Without detracting from my homeland of England, I would like to pay tribute to Australia and it's people, who are some of the most friendly in the world.
My children married here, and I have four lovely Aussie granddaughters. The poems that follow descibe this beautiful land very well!
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 rugged 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 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.
Dorothea Mackellar
1908
From New York To Rio, and Old London Town,
But no matter how far, or how wide I roam,
I still call Australia Home.
I'm always travlin, I love being free,
And so I keep leaving the sun and the sea,
But my heart lies waiting over the foam,
I still call Australia home.
Peter Allen, "The Boy From Oz."
