AUSTRALIA DAY

HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY

My Country
- Dorothea Mackellar
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 I cannot share it,

My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of rugged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding plains.

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 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 three-fold.

Over the thirsty paddocks,

Watch, after many days,

The filmy veil of greenness

That thickens as we gaze ...

A 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.