My Country

As seen through the window at holtieshouse

While Australia as a land mass is one of the oldest in the world it was uninhabited until about 50,000 years ago when aboriginal settlement occurred, white settlement is as recent as 235 years ago.

As an introduction to this series I am going to introduce you to a young lady named Dorethea Mackellar who as a visionary youngster of about 20 wrote;

My Country

The love of field and coppice,

Of green and shaded lanes,

Of ordered woods and gardens

Is running through your veins.

Strong love of grey-blue distance,

Brown streams and soft, dim skies-

I know but cannot share it,

My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains,

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror-

The wide brown land for me.

The stark white ring-barked forests,

All tragic to the moon,

The sapphire-misted mountains,

The hot gold rush of noon,

Green tangle of the brushes

Where lithe lianas coil

And orchids deck the treetops,

And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!

Her pitiless blue sky,

When, sick at heart, around us

We see the cattle die-

But then the grey clouds gather,

And we can bless again

The drumming of an army,

The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart my country!

Land of the rainbow gold,

For flood and fire and famine

She pays us back threefold.

Over the thirsty paddocks,

Watch, after many days,

The filmy veil of greenness

That thickens as we gaze.

An opal hearted country,

A willful, lavish land-

All those who have not loved her,

You will not understand-

Though Earth holds many splendors,

Wherever I may die,

I know to what brown country

My homing thoughts will fly.

Dorothea Mackellar 1885 – 1968.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Dorothea was able to see below the harsh surface of a newly settled land and show us the beauty beneath.

Children of my era, a looong time ago, were fairly familiar with the first verse of this poem, knew the second verse by heart, knew the fourth and fifth verses vaguely, but had little concept of the truly beautiful whole poem.

I’m not going to clutter this space with anything else; it could detract from the poems effect.