"I
have lived in Britain and the USA. Australia's social system,
cost of living, outlook and weather are better than those
of either country."
– Howard J. Peters, Albany, WA, quoted in TIME.
Remarkable Journey Through Time
The
Back of Beyond
Founder
of the Flying Doctor... Flynn
An
Australian's View of Australia
The
Bush Parsons
Beginnings
of Australia
Home
of the Largest Living Thing on Earth
On Angels Wings by Esrom Morse
This
picture shows some of the desolate landscape (click on
pic. to enlarge)
This
is a quote from a 1994 300p fiction called, The Back of
Beyond by Barbara Bickmore, published by Random House
(Aust) Pty Ltd., 20 Alfred St., Milson's Point, NSW 2061.
It creates stories of the early days of the Flying Doctors
and continues like this:
Occasionally
tracks cross the sand, signs of man like no other men on earth.
Thousand-of-years-old stone paintings on rocks. The most consistently
remote and barren land known to man. The most unwelcoming.
Uninhabited and uninhabitable.
And
then slowly, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a few
men came, searching their way across the gibber plains, across
the vast deserts, across the horizon that never seemed to
come any closer. With the men came sheep and later, cattle.
Along with these came death, desolation and infinite loneliness.
It
was a man's country, for a few men had the temerity to ask
a woman to share a life so removed from humanity. And yet,
here and there, hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles apart,
a woman did come with a man, came and made a home for him,
bore his children who would be doomed, as was she, to be forever
alienated from civilised society ... from any society, civilised
or not. It drove some people insane. It was referred to as
The Loneliness, The Great Loneliness and then, The Great Australian
Loneliness.
The
sun beats down on this parched earth, which for millennia
seemed unfit for human habitation. It is the most isolated,
empty vastness, as well as the oldest land mass, on the face
of the earth. And the last to be populated by white man.
It
is a land of infinite beauty, frightening, empty ... a land
of indescribable bird life, of reptiles, or mystical spiritualism.
It combines blacks native to the land - unlike any other people
known to man - and whites of European extraction who have
met the challenges of this inhospitable continent.
It
is a land where Biblical seven-year droughts are common, and
the earth is littered with the bleached bones of sheep, cattle,
horses ... and the broken hearts of men. It is a land where
flash floods appear with no warning, obliterating homesteads
and drowning babies. Wind-driven fires rage out of control.
It
is the only place on the plant where people dwell in underground
caves to escape the blast-furnace heat of summer when the
temperature hovers above 125F (+50C) months on end, where
a man can die of thirst within hours. It is two million square
miles unlike any other, beyond anything most men can imagine.
Catacombs
Church at Coober Peady (click on pic. to enlarge)
That
it has ever been populated that any women were willing to
settle on homesteads where the nearest neighbour might be
as close as sixty-five miles away or as far as five-hundred
miles distant. It truly is a miracle.
And
the fact that towns were born there, that cattle and sheep
stations developed that led to wealth, as well as to bankruptcy
and death, has all largely been due to the efforts on one
man, and to the radio and the aeroplane.
These
two inventions and this man, The Rev. John Flynn, opened the
way for the Flying Doctor Service, one of the nobler experiments
of mankind, and it made all the difference to the development
of the interior of Australia."
John
Flynn once said, "If we once dream, the rest is easy."
For Flynn himself, the rest was not easy but with the
grit of so many of Christ's pioneers, he struggled against
all odds until his own dream became a reality.
His
heart went out to thousands of isolated settlers who were
deprived - not only of the Gospel - but of the basic medical
help and companionship which city people take for granted.
He
dreamed of aeroplanes when the whole of aviation was in its
infancy; and unheard morse code wireless which would give
bush people a voice. His friend Alfred Traeger invented and
developed the famous pedal radio that linked the outback to
the world.
Flynn's
persistence and drive eventually got the Flying Doctors off
the ground in early Qantas biplanes, at Cloncurry, far northwest
Queensland in 1928. The first journey was to Julia Creek for
a medical evacuation, a town now served by Schools of the
Air and Outback Patrol's monthly Explorers Club Magazine.
John
Flynn died in 1951.
Flynn
saw his parish as the whole of inland Australia when the vision
of the people was limited; no radio, no aviation, camel travel,
raw newspapers and primitive medicine.
His
vision brought the mantle of safety to the wilderness and
the message of the Church to the people.
