What a blessing to live in a country that, according to my nine year old son, is “war free, has great food and awesome animals like the echidna.” A country where the further north you travel the slower people speak.
Where a green tree frog in your toilet is lucky, and a toad is “bloody vermin!”
Where a cool breeze off the rainforest, turns into a cyclonic gale, and summers resemble life on Mercury.
Where the truest friends call you “asshole”, while helping you build that shed.
Where braking to avoid hitting a bounding kangaroo in your car is still a “bloody privilege,”
A country where generations of children and adults alike still think the opening verse to our national anthem is “Australian’s all eat ostriches.”
Where mowing your lawn at 7am on a Sunday morning whilst the neighbours attempt a sleep in, is just about the most Australian thing you can do.
Backyard cricket
Thongs on our feet (not the kind that rides up your bum crack)
BBQs
Beer
Blistering sunburns
Kids under the sprinkler on the back lawn
Bindies in our feet and the occasional bee sting
Sand in your bum from all day at the beach
These are my memories of January 26 – Australia Day.
MY COUNTRY
A poem 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!
The tragic ringbarked forests,
Stark white beneath 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 crimson 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.
