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.

I don’t often read the paper.  The news seems to stick in my mind and haunt me.  It follows me around, begging for a solution.  “The world has problems!  What are you going to do about it?”  It’s not that I don’t care.  I care too much and  get overwhelmed.  Then the melancholy sets in.  I try to let it wash over me, to not give too much attention to the negative.  I think negativity feeds negativity, so I try to empathise then move on.
Yesterday however, I read a story about a lady who intentionally drowned a possum in her garbage bin!  There was a lot of feedback from the community, some commenting on how sad it was, others making note that possums were pests and they should all be drowned.
Now I’m not a possum lover or hater.  But I have had my encounters.  Many times I have visited rural playgroups and had to discourage the children from eating the possum droppings off the path.  Once I sat with a dying possum on the grass. Despite the obvious outcome, I stayed until he passed away.   As an adolescent I would lie in bed at night and listen to our cat fight with the possums in our roof.  On our honeymoon the MOTH and I dined alfresco at a tropical rainforest restaurant where the possums wandered in and we fed them scraps of bread.  My Gran frequently has her phone calls disconnected by the possum that lives on top of her fridge.   It climbs down to sit on her head and accidently stands on the “hangy uppy bit.”  I guess my point is, there’s a pretty good picture of a possum in my head and now it’s drowning in a bin.  I wonder sadly at the cruelty of  this.  This woman isn’t a warrior out feeding her family.  She doesn’t hunt for sport, or work in an abattoir.   And yet her response to an annoying situation was the premeditated killing of an innocent creature.
I find the arrogance of humanness astounding.  Build your house in someone else’s backyard, take over then start killing the locals if they mess up your bins at night.  I guess that is the history of the world.

I feel sorry for this lady.  Not a condescending sorry either.  Often people are pushed to extremes.  And it’s the extremes that worry me.  Where must she be in her life that killing became the next obvious solution to her problems?  “Wits end” has a lot to answer for!