One of the poems many Australian children learn at school is My Country by Dorothea Mackellar (written in 1904). While most Australians can recite the second verse, the context for the poem is set in the first verse! On 365 we see pictures from around the world every day, and I am often in awe of the 'exotic' nature of other lands. This wonderful poem paints the colours and contrasts of two very different lands.
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.
see
http://www.lancescoular.com/my-country-by-dorothea-mackellar.html for the remaining verses.
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