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.
GAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
John Griffiths - good try, but it's currently hit the " flooding rains" bit. Perhaps you should have read the whole poem!
Additional verse: I mourn the burnt koalas And the toasted kangaroos And deadly spreading bushfires Of smokey orange hues If only we had leaders To meet our country’s need With policies for climate change And not rewarding greed!
my favourite inspiring poem from one of australias best poets taught to us at school in the 1950's. dorothea mackellar.s grave and tombstone can be found in the old heritage cemetary overlooking the pacific ocean at Waverley in Sydney.
Hi there are we still at work for the church and we can do it a few times a while back and we will go get it a bit later on it is there something I will do to do it and I can help with that this morning I can get you some more water water to water and water it will help me get to water and then I can do a lot more for you I don’t get it I will go to get your help I don’t want you going on a trip or you can go get your car
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
Always remember the second verse. Should be taught in schools 4th grade. We are loosing our history due to political correctness. Bring it back.
No, they are stanzas. Also, pity about the spelling of “lose”. In fact I was taught this poem more than 60 years ago in primary school; we all were. I think that the first stanza is just as important as the second. In these modern times of the encroachment of the desert everywhere, the failure of the Murray-Darling system, and the swallowing of farmland by expanding suburbs, I wonder if she would again pen this poem.