We travelled to central New South Wales to spend Easter with family. It's a really long drive through miles of endless miles of brown, flat country. Sometimes it feels like you're in the middle of nowhere and then all of a sudden the scenery changes and your passing through a gorgeous country town.
As we drove, I often thought of one of the most well known Australian poems. Whenever I hear it or read it a very patriotic chord is struck inside of me. So, I'm going to show some of the photos from our time away in between verses of ...
by Dorothea Mackellar
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.
