At around 20 years of age, this English born woman saw her adopted country through grateful eyes. Australia may not be the land of milk and honey - but it sure comes close.

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.