Just over a century ago, in June 1903, an impatient young man with big ideals signed up for the Presbyterian ministry. Over the next half century John Flynn’s career would shake up the church establishment, challenging the boundaries between social activism and church neutrality. He would create a network of outback hospitals, bush padres and, in 1929, the Flying Doctor Service, his enduring monument. In the early 1930s he had been immortalised in Ion Idriess’s Flynn of the Inland as the camel-riding padre in the desert—’my mythical self’, Flynn would always say later with a laugh. By the time of his death in 1951 he was a stock heroic figure to the postwar nation, a ‘modern Apostle Paul’ as Robert Menzies called him a few years later.

Back in 1903 he was simply a young idealist: ill-at-ease with the formal training at Ormond College, he waited until a new vocational ministry was set up that enabled him to work in the slums of Melbourne while studying. He had been a student teacher: a free spirit with a bicycle and a camera, touring the country roads of Victoria and publishing his photos in the Illustrated Weekly under the jaunty nom de plume ‘Sprocket’. In many ways he never left that sense of independence behind. In training he was constantly distracted by his own projects and barely scraped through his degree: ‘they let the slip-rails down to get me through’ he would often say later in life. His sense of being an outsider would serve him well when it came to yarning on a bush fence with stockmen and dingo trappers. His correspondence boxes in the National Library contain touching letters, laboriously written, from men like these. Their confidence had been won over by a serious, reserved bloke in a dark suit with a gift for conversation and trust, and a capacity to imagine a future in which practical idealism was the keynote to social reform. Fred Booty, a Pilbara cattleman, wrote to one of Flynn’s outback nurses in 1929, extolling Flynn’s example: