Feeling Aussie and cultural!!!!

Getting in the Aussie spirit as Australia Day is nearly upon us.

My host Belle was telling me when she was a school girl (more years ago than we'll blog) she sang a song that she has remembered to this day that always takes her mind to like a slideshow of Australia she has visited in her lifetime.


 My Country - song
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

Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.


F.Y.I - that song was taken from a poem:

 My Country
 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!

A stark white ring-barked forest
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.

By Dorothea MacKellar

If by chance you have any budding poets- there is a poetry competiton for school aged children run annually that i have stumbled across that i thought i would share -

 The Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards.  http://www.dorothea.com.au/
(it's also got other great info on Dorothea Mackellar)

The legacy of Dorothea Mackellar lives on!