Amazing Grace: Stories of faith and friendship from outback Australia

By Bill Marsh

Great Australian stories of faith and friendship in outback Australia, gathered by the inimitable Bill 'Swampy' Marsh - bestselling author of Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories and Great Australian CWA Stories.

'the term "Bible bashing" took on new meaning in our household ... Mum used to suffer from bunions; that is until she started bashing them with the heavy family Bible, believing the Lord's weight behind the Lord's word could move anything from mountains to bunions.'

 

Priests, pastors and preachers play a vital part in the lives of people in remote and regional Australia. Often from the city, they are posted to places they have never even heard of to provide spiritual care for communities over areas larger than they could ever imagine. No matter their religion, they are all committed to helping people in the bush - whatever way they can! they shear sheep, put up fences, travel hundreds of kilometres to visit their parishioners, act as counsellors, set up schools and programs, and advocate for Aboriginal and asylum seeker rights.

 

Bill 'Swampy' Marsh has travelled Australia gathering first-hand these memories and yarns to bring together this wonderful collection of seventy stories that so perfectly capture life in the bush. From hilariously irreverent tales of misadventure to reflections on what it means to have faith, these stories serve as a reminder that wherever in this country we may live, and whatever our beliefs may be, a helping hand and sympathetic ear are never far away.

 

Bill 'Swampy' Marsh is an award-winning writer and performer of stories, songs and plays. He spent most of his youth in rural south-western NSW and now lives in Adelaide. this is his thirteenth book.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780730499015

Bill Marsh

Bill ‘Swampy' Marsh is an award-winning writer/performer of stories, songs and plays. Based in Adelaide, he is best known for his successful Great Australian series of books published with ABC Books: More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2007), Great Australian Railway Stories (2005), Great Australian Droving Stories (2003), Great Australian Shearing Stories (2001), and Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (1999).

Book preview

A Man Called Peter

I grew up in a family of nurserymen. I was one of five children. We were Church of England, yes, though I wouldn’t have said we were overly religious. I wasn’t even baptised until I was eight. In fact all of us children were baptised on the same day — the whole five of us, all in one go. I still remember that.

As far as my early education went, that was short-lived. I left school in the 8th grade, when I was fourteen, and went to work in the family business. But I did enjoy my football. I played Aussie Rules. That was back in the days of the old VFL — Victorian Football League. In fact it was through my involvement in footy that I met my wife. We were both sixteen. Her father was the coach of the Clayton under-eighteens. She was a Salvation Army lass and so after we met I used to go to the Salvation Army meetings on Sunday nights. That’s when we started keeping company and we’ve been keeping company with one another ever since. We married at the age of twenty-one.

Following our marriage there were a couple of events that were significant to the beginning of my religious journey: the first is that, for reasons I have no real understanding of, while we were on our honeymoon I read the book A Man Called Peter. It was a biography of Peter Marshall, an American preacher who was Chaplain of the United States Senate. It was written by his wife, Catherine. In the mid 1950s it was turned into a popular film. So that was the first thing that had quite a large influence on me.

The second event — and I’ve said this many, many times before — no doubt the primary influence on my religious development was the birth of our daughter. My wife and I were around twenty-three and, although it’s not always appreciated for someone like me to say it this way, I most certainly knew how she was conceived. But when she actually came into being, for me, it was a truly life-changing experience. She’s now fifty-three and I still haven’t got over it. In fact I look upon every baby I see as being a miracle.

But out of those two events there grew the strong sense that I was being called to the priesthood. As to just why, I had no idea. It didn’t make sense then and it probably doesn’t make sense now. So then to the next step: with my wife being in the Salvation Army and my family in the Church of England, the choice was either to become a Salvation Army officer or an Anglican priest.

With the decision having been made to go Anglican I then went to discuss the matter with our local vicar. That had a positive outcome. Following that there was another memorable moment that was integral to the journey I’ve been on ever since. That happened when I met with an examining chaplain to see whether or not there was a true calling for me. At the end of our conversation this particular examining chaplain said something I’ve never forgotten. He said, ‘Yes, well I believe there is a call into priesthood for you, though definitely not in the diocese of Melbourne because Anglicans in the diocese of Melbourne are both sophisticated and educated and you are neither of those things.’ He then added, ‘So perhaps it would be a good idea if you were to go and see the bishop in Gippsland because there’d most certainly be a group of cow farmers out that way who you’d get on terribly well with.’