Flynn
was one of God's true adventurers, and Outback Patrol pilots
and teams struggle to carry on his personal ministry to the
people today, while the Royal Flying Doctor Service continues
it's grand medical work.
F.
W. Boreham, 1886-1959 – Speaking in North America in
the 1930's.
"I
come from Australia, and to us Australians, you Americans
seem strange people. Not that you are strange; but you look
queer to us. For Australia, as you know, is a topsy-turvy
kind of place. It is a place where we walk with our feet to
your feet; a place whose midnight corresponds with your noon
and whose noon corresponds with your midnight. A place where
we get up when you go to bed and go to bed when you get up;
a place where we celebrate Christmas at midsummer and keep
the fourth of July in the depth of winter; a place where we
go north in winter if we want to be warm and go south in summer
is we want to be cool; a place where the trees shed their
bark instead of their leaves, where the birds laugh and where
the native animals are fitted out with pockets.
Now,
just as all the world looks upside down to a man who is standing
on his head, it is natural that, to us Australians, you Americans
should appear odd. Here in my hand, for example, is the printed
program of this gathering. The word Program is spelt with
only seven letters. I am filled with admiration. The final
letters of the word as we spell it are, of course, superfluous.
But we British people never notice that, and, if we had noticed
it, we should have been too conservative to make the change.
But you Americans both see and act. The thing that puzzles
me however, is that you, being such misers with your letters,
are such spendthrifts with your syllables. You cut the final
letters of our program; you deleted the u from colour and
honour and valour; you even paint the words GO SLO in enormous
letters across your city streets; yet you call a lift an elevator,
a car an automobile, a jug a pitcher, a tram a street-car,
and so on. Now this does strike us as peculiar. It would not
be so bad if your long words were the right words and our
short words the wrong words. But our short words are the right
words and your long words are the wrong words. A lift is a
lift; it not an elevator. You can lift a man up and lift him
down; but you can't elevate him up and elevate him down...."
In
explaining this, F. W. Boreham called it 'a banquet of banter',
and it won admiration in the numerous conferences at which
he spoke in the US and Canada in the 1920's and 1930's. It
explains succinctly, the differences which bring us together
with peoples of the world.
Note:
F.
W. Boreham is the author of 48 books, published by Epworth
in the UK from 1902 to 1958. They contain numerous short articles
on the Australian way of life compared with Christian teachings.
They are now collector's items. Les Nixon will Email
you his book list, upon request.
Outback
Patrol's Les Nixon is an avid FWB collector, and has 46
of the 48 titles on display at Patrol HQ Institute,
with a supply of duplicates to lend. Only a handful of Australians
possess the whole set.
Nixon
is searching for F. W. Boreham's The Whisper of God
(1902) and George Augustus Selwyn (191?). Any
person willing to offer these will be welcomed with a veritable
avalanche of affection, and offers to swap, buy or steal at
any price, to complete the Nixon FWB collection.
This
is what the outback was like when the first Anglican missionaries
entered it in the cause of the Gospel, and in the name of
the Bush Brotherhood of St. Laurence. From Ivan Southall's
Parson on the Track" 1956, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne,
p129. (out of print)
Heat
and dust and flatness:
Back
in the twenties, many of the outback places like Bourke NSW
were hard frontier townships of heat and dust and flatness
on the banks of the great inland rivers of the west that changed
names several times between it's source and where it empties
into the great south ocean, sometimes as much as 1700 miles
long. The one great river, for instance, starts as the Severn
and becomes the Dumaresq in south Queensland, and then the
Macintire and the Barwon and finally the Darling in New South
Wales! It is a magnificent stream, navigable for great distances,
draining more than a quarter of a million square miles, and
in the last of the 1800's and early decades of the 1900's
still carrying the remnants of the picturesque river traffic,
before the railways and the roadways emerged to take over.
Floods
brought the silt:
Sometimes
the great rivers flooded , as they had flooded for thousands
of years, and huge levee banks protected the towns. Without
its levee banks, Bourke might have become, from time to time,
a poor man's 'Venice of the West' or have drowned completely
beneath a vast inland sea. The river rose so high that it's
tributaries did not drain into it but flowed backwards and
inundated thousands of square miles. When the water drained
away, they left yet another layer of silt over the table-flat
plains - fantastically flat plains, created by the rivers
across ancient depressions and undulations, gradually drowning
the irregularities of the terrain in silt, and inch or two
at a time, until only here and there on high ground, where
a hillock might glory in the name of a mountain, the original
red earth remained; rich plains created by water yet ironically
starved for the lack of it.
