My Country/Dorothea MacKellar

Dorothea MacKellar was born in Sydney in 1885 and became one of Australia’s best known poets. This poem was written at the age of 19 when she was homesick in London. The second stanza is particularly loved by Australians and invokes the wild beautiful landscape of their country.  Its first line seemed an appropriate title for my article on the Larapinta Trail in the Northern Territory of Australia.

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 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 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!

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.