Now why I remember that story so vividly is because I only had a short drive back to where we lived, which was in the suburbs of Melbourne. And all the way home I was furious, not because of my perceived lack of sophistication or education, but because for me to have to go all the way out to Gippsland was just unthinkable. It was the sticks. It was out in the middle of nowhere. Yet, oddly enough, here I am, I’ve now spent the best part of my last forty years wandering around a third of Australia, most of that involving rural and/or remote locations. So in terms of how it’s all worked out, if anyone would’ve told me at that time how my life was to unfold, I’d have assumed they were on drugs or something.

Anyhow, I was finally accepted, even though I had a lot of educational catching up to do, having left school at fourteen. But thanks to the support of my family, who agreed to provide me with a regular wage while I studied, and, of course, the great support of my wife and our children, I was deaconed and priested after three years’ theological studies, then went on to a part-time Bachelor of Arts degree at Monash University.

So, no, I didn’t end up out in the backblocks of Gippsland with a mob of cow farmers. After I’d completed my studies I stayed pretty much within the precincts of Melbourne. But after a number of years I really felt that I wanted to experience working in a different part of Australia. I applied for a job in New Guinea. Didn’t get that. A number of other possibilities were also on the go. Then, in the October of 1973, the then Bishop of the Southern Region Melbourne Diocese called me one night and said, ‘Forget all those things you’re thinking of doing. Christ Church Cathedral in Darwin is vacant. You ought to go to Darwin,’ and to my eternal shame I replied, ‘Where the bloody hell’s Darwin?’

He said, ‘In the Northern Territory, stupid.’

So nearly three months later, on Australia Day 1974, we arrived in Darwin for what I believed would be at least a three-year appointment. My title at that time was rector and canon residentiary in Christ Church Cathedral. Then, as I’ve said on many occasions, our lives — like the lives of so many — were changed forever with the arrival of Cyclone Tracy, on Christmas Day of 1974. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, my wife and our three children had already gone to Melbourne for Christmas and I was booked to fly out on Christmas Day, the day of Cyclone Tracy. Of course that trip didn’t eventuate.

At that stage there were two residential houses on the cathedral site. There was a ground-level home that had been built in 1916. That’s where the assistant priest and his wife lived. That house was de-roofed, but the structure basically stayed the same. Then there was the rectory, which was where we were living. The rectory was your normal Darwin-style three-bedroom elevated home and while the walls of the bedrooms basically remained intact, the rest of the place disappeared. I finished up in a wardrobe with our little dog tucked between my legs and a mattress over my head, just in case something came flying through.

I survived okay. In fact, during the lull, I went to sleep for a while. There didn’t seem to be much else to do. But at about 6.30 in the morning I had great difficulty getting out of the place because, as well as the windows and all that having been blown out, the door frames had shifted and I couldn’t open the door. Then when I eventually managed to make my way outside to survey the situation, everything had gone, including the solid-stone cathedral. The porch was still intact, but it looked like somebody had given the rest of the church building a huge shove and it had just fallen over.

I stayed on in Darwin, helping out. There was a small group of about ten of us who set ourselves up on top of one of the insurance buildings in Cavenagh Street where we were given a list of names and so we got to prioritising those who were to be flown out on aircraft. Naturally, it was women and children first, and so I remained there, in Darwin, for three weeks until it was appropriate for me to go south for a while.

On our return, one of the major projects I was involved in was the rebuilding of Christ Church Cathedral. That was a long three-year process and it was eventually consecrated in May of 1977. Outside of that, my other crucial task was as the first chairman of the Darwin and District Alcohol and Drug Dependence Foundation. Almost from the very day we’d arrived, our lives on the cathedral site had been punctuated by a stream of people who’d had too much to drink and nothing to eat. They were everywhere. We even had people sleeping under the house. Enough said about that. And, yes, while sometimes it might’ve appeared to have been funny, due to the violence that’s associated with the consumption of alcohol, most of the time it wasn’t funny at all.

