in the 1920’s.
 
It can’t be denied that inspiration for the three of these young men sprang from the energetic life of Jesus. John Flynn loved Robert Browning’s famous lines of poetry ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” I believe a new wave of innovation could be generated if Australia’s current generation could be shown that so many of the blessings they take for granted have the fingerprints of Jesus on them.