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  The Epistles of Pastor August Gersch. The first Journey. The two men stood shoulder to shoulder on the precipice of the most Eastern knoll of the Mt. Lofty ranges, out before them spread the vast, vast and dark, green veldt of the Murray Mallee forest..here and there, at great distances apart, slim streams of smoke rose toward the morning sun, depicting what they were to come to know as campfires of the indigenous peoples of the region.. The Ngaiawang, The Nganaguruku and the various clans of the region. A feeling of elation mixed with unease captured August’s body…he was the pastor and leader of this first small group of Germanic settlers assigned blocks of land by The South Australian Company, out there in that vast forest. He was to lead them into the wilderness. He felt the elation of discovery, as he and his fellow pioneers were the first of their faith and peoples to set foot on this plain and the thought of laying the base for both a vi
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  The Day Bomfino Went Crazy! Adolph Luben…”The Last Drop”. The Day Bomfino Went Crazy. I doubt that many gen X’ers or Y’s with a “Woke” attitude, would sympathise with the sentiments in the story below, it being of a “raving radical” kind from the days of my apprenticeship when “Workers and Bosses “ were a world apart and “ nae’r the twain shall meet !” . The paint shop man where I worked WAS named Beppi, he DID have a flagon (several that I saw) of red wine behind the tins of primer and he did go troppo one blistering hot day and he did get the sack even though we collectively pleaded to Mac, the foreman for his job (he was a decent bloke, just a tad homesick) … the political rantings are from my imagination and if you don’t approve of them…tough!… though such sentiments were not far from many of our lips in those days … Viva la differenza! … and thank god for the unions!  The Day Bomfino went Crazy. The day Beppi Bomfino went crazy was a
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  . . . Snips and Snails and puppy dog tails. . . (complete storyline). Spiny Echidna, by; Patricia Hopwood-Wade..( www.pjpaintings.com ) Spiked Echidna. Just up-river and around a few bends, around ten miles from the main town of the region (I think you know the one I mean), was the little hamlet of “Spiked Echidna”…the name arising from the government surveyor who set out the village remarking on the surprising number of echidnas in that particular area. It consisted of a small cluster of multi-ethnic families that settled here during and after the Great Depression, when the government made land available for the many new arrivals from overseas and other families driven by unemployment and poverty to these and many other regional centres along The Murray River. The landscape around “Spike”( the shortening of the longer name being a common thing in Australian lingo) was mostly flat or shallow undulating, this is where most of the old pione