Anyhow, we said, ‘Look, we’ve got a big problem here, so let’s try and do something about it.’ To that end, we started providing breakfast every morning. After that there were sandwiches. We then went about setting up a place to provide people with all sorts of educational and counselling services. That was Amity House. It’s quite a major organisation now, out on the Stuart Highway. These days there’s also a number of different such organisations but, as far as I know, Amity House was the first one in the NT and, even to this day, alcohol abuse and its consequences remain a critical problem throughout the Territory.

A Nice Legacy

I’ve been working with Indigenous people in the Northern Territory for a while now. I first started up here as a community development worker in 1988, the centenary year of invasion. Then about six years ago I came to Jabiru as a minister with the Uniting Church. This is my first and last placement and, yes, it is a beautiful place and, no, I don’t think it was a lucky appointment. Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s the work of God. It’s the way He works because, in many ways, this job is really made for me through my long-time connection to the area. Even through my five years at theological college I still visited the Territory to attend funerals and to keep in touch. So, for me, coming back to Arnhem Land was like returning to country, in the sense that it enables me to keep contact with people I’ve got to know from a broad range of communities such as Croker Island (Minjilang), Goulburn Island (Warruwi), Maningrida, Oenpelli (Gunbalanya), and the other homelands in that area.

In my work I’m supported by the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, in as much as the Northern Regional Council of Congress provides the funds for my travel. Then Frontier Services provide my stipend and a vehicle, and the Pilgrim Presbytery of Northern Australia provides the house. So I’ve got three bosses. A Trinity of bosses.

My ministry’s seasonal. With the East Alligator River being the border into Arnhem Land, in wet season, when the East Alligator’s up, road travel into Arnhem Land is impossible. So then my ministry is mainly focused in the homelands where Aboriginal people are living on their ancestral estates. In these homeland centres there may be just a few houses, a bore and a telephone, with family groups of up to twenty or thirty people living off the country. Around Maningrida, which is on the Liverpool River, there’s about thirty-three official homeland centres, then there’s the more informal ones where people go for seasonal hunting. At Mumeka, a traditional area on the Mann River, the homeland centre there consists of little more than a few houses, a couple of bores and a school. Then they also have two or three informal camps where they go for hunting purposes, like when the long-necked turtle is in season or when the fish are biting.

So when the estuarine system is flowing, the people move around to their different camps. They mainly travel by car. People are remarkably sedentary and they’ll only get out of their cars to shoot a buffalo or line up a fishing line. Then they’ll set up their bush camps — those little thirty-dollar exoskeleton tents work fine. Anything to keep the mozzies out. If need be, they might knock up a bough shelter. It’s all very simple; blackfellas don’t leave too much sign of their seasonal camps. Any sign of civilisation is mainly due to a western presence. So they come and go, according to the season. There’s four or five major river crossings between Jabiru and Maningrida and, now that it’s the start of the dry season, at Mumeka they’ve just moved back to their homeland centre.

When I travel I’ve got a four-wheel drive vehicle. I’ve also got a boat — a tinny — for when I visit the islands. So if I’m going to, say, South Goulburn Island, I’ll drive to the shore opposite the island then jump in the tinny and go across. It’s only a half-hour boat trip. Probably less than five k’s. I always take a tent and I always travel with meat. Dave Lindner, who you’ll meet tomorrow, God willing, supplies buffalo meat and, in the season, magpie geese; so I’ll take a load across to the families. That’s just part of the trade network that exists. And I never travel alone. I always travel with someone. More often than not, part of my job is as a taxi service. I’ll say, ‘I’m going to Maningrida next week,’ and it’ll be, ‘Can you go and pick up so-and-so and take them too?’ So I’ll take people to Maningrida. I’ll pick up stuff from Maningrida; bring people back. You always keep the trade routes open.

Actually, it’s surprising how many people you can shoehorn into a Troop Carrier. A couple of years ago a group from Sydney came up to stay and, by the time we returned from one trip, we had thirteen people in the vehicle, plus all their stuff. In the front seat there was Joe, his wife and two little kids, who were standing up, and me, driving. Everybody else was stacked in the back plus there were people shoved right down underneath the roof space. I counted them as they poured out. Thirteen. I thought, If only the manufacturer could see this.

