The Dreyfus Files - The Age
I love a sunburnt country as much as the next Australian, but what is it about Dorothea Mackellar's poem, My Country, that has so captured our politicians' thoughts this week?
In Parliament, both chambers have heard moving speeches for Australians affected by the disasters of this summer, starting with Prime Minister Julia Gillard's heartfelt condolence speech on Tuesday.
I've been struck by the number of times members have turned to Australian poetry, and in particular a specific line from a particular 20th century poem, to describe the national mood. In fact, the liberal use of the poem has not been confined to Liberal members and senators, although both Julie Bishop and Don Randall felt so moved that they sought to read into their condolence speeches the whole of the famous second stanza, "I love a sunburnt country . . .", the fourth line of which is the reference to "droughts and flooding rains".
So why is it that so many parliamentarians, and others, think that Mackellar's words are right for talking about disastrous floods?
George Orwell warned us in his 1946 essay on Politics and the English Language, "never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print", and at the 10th or 20th hearing of Mackellar's lines some might fear we're at risk of contravening that generally pretty helpful rule.
But something else is happening in these multiple references to My Country. Though written more than 100 years ago, I think this poem captures widely held sentiments about our continent more beautifully and more neatly than perhaps anything that we can easily muster on our own.
As probably the most widely recognised poem in Australia, it taps into our common consciousness, the acceptance we have of the harshness of our land and a deeper appreciation of its beauty. For many years the poem was in every school anthology. Many Australians, including myself, learnt it by heart in primary school. I'd guess most Australians know at least a line or two, just as we know at least a line of two of Waltzing Matilda.
Mackellar wrote the poem in 1904, at the age of 19. It was first published in the London Spectator in 1908 under the title Core of My Heart, and appeared in her first anthology published in 1911.
Her poem, particularly the second stanza, has come to represent love of country for many Australians. We need to keep in mind that when she wrote it many European settlers (mostly English) saw Australia as a deeply alien landscape, and contrasted it unfavourably with the land they came from.
Mackellar loved our land, not the "green and shaded lanes" and "ordered woods" of England, where she was when she wrote it, homesick for Australia. Her poem is not just about homesickness, and love of country, but a retort to an English lack of understanding.
George Orwell's warning doesn't apply to Mackellar. And I hope we keep hearing at least passing reference to "the wide brown land for me", because her words have become something well beyond anything she might have expected as a homesick 19-year-old.
But could I make two pleas? First, let's not have any more use of Mackellar's poem as "evidence" for denial of climate change. And secondly, there is other Australian poetry.
