Dorothea Mackellar’s famous poem begins “I love a sunburnt country”

Another sample from the now 130-strong collection, currentlt dubbed Mythinformation, These are widely believed tales that have no basis in fact.

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Ask Australians to quote from Mackellar’s poem My Country, and most will begin with “I love a sunburnt country…” While those words do in fact appear in the poem, that is the start of the second verse.

In 1908, Mackellar was a homesick Australian girl holidaying in England. In the late 1890s, she had watched a drought break on Torryburn Station, in the Hunter Valley of NSW. She marvelled as the brown and dusty country went green, almost as she watched. The drought had run for most of the 1890s, but in the end, the rains came and the land bounced back.

Drought on the Darling River, near Bourke.

A decade on, in prim, ordered England, she described the magic that is Australia, in a poem that she called Core of My Heart. The first verse tells us something important which she had noticed about the English and some of her fellow Australians, late in the 19th century. Core of My Heart begins like this:

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.

Then in the second verse we reach the “sunburnt country” part that we all know, the lines that describe our present-day relish for our surroundings.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of drought and flooding rains,
I love her far horizons
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror —
The wide brown land for me!
— Copied scrupulously from the ms copy in the State Library of NSW.

In the middle of the 19th century, a diminishing number of well-off Australians would have been puzzled by Mackellar’s love of the alien Australian landscape. Some still wanted fields and coppices in the Antipodes, but their number was fading. Sadly, there are still a few conservative peasants in the Peasants’ Party who viscerally hate The Bush. By the way, Mackellar’s sunburnt country was not a new expression. The South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide), 21 February 1883, 4, offered this:

…there seems a probability that those who come after will be shown pits and hollows excavated by “American scoops” choked up with mud and debris, and told these were the ideas their forefathers had of providing in a dry and sunburnt country for water conservation and irrigation.

When Australia had its gold rush, free people came from all over the world, the flow of convicts was shut off, and Australian society changed, very fast. People learned to love the difference.

Mythinformation

This work-in-late-progress punctures 130 false beliefs like:

George Washington had wooden teeth: Not true: his choppers were made of human teeth and seahorse teeth;

The atomic bomb was a big secret: The Manhattan Project was a secret, but the atom (or atomic) bomb was old news, from 1913! SF people were questioned by agents circa 1943.

Dorothea Mackellar’s poem begins “I love a sunburnt country”: No, that's the second verse;

Noah’s flood really happened: Thomas Jefferson proved otherwise;

The botfly goes at 800 mph: Seriously dodgy 'research', result impossible: more like 25 mph;

There are lies, damned lies and statistics: Did you know my Master's was in Bayesian statistics, but as a bureaucrat, I refused to wear the Statistician label? How stats are abused, and I prove that New South Wales podiatrists are moving to South Australia and turning into public phone boxes.  Or maybe they are going to Tasmania to have their babies, or maybe Tasmanians can only fall pregnant in South Australian public phone booths, or maybe codswallop grows in computers which are treated unkindly...

Carrots give you better night vision: this dates from World War II, and was intended to trick the Germans about radar;

You can kill somebody by pouring molten gold down their throat: You might, but there are some serious challenges in the way;

Thomas Edison invented the light bulb: [n July 1859, Professor Moses Farmer lit one room of his Salem Massachusetts house with lamps using small pieces of platinum-iridium wire which glowed dimly as the current from primary batteries passed through them;

Bumble bees can’t fly: But they can fly, so a rethink is needed;

Guns were better than bows and arrows. Nope!

All germs are bad: here are some that cure diseases;

No animal has ever shot a human: the true story of Harry the Camel;

Crude oil comes from oil wells: early 'crude oil' was distilled from coal.

These samples are available:

Dorothea Mackellar’s poem begins “I love a sunburnt country”,

Noah’s flood really happened,

The world is only six thousand years old,