BUSH BISHOP STORIES
The late Right Reverend Howell Witt (he died in 1998) formerly Anglican Bishop of North West
Australia (1965-81) and later of the Diocese of Bathurst, lived well up to his name. Welsh-born, he
was one of the funniest, wittiest men you could ever meet – practically a stand-up comedian. He
was famed as a Rugby player too and as something of an actor and script-writer. But he was also a
serious minister of the gospel and a faithful shepherd of his flocks, especially in the far-flung
isolated parishes of the North-West and before that in Woomera and Elizabeth in South Australia.
His book Bush Bishop, published by Rigby in 1980, is written in his delightfully convoluted,
extremely wordy style. It’s full of hyperbole as is usual with tellers of stories for comic effect. I
have recently re-read it, and I thought some of his stories well worth inclusion on the Light Relief
page of www.nswchurches.com the website I managed from 2004-2007 for the NSW Council of
Churches. And I’m including it also on the book review page.
The first is one I first heard told by another Anglican priest, a Bush Church Aid minister who
worked under Bishop Witt in the Kimberleys. Witt relates the same incident in his book, but I
actually like it better the way I first heard it. I had once met the bishop, small of stature and chunky
in build. I also knew years ago in our youth fellowship, the other BCA minister in the story, the Rev
Ron Beard, who was even smaller. As Witt puts it “If you think I’m small, you should have seen
Beard. Mark you, you would have needed a magnifying glass to do it. Not so much a Beard as a
five o’clock shadow, I always thought. He was the only priest I ever knew who looked up to me. …
But his ability as a pastor was in inverse proportion to his size.” Having met both clerics, I found
the story hilarious.
Here it is as told at some length by the bishop but with the punch-line from the other version. The
bishop, an Anglo-Catholic who normally wore his full episcopal