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!
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.
~ Dorothea MacKeller
I’ve always loved this poem, right now it’s another reminder of why I’m moving back to Australia.
I, like many, am only a first generation Australian but my parents and grandparents embraced the country as their own and quickly became part of the melding of cultures that has made us Aussie’s who we are.
Now, having lived overseas for 8 years, I can see many traits and values that mark us as Australian - and I am, as always, very proud to be one.
Tippi Benjamine Okanti Degré, daughter of French wildlife photographers Alain Degré and Sylvie Robert, was born in Namibia. During her childhood she befriended many wild animals, including a 28-year old elephant called Abu and a leopard nicknamed J&B. She was embraced by the Bushmen and the Himba tribespeople of the Kalahari, who taught her how to survive on roots and berries, as well as how to speak their language.
Riding an ostrich like a fucking Chocobo.
my salmon cooking does not need your supervision, cats.
@agnte: The Cathedral (fig) Tree is 500 years old, 44m girth, 48m high.
Danbulla State Forest - Atherton Tablelands, FNQ, Australia
Trevenath Falls FNQ
I struggle to communicate with people and I’m working on that, so I wrote some letters to people today. Of course now they’re sealed & about to be posted so I can’t re-read them and agonise over whether what I wrote was worth reading. Instead my mind wants to desperately remember what I wrote so I can second guess everything!
But this was part of the point of deciding to write to people rather than email.
There’s something about putting pen to paper that makes the communication feel more real and more immediate, the words go on the page as I think them. To rethink and recompose would mean a lot of wasted paper and I don’t have an infinite amount of pretty writing paper! My aim is to send letters and postcards to people about my experiences on my Europe trip.
The main point of anxiety is whether anyone wants to read my thoughts.
But, if you never offer them you’ll never know. It’s easy enough for people to throw away the paper without a second thought if what I’ve written doesn’t interest them. But if they find it interesting maybe they’ll re-read the words a few times before disposing of them. And maybe they’ll enjoy them, I hope they will!
Now I have the ‘why this is happening’ letter out of the way, the next batch will be more descriptive of London in summer and events happening in my life. Then I’ll have Europe to talk about and I’m sure at that point I’ll have more interesting stories to tell!
sunshine
Something pretty to come home to