So as to the highs and lows of the ministry, that’s much of an even-steven actually. There’s things like having to drive five hours before you get to somewhere like Maningrida. There’s the frustration of not having enough hours in the day to do the amount of work that needs to be done. But I guess the hardest one is the constant tragedies one is faced with. At the moment on Goulburn Island there’s three funerals. There’s five funerals at Maningrida. Two funerals on Croker Island. You’re forever surrounded by what I call a ‘death cult’. That may seem like a severe way of putting it, but there are people who are in a perpetual state of mourning. A lot of the deaths are untimely — same as in the wider society. On Goulburn Island, one lady had cancer in the brain. Another guy died at a bus shelter in Darwin, after having lived his life in the long grass, as a homeless person.

But the funerals aren’t all about sadness; they’re actually a bit like a wake in the sense of being a celebration of the life. And they go on for weeks, not just days. The majority of the time is spent in traditional dance and in discussion about succession and, because family come in from everywhere, the funerals also act as a general get-together. For example, with the funeral at Goulburn Island, people came in from the Tiwi Islands, from Maningrida, from Oenpelli. So there’s a whole wider community involvement and, because the rules of hospitality dictate that you have to provide for your visitors, the stores will be completely emptied of foodstuffs.

How a funeral normally works is that, because the body’s usually been away to the coroner or it’s been kept in a morgue somewhere, when the body first arrives, it’ll go to the church where there’ll be a brief service. After that it’ll be placed in the shade of a bough shelter. Surrounding this bough shelter there’ll be a sandy area. The immediate family then sits in the shelter around the coffin while the dancing takes place outside, on the sandy area. They’ll also have a Christian fellowship singsong. All of that will happen most nights during the funeral period, with different groups performing dances from their different areas. Then on the final day the coffin will be taken to the burial site. That’ll usually be in someone’s backyard where they’ll have a Christian burial service — ‘ashes to ashes’ and that stuff — and the graveside oration, with a eulogy and a couple of Christian songs, before the body is buried. Then, depending on the importance of the person, their body might be exhumed in a year or so and the bones stored in a lorrkon, which is a burial pole.

As for my part in the proceedings, it depends on the invitation really. One of the funerals at Goulburn Island is for my brother, if you like, in the family system. I could quite easily spend the whole week there, but this time I’ll probably only go out for the last couple of days. But because I’m family, as a brother I won’t be asked to play any official role in the funeral service. Whereas with non-family I’ll quite often conduct the service: like, just recently, there was a memorial service for a young girl and they asked me to come in after they’d done all the ceremonial stuff, to do the graveside oration. Things like that.

So that’s part of what I do. Then I also make large wooden crosses — cross dedications — where the cross is taken by the traditional landowners and planted into the ground in an area that’s dedicated to Jesus. The planting of something in the ground is a highly significant act within Indigenous culture and these cross dedications act as a mantle of protection. Then, when the crosses decay, which they inevitably will after a period of years, the covenant will be renewed within that homeland.

Cross dedication ceremonies can last up to four days. First it involves baptisms. At the last one we baptised seventy-eight people in the living waters of a nearby river, and up to two hundred people from the community attended. So they’re serious. People are really into it. It’s fantastic. Then after the baptisms we have the planting of the cross dedication. That’s accompanied by much singing and dancing and it’s followed by a feast, of which communion is part.

For the communion, the women make a large loaf — kantijawa — which is like a damper. So we incorporate that into communion as the body of Christ. As for the wine being symbolic of the blood of Christ, that’s become more of a translation issue because wine isn’t of any cultural significance among Indigenous people. Actually, in one language, the word for any form of alcohol is nundirri which, when translated, means ‘poison’ or ‘danger’. But then Heather Hewitt, who’s a linguist working with the people, came across a translation which indicated a ‘red-coloured fluid’. ‘Fluid’ in this case is a particular noun-class which relates to ‘liquid’, which also relates to ‘matters of the spirit’. So it actually fits in with the blood of Christ.

