My Country, by Dorothea Mackellar

' '

"My Country" is an iconic patriotic poem about Australia, written by Dorothea Mackellar (1885-1968) at the age of 19 while homesick in England. After travelling through Europe extensively with her father during her teenage years she started writing the poem in London in 1904 and re-wrote it several times before her return to Sydney.

The poem was first published in the London Spectator in 1908 under the title "Core of My Heart". It was reprinted in many Australian newspapers, quickly becoming well known and establishing Mackellar as a poet.

The 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!

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 orchid-laden tree ferns, Smother the crimson 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.

 Dorothea Mackellar

Analysis
Mackellar's family owned substantial properties in the Gunnedah district of New South Wales and a property (Torryburn) in the Paterson district. The inspiration for her poems undoubtedly came from the time she spent on the rural properties as a child. The famous poem is believed to have been directly inspired by witnessing the break of a drought when she was at Torryburn; My Country uses metaphorical imagery to describe the land after the breaking of a long drought. Of ragged mountain ranges possibly refer to the Mount Royal Ranges, and the Barrington Tops.

The first stanza refers to England, and the fact that the vast majority of Australians of that era were of British birth or ancestry. Most Australians are generally not aware of this first stanza even though the second stanza is amongst the most well-known pieces of Australian poetry.

MacKellar's first anthology of poems, The Closed Door, published in Australian in 1911 included the poem. The last line of the third stanza, "And ferns the warm dark soil" originally read as "And ferns the crimson soil". Her second anthology, The Witch Maid & Other Verses, published in 1914 included the original version. A recording made by the radio and TV actor Leonard Teale became so popular in the 1970s that his reading of the first lines of the second stanza were often used to parody him.