‘My Country’ is one of the best-known Australian poems. Many Australians can recite its second stanza by heart: “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!”

Dorothea Mackellar grew up in Sydney but spent a lot of time on a family property in rural New South Wales. The story goes that in her early twenties, she was speaking to a friend who’d recently returned from England and was complaining about the things that England had that Australia didn’t. Mackellar wrote ‘My Country’ in response. It is a love song, not to a person but to a place. When it was published in 1908, she shot to instant fame.

I lived in Australia for six years and have dual citizenship. The landscape, as described in ‘My Country’, is the most beautiful you’ll find on this planet: the russet earth of the Outback, kangaroo-filled valleys, rainforest-lined beaches, vast kingfisher skies. I understand the pull it had on Mackellar’s heart. However, like all places, Australia is not without conflict.  

Mackellar’s biographer Deborah FitzGerald addresses “the invisibility of Indigenous Australians in this work” and notes that “My Country has been politicised over the years by both the left and the right in order to justify differing ideology about drought, bushfires and climate science…”

It’s worth reading the response to ‘My Country’ of fourteen contemporary Australian poets, who address issues related to land and belonging in Transforming My Country: A Selection of poems responding to Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My County’, edited by Toby Fitch and published in 2021 by Australian Poetry Ltd. Another contemporary companion to this poem is Ziggy Alberts’ heartfelt song ‘Together’, which he wrote in the wake of the 2020 bushfires. It’s hard not to be moved by both.

First published as ‘Core of My Heart’ in The Spectator, 5 September 1908 and available to read online here. Collected in The Closed Door and Other Verses, Australian Authors Agency, Melbourne, 1911, and hundreds of Australian newspapers and books since