As I said, this is my first, and it will be my last, placement so, as far as my work here goes — if you’re talking about what I’m hoping to achieve — I’m actually hoping that I’ll have made as little impression as possible on these people in relation to the imposition of the dominant culture; the dominant culture being the western system under which we operate. I’d also like to leave a bit more of God’s word in the traditional language of the country, and I’m hoping that the cross dedications will become part of traditional ceremonial life in Arnhem Land. So yes, that would be a nice legacy.

A Simple Faith

When independence occurred in New Guinea in 1975, it shouldn’t have. Not then anyway. As the prime minister of Papua New Guinea, Sir Michael Somare, said at the time, if a vote had been taken on the issue, the outcome of that vote would’ve been a resounding NO. The majority of the people weren’t ready for it. It was more a case of how the then Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, wanted to trot off to the United Nations and declare how liberating he was that he’d given the New Guinea peoples their ‘freedom’.

After 1975 my husband, Chris, myself and our three children — a girl and two boys — stayed on in New Guinea until 1982. It was then that we decided to return to Australia. There are complex reasons for that, but I suppose the main thing was to do with work permits. Given that we could cope with the lack of law and order and the complete lack of support from the Australian Government for expats such as ourselves, given all that, one of the new laws was that, to get a permit to work in New Guinea you had to have either a tertiary, technical or academic qualification. That meant, if our children had have gone away to Australia for their boarding school days, they would’ve had to stay on in Australia for an extra three or four years to gain a suitable qualification so they could return to New Guinea and live with us. By that time of course they would’ve been well and truly Australianised and so we would’ve missed out in sharing that part of their lives.

Anyway, we’d already planned to end up in the Ord River area of north-eastern Western Australia. We’d invested there in tropical farming, something both Chris and I knew well. But circumstances, which would take too long to go into, meant that we ended up doing a trial growing peanuts for the summer period, near Dandaragan, just two hours north of Perth.

Having had the problem of being the wrong race in New Guinea, we were very much looking forward to returning to Australia. We were thinking, Well at least it’s our country so we’ll be all right now. But the whole move over here proved to be a huge change. Just huge. Chris had spent more than twenty years in New Guinea and I’d gone over there in the late ’60s and of course by the time we returned in the ’80s, Australia was a very different place. All sorts of things were different, particularly culturally. Take the 1980s Australian view of religion for example. At times I found myself thinking just how lovely and straightforward life had been in New Guinea. Everyone believed in God, plus a few more spirits besides. Everyone. No questions asked. The churches had divided up New Guinea very clearly and peacefully. Basically, the Highlanders were Catholic and the coastal dwellers were Lutheran.

On our farm in the Markham Valley we had a mix of both Catholic and Lutheran workers. The majority were Highlanders so they were Catholic. Being quite bossy they made it very clear to their local Catholic priest how it would be far easier for him to come out to them to hold mass in our peanut shed than it was for them to go into town to attend the church there. So once a month the Catholic priest would arrive at our place. First he’d hear confession, then he’d come up to the house to change into his robes for mass. We had thousands of chickens and occasionally a few of them went missing and we felt that this might provide an ideal opportunity to get out of him who’d been doing the stealing. But, true to his Catholic ethos, when we asked if he could tell us who the thieves were, he’d simply say, ‘I will give you no names but I can let you know the exact numbers of missing chickens and I can guarantee you that the perpetrators are all very sorry for taking them and they promise they won’t do it again.’ We’d have a good laugh at that.

Though, in reality, there wasn’t that much stealing going on. In fact we didn’t even have that much security. In the main, our workers were very honest people. If ever our Highlanders had some friends or relatives coming to visit we’d soon know if these visitors were trustworthy people or not. If they weren’t, our Highlanders would come to us and say, ‘Could you look after my money bag for me? I’ve got friends coming.’ Yes, so in that way, life was lovely and straightforward.

So that was the Catholics. Then there were the Lutherans. Lutheran missions were still very strong in New Guinea and while most of the Catholic priests were white, many of the Lutheran pastors were black. That’s because the Lutheran missionaries had originally arrived in New Guinea from Noumea and places like that. They even called the Lutheran pastors the ‘black mission’. Anyhow, about once a month the Lutheran pastor would turn up to hold a service. The Lutheran service was held down in the creek bed. For their altar they’d just put a plank of wood on a forty-four-gallon drum and away they’d go. It was fascinating. I took the children to whatever service — Catholic or Lutheran, it didn’t matter to me — and, with the Lutherans, I’d just sit there with the kids and listen to the men sing their line and the women singing back, in answer to the men. It was beautiful, and the congregation just loved it. So much so that the pastor quite often had difficulty trying to stop them all from the singing so that he might be able to get the odd prayer in.

