My Country

There is a popular saying, “Home is where the heart is.” My heart is here. There are few things I know about my future, but one thing I do know is that my future is here. I try not to think of how much time I have left in Australia (because it seems so short); but I do know that when I do leave I will leave my heart here. I will long to return home. Below is one of the most popular poems in Australian literature that describes my heart’s new home.

My Country
© 1904 Dorothea MacKellar

(modified from original)

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,
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.

————

P.B. (Post Blog) Australian’s understand this country’s hold on me. They love to travel but would never want to live anywhere but here. Jus think, how many Australians have you met in America or wherever it is you live?…My point exactly.

"Three cubic feet of blood and bone": Academic, Apple fanatic, and forever 18.

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