The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in 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 rugged 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 hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
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 wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
I wish I'd said that! The imagery is fabulous. I think most people would be familiar with one of the verses, and I hope reading the whole poem gives you some idea about how I feel about good old Oz. Dorothea Mackellar's family owned a lot of property up around Gunnedah in NSW, where I used to go gliding, and she also spent a lot of her time there. She wrote this poem when she was in England and feeling homesick for Australia, and I think it's just the best description of the place ever.
Isobel Marion Dorothea Mackellar was born on 1 July 1885, at Point Piper in Sydney and moved on, also from Sydney, in January 1968. There is a beautiful Memorial to her in Anzac Park at Gunnedah, NSW, which Vonnie and I visited once. A short biography of Dorothea and heaps of stuff about Gunnedah can be found here.