Poetry
My Country
Dorothea MacKellar · 1911
Synopsis
The poem opens on another person's love for the green fields, shaded lanes and orderly woods of an English-style countryside, which the voice understands without sharing. It then sings of a land scorched by the sun, of vast plains and ragged ranges, of droughts and of rains that flood, then of the ring-barked forests under the moon, the blue mountains, the tangled bush and its orchids. Then come the pitiless sky under which the cattle die, and the rain that arrives like the drum of an army.
Context
Written around 1904 by a young woman who was homesick, in England, the poem appeared on 5 September 1908 in the Spectator of London under the title Core of My Heart; the Australian press reprinted it in 1908 and 1909, then under its present title in 1910, before its author's first collection, published in Melbourne in 1911 by the Australasian Authors' Agency. According to the State Library of New South Wales, the family station of Torryburn, in the Hunter Valley, where a drought was seen to break, was one of its sources.
Who it is for
Six stanzas of eight lines in English; the first describes an English countryside, which clarifies the reversal that follows.
Prizes and reception
One of the best-known Australian poems according to the ADB, especially since the Great War; H. M. Green saw in its author a lyric poet of colour and light.
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