Legends & Heroes
Within these broad themes are thousands of stories of shearers, unions, missionaries, and miners. Doctors and nurses, coppers and bushrangers, the wild, the ambitious, the sacred and the profane. Their stories are written into the very buildings of the town of Bourke, their character etched into the landscape.
Pearl Gibbs
Pearl (Gambanyi) Gibbs was born to a mother of Ngemba or Murawari decent.She reported that her girlhood working as domestic servant with her…
Jimmy Barker
Jimmy Barker was brought up by his mother Margaret on Milroy Station by the Culgoa River, New South Wales. Jimmy spoke Murawari, and learned the…
Frank Williams
Frank Williams was born in 1881 on the Warrego River on what was both Samuel McCaughey's Toorale Station and his mother’s traditional Ngemba tribal…
Abdul Wade
In the space of roughly thirty years (1890-1920) Abdul Wade (Wahid) created an extraordinary ‘sheikhdom’ based in Bourke that stretched 1500 kms…
C.E.W Bean
Born in Bathurst where his father was the principal of All Saints College, the young Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean completed his education in Imperial…
Percy Hobson
Percy Hobson’s story is a classic yarn of the kid who did it against the odds.Born in Bourke on November 5th 1942, Percy was one of ten kids whose…
Nancy Bird
Nancy Bird was born near Port Macquarie, NSW in 1915. She was keen on flying from a very early age and took her first lesson with Charles Kingsford…
Bill Ferguson
Twenty years before the Reverend Martin Luther King in the United States, William Ferguson articulated a dream of freedom for his people. Ferguson…
Myrtle Perooz
A local saddler named Charlie Dee and his wife Sarah, the daughter of a Welsh/Irish Jew, had a baby girl whom they named Myrtle. The marriage was…
Breaker Morant
The outcast bastard son of an English Admiral, Harry found the wild frontier life of a drover in the outback beyond Bourke the ideal setting to act…
Fred Hollows
In the early 1970’s Fred led an eye team which over a 3 year period, covered an astonishing 460 Aboriginal communities, examined 67,000 people,…
Henry Lawson
"If you know Bourke, you know Australia", Henry Lawson wrote to Edward Garnett in February 1902, a few months before returning to Australia from…
Wilkie Davis
The poems of Wilkie Davis reveal the heart of a native born Westerner, whose idea of heaven was a camp fire under a myriad of glittering stars, a…
Roy Dunk
Roy Dunk fought with great courage for Australia during the Great War, and his vivid recollections of his experiences, both terrible and uplifting),…
Captain Starlight
On the morning of October 6th 1868 bushrangers Charles Rutherford and Frank Pearson burst into Shearer's Inn at Enngonia, and found themselves face…
Paddy the Bell Ringer
At the turn of the 20th century, Patrick O’Connor had owned the fastest hansom cab horse in town, and was always first to reach the railway station…
Barefoot Harry
The curious story of Barefoot Harry of Louth, an almost legendary bushman, who at the turn of the 20th century) was known from one end of the Darling…
