I Love a Sunburnt Country

When I was 11 years old my parents decided to move from England (where I was born) to Australia. It was a scary experience moving so far away and yet I felt like I was home. I loved Australia from the minute we arrived. I loved the Kookaburras and the lorikeets and the little skinks that ran up the walls on the outside of the house.

I was so terrified going to school, I was the kid that talked funny. It is funny looking back on it now but everyone would come up to me on lunch breaks and ask me to say different words because I said them differently to how they spoke.

It didn't take me long to settle in and one day in class about 4 months after I had arrived at the school, the teacher, Miss Smith spoke about poetry and a poet by the name of Dorothea Mackellar.

We were told that we were all going to learn this particular poem off by heart and it was to be read out on parade the next week.

I fell in love with this poem and to me it was everything Australia, that sunburnt country that I had fallen in love with as the plane descended towards the runway on my first entry into this beautiful place I now call my home. The Poem was called. My Country and I have shared it with you below. It has always had a special place in my heart and been one of my favourites. Please enjoy.

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.