Led by Mark and Delma Tronson the chairman of Well-Being Australia, the Country Town Tour (CTT) proceeded along a proven format and were welcomed wherever they went.
There were three major aims of this particular CTT.
The first was to ascertain first hand the remote indigenous settlement issues that have been foremost in the news for the past several years. While the second was doing video interviews for the Australian Missionary News IPTV.
As Mark Tronson is the Footplate Padre (Railway) as a former locomotive engineman and an author of 16 railway books, he rode The Ghan from Darwin to Alice Springs and caught up with The Ghan crews.
To the first issue, Mark and Delma Tronson spent three days in the Kakadu regions of the Northern Territory. Here they were welcomed to an Aboriginal Homestead settlement and spoke with the leadership. They were taken to other areas to make a connection with what was happening on the ground.
The second mandate were interviews for the Australian Missionary News IPTV and he was able to catch up with Aboriginal Paster Tom Slockee who travels to these remote centres (Kakadu and Arnhem) on a regular basis mentoring the Christian leaders and giving leadership training.
Another person he interviewed was Rev Dr Peter Christofides a Cyprian Greek South African who is the Minister of the Casuarina Baptist Church in Darwin. Peter discovered why the Lord called him as there is a 14,000 Greek working community in Darwin.
As the Footplate Padre Mark Tronson delighted in travelling on The Ghan from Darwin to Alice Springs. He visited the locomotive as well connecting with the passenger service crew from the train manager to carriage supervisors and the dining and lounge car personnel.
This was a 27 hour trip which included a tourist visit at Katherine for five hours to see the famous Gorge and with the many long stops on the single line to allow freight trains to pass, a mid to late morning arrival in Alice Springs is the norm.
While in Alice Springs Mark and Delma Tronson were at the Baptist Church where a team of young people from Northside church, Brisbane, mostly University students were on a 10 day outreach.
He returned to a more specialist theme while in Alice Springs researching the desert foods and water holes for tourism ministry development along with a pastoral Footplate Padre visit to the staff at the Old Ghan Museum.
This was a particularly pleasing County Town Tour as it took in several aspects of Well-Being Australia ministry.