So that’s how they ran the Lutheran service. Then every six months or so they’d come to baptise all the babies. For the baptisms, the Lutherans moved from the creek bed up into the peanut shed. I went away to have a baby once and when I came back I found my lovingly tiled old laundry table had been shifted into the peanut shed and, when I asked Chris about it, he just said, ‘They needed it for their altar. Looks like you’ve lost it.’

With the baptisms, I remember when my mother was staying with us at one time and a local girl, Toonsie, who was our mother’s help, said — in pidgin English, of course — she said, ‘Would you like your son Markham to be baptised?’

None of the children had been baptised by that stage so I thought it would not only be a nice opportunity to baptise Markham, but also the two other children as well. Toonsie was horrified to find out that none of the other children had been baptised. Anyhow, I said, ‘Yes, that would be lovely.’ So there were three little New Guineans and our three, all baptised in our peanut shed, in a language called Yarbim. Yarbim’s the language the Lutherans used, though, in our particular case, as a concession they later mailed us a certificate in pidgin English, just so we understood what it was all about. It was lovely.

But the thing is that the New Guineans’ faith was straightforward, nice and simple and very sensible. And it worked, and that’s how it was. As I said, everyone believed in God. No questions asked, and that’s how my children grew up: not only believing in God but believing that everyone else believed in God as well. But I’m sure that at some time or other any child who’s been raised with a bit of religion has to one day come to the realisation that life’s more complex than they thought it was, including in the ways of religion. That’s why I just stuck to my own simple faith and tried to keep the churches out of it. So it was an interesting observation for our children to come all the way to Australia and discover that complexity. I particularly remember the day when we were living near Dandaragan, they got off the school bus and one of them ran up to me and said, ‘Did you know, Mum, there are people in Australia that don’t believe in God?’

It was like he’d just found out that Father Christmas wasn’t real. He was astounded.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve heard that that is so.’

Arrival

Looking back as I do now I can see that we were a complex family. While Dad could’ve been described as a devil-may-care sort of man, Mum was a different kettle of fish. Mum was a woman on a spiritual crusade. She was one of those who was born to the notion that all things that moved in the night or had no immediate explanation were the workings of some mystical phenomena far greater than the mortal human being could comprehend.

It’s not that our family was saved from any suffering because of Mum’s odd spiritual links. No way. We suffered along with everyone else, probably more so in many ways. Let it be understood that Dad never had the opportunity to sleep alone with Mum, not for one single night of marriage. Because always between the nuptial sheets, there lurked such matter as wrapped-up bricks, bags of corks, rolled-up newspapers, sachets of herbs, packets of copper filings, handkerchiefs steeped in eucalyptus, rusty nails and the like. All these oddities, though not making for a good night’s sleep, ensured the morrow to be free from arthritis, headaches, unexplained injuries and bad spirits, and holding nothing but good thoughts, kind deeds, love and luck.

As it happened, none of Mum’s strange bedfellows were ever given a whiff of a chance to be proven right, because they were never given the slightest whiff of a chance to be proven wrong. Even when we ventured on our occasional travelling holiday, an extra suitcase, filled to the brim with all this voodooic trickery, had to be lugged along. I came to accept these as normal accompaniments to a safe and happy holiday.

Even the term ‘Bible bashing’ took on new meaning in our household. Being the strict churchgoer she was, God certainly remained the top dog on Mum’s spiritual priorities. But Mum used to suffer from bunions; that is, until she started bashing them with the heavy family Bible, believing the Lord’s weight behind the Lord’s word could move anything from mountains to bunions.

Our visitors weren’t immune to Mum’s goings-on either. As soon as anyone arrived at our place, out would come the astrological charts, or they’d be asked to present the palm of their hand to be told where their life was heading, or a pack of cards would appear mid-conversation and be spread across the table. Barely