A
dangerously pitted surface
When
they were wet, the black soil plains were undoubtedly black,
a greenie sort of black with the consistency of an oozing
slimy paste that stank when disturbed, just firm enough in
the drying stage to retain the impression of animal hoofs
and assume a dangerously pitted surface, brick hard, rough
enough to shake a motor car to pieces. If undisturbed in the
drying stage vast tracts of it set like concrete and vehicles
could pass over it in any direction, in comfort and safety.
"Zis
ees emposseeble!"
When
they were dry, the black soil plains were a dirty and dreary
white, drab, crazed like old china, and bore incredible quantities
of rubbish. When they were dry, the plains slowly crumbled
away to a fine powder in the burning sun, powder so fine that
every footstep and every breath of wind disturbed it and every
flock of sheep passing over it moved beneath a dense haze
of dust, dust so light and so airy that a still night was
almost too brief a time for all to settle. By night it hung
over the townships like a mist in the highlands of Scotland,
softening every outline, ghosting every street light, irritating
human lungs and throats. It was dust so fine that forty years
later it was said to have wrecked the performance of a certain
brand of imported motor car by limiting its engine life to
a few thousand miles. A sample of the dust submitted to the
car manufacture was puffed into a state of total suspension.
Sahara dust analysed by the same method settled in twenty
minutes. Dust form the western plains of NSW (according to
several informants) was still in suspension four hours later.
("Zis ees emposseeble," said the manufacturer, "wee
caann do nooozzing!")
Easiest
way in was through the cracks in the walls.
Just
about all of the inland towns of any size were made of wide
unmade streets where the unwary driver might bog down in wet
weather at his own front gate or outside the bank, a town
not beautified though sixty years old, a town in which only
a handful of householders had established gardens, most had
been so thoroughly disheartened by climate and dogs and small
boys and myriad pests that they had given up, a town with
several impressive colonial buildings - government building
from the old days when men had hoped for great things, and
streets of sub-standard houses. Right across the plains there
were serious problems for the designers of early heavy building,
foundations shifted, walls leant, windows and doors jammed
and were reluctant to close at all. One building might remain
firm and immovable and another next door might split right
down the middle. Of the old Church Rectory at Brewarrina,
it was said that the easiest way in was through the cracks
in the walls, but the Rectory at Bourke passed muster. It
was built of red brick and stood down by the river bank, several
minutes march from the church. It had four rooms with high
ceilings and a passage in the centre, and a summer kitchen,
washhouse and storeroom outside in the yard. The Church at
Bourke, St. Stephens, was not a church at all, strictly speaking.
It was a dusty old hall of wood, with it's timbers thirsting
for paint. There had been a church once, a very fine building,
as fine as any in the west, but one blisterringly hot unhappy
day in 1895 it had burst into flames and the roof had fallen
in. They didn't salvage it, but entirely demolished it and
forgot to put it up again.
(Exerps
from Ian Southall's Parson on the Track, 1956, out
of print. Used Book Shops are the best source. Also, read,
Ian Idress's Flynn of the Inland, the story of the
beginnings of the Flying Doctor Service.)
Added:
Today's Workers
Into towns like these in outback Australia, men of the 1880's Bush
Brotherhood entered, served the people and God, and prepared the
people for what was to follow, fulfilled their Divine Calling, handed
it on to others, then died. In 1972 the three Brotherhoods united to
become "The Company of Brothers". It is true that actual ministers
on the ground are few and far between, but the Company of brothers
still exists and it's funds help ministry in a variety of places.
Revd. Richard Stamp says, "I was a Bush Brother and still serving
in other fields, as are many of my former colleagues." He mentions
Ivan Southall’s book, Parson On The Track, and
R.A.F. Webb’s, Brothers In The Sun, with accounts of the various
Bush Brotherhoods over the years. A classic book to read is Charles
Matthew’s, A Parson in the Australian Bush, 1903. It records
the pre-auto horse and sulky days of the early brothers, before Len
Daniels flying events. Richard Stamp closes his 2009 letter to Les
Nixon with the benediction, "Blessings in the Lord Jesus".
In the 21st Century, rectors of the Bush Church Aid Society,
patrolling padres of the Uniting and Presbyterian Churches and
others, and flying teams of Outback Patrol continue the invasion. The
Salvationists have their David Schrimpton and the Bible Society's
Phil Zamagias based in Darwin NT, and Assemblies Steve Cavill at
Longreach; flying pastor Es Morse at 84 has retired.They stand on
the high shoulders of valiant pioneers before them.
