I am sure that just about everyone would know or has heard the second verse of this wonderful verse beginning with ‘I love a sunburnt Country’ but not many would have read the full poem which is beautiful. I have given a short biography of the author below:
My Country
First Know as ‘Core of my Heart”
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
Isobel Marion Dorothea Mackellar was born on the 1st Jul 1885, the third child and only daughter of physician and parliamentarian Sir Charles Mackellar and his wife Marion Mackellar (née Buckland), the daughter of Thomas Buckland. She was born in the family home Dunara at Point Piper, Sydney, Australia in 1885. Her later home was Cintra at Darling Point and in 1925, she commissioned a summer cottage (in reality a substantial home with a colonnaded verandah overlooking Pittwater), “Tarrangaua” at Lovett Bay, an isolated location on Pittwater reachable only by boat. This home is currently the residence of the novelist and author Susan Duncan and her husband, Bob Story, and features prominently in a number of Duncan’s books.
Dorothea MacKellar – Photo State Library of Queensland.
A woman of independent means, she published poetry and other works between 1908 and 1926 and was active in the Sydney literary scene of the 1930s, being involved with the Sydney Publishers, Editors and Novelists Club, the Bush Book Club of New South Wales and the Sydney PEN Centre. In her later years, she ceased writing and, suffering poor health, her last eleven years were spent in a nursing home in Randwick where she died in 1968, aged 82. She is buried in Waverley Cemetery, in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.
Although engaged twice she never married. She died a relatively wealthy woman, leaving an estate valued for probate at $1,580,000- Wikipedia.
Moya Sharp
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I think almost all Australians can recite this poem as it was in the school curriculum and we had to memorize it as children. I now live in Canada but have several Australian friends here and we can still recite it when we all get together! Thanks for posting it! Pam
Great to see the full poem!
Many thanks.
I remember singing this in a primary school choir at the Wagin Eisteddfod but it wasn’t all the stanzas. Definitely stanza 2 and I think 5 and 6 were the others. Still my favourite Australia poem. Thanks for the memories!
I went to school in the 1950’s in Buxton NSW. Our dear teacher, Constance Cook, taught us this beloved poem. Our school was nestled into the native bush so we could all relate to many of the scenes mentioned in this lovely poem describing Australia. 💕