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!
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.
Poem by Dorothea Mackeller