The landscape is the same, the conditions are better, and the workers
possess the same motivation, and enjoy the pleasures of speedy plane
transport, exquisite communications, and a less torturing
environment. But the people are the same as ever, and are possessed
of the same needs, and require the same Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
ON
FINDING AUSTRALIA
ON BEING AN AUSTRALIAN
With gratitude to Russell Braddon and Robin Dalton
Since
the 1500's, the white people of Europe constantly flattered
themselves that they were good at discovering places, but
try as they may, they consistently missed finding anything
worth having down here in the southern climes. They were looking
in the wrong places, or for other reasons ... and thus found
what they were not looking for....
In
the sixteenth century, the Spaniards and Portuguese failed
to get within a thousand miles, and Sir Frances Drake, who
set out from England specifically to find Australia, ended
up in Peru. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch landed briefly
in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and failed to identify it as part
of Australia, found it unappealing anyway and moved on. Sixty-five
years later, William Dampier made an inadvertent call on Western
Australia, took one look at the locals, compared them unfavourably
with the Hodmodods of Monomatapa, and sailed away. And when
Captain Cook stumbled upon eastern Australia in 1770 he was
actually looking for a planet, and when he had, then, a sea
passage from America to India. He at least, though, had the
sense to recognise his unpremeditated discovery as an island
continent. So, he says so.
Of
course, once Captain Cook had discovered Australia, all sorts
of foreigners, like the Dutch and the French claimed to have
done it first. Bacon did the same thing with Shakespeare,
but Cook's claim is easier to substantiate than Shakespeare's
because, had a foreigner discovered Australia, we'd have been
talking in French, Portuguese or Double Dutch by now.
And
so, indisputably, it came to pass that, in 1770, Captain James
Cook discovered Botany Bay, (which was so utterly unappealing
that it was subsequently made an airport), the British promptly
dispatched a fleetful of convicts who, due to the exigencies
of eighteenth-century travel, didn't arrive until 1788. If
Cook had stayed on the job where he was, he may lived to a
ripe old age.
Because
of the invasion of the convicts, there are those who say that
today's Australians are all descended from criminals. It is
therefore necessary to point out that the worst crime of which
those British calcitrants deported to Australia were guilty
of was stealing something as modest as a loaf of bread; and
anyway, only ten percent of Britain's then innumerable convicts
were thus deported. The bread-stealing instincts of those
ten percent have today been dispersed among nineteen-million
Australians. The larcenous, arsonous and murderous instincts
of the ninety percent who remained in the United Kingdom have
been dispersed among 60-million Brits. In short, the British
are at least twenty-five time more crooked than us.
After
all these years since Cook, Australia is still, only just,
in ways that matter, a frontier country with a folk history
of helping out the family in the next covered wagon (or it's
equivalent). It's harsh history grew out of a harsh environment-but
for me, it was a long familiar and comfortable harshness.
None of the gentleness of England, no dissembling; none of
the tangible woolliness of the US; and not even a little bit
of meaningless politeness. In the US, the plumber, the telephone
operator, the sales person will all say, 'have-a-nice-day';
but should you limp to an urban doorstep here with a broken
leg here, the chances are you will limp all the way to the
next house alone. In London, you'd be made comfortable with
a cup of tea, providing you knew who lived next door. In the
US, they'd call 911. In Australia, no hospital being handy,
the man next door would probably have-a-go at setting it.
But
Australia still belongs to me if I no longer belong to her.
She probably does not recognise me, as I do not recognize
much of her, for that is the penalty of choosing to pull up
one's roots. I am fiercely protective of her memories, proud
of her achievements, resentful of her change. She, my mother
country, is now for me an errant but much-loved child. Loved,
and sometimes, hated by others for the things I took for granted.
I am jealous of both the love and the hatred, feeling that
those others cannot fully understand. Perhaps I have thoughtlessly
misjudged her, exaggerated her faults, grasped at generalisations,
indulged in inaccuracies; but I am only doing as I was taught—Ohaving-a-go!'
To criticise and resent change, be it real or subjective,
is the prerogative of family love. I may say what I like,
but let no outsider cast a stone.
Excerpts
from Australia Fair, 1984, Methuen London Ltd. ISBN
0-413-52600-3
Opportunity down under
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