{"id":606,"date":"2015-10-08T13:09:10","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T03:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janineprince.com\/?p=606"},"modified":"2015-10-08T21:42:57","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T11:42:57","slug":"i-love-and-hate-a-sunburnt-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janineprince.com\/home\/i-love-and-hate-a-sunburnt-country\/","title":{"rendered":"I love and hate a sunburnt country"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dorothea<\/a>I have been lucky enough to travel <\/a>to the other side of the world and visit the \u2018home country\u2019 (as it was still being called when I was little). I\u2019d always aspired to this cultural \u2018homecoming\u2019\u00a0 in an unconscious way due to a steady childhood diet of English culture, books, stories, myths, music and television. Badges, foxes and the Queen imbued the world that was valued, but not the world that I inhabited. The world I lived in had bushfires, snakes and Christmas in summers so hot you could burst your skin if you got badly sunburnt. It was confusing.
\nSo I went to England to see the Queen, her Tower, and the Thames. I went to Bath and Stonehenge too as well as Stratford on Avon. It was gorgeous and charming. Every day I was excited to see visit and touch another sacred idea of home. The more I saw, the more I wanted to consume. Tintagel, Cornwall, the Lakes District, Portsmouth, Sussex, Sherwood Forrest all the places and names and stories, I wanted to bring them all to life inside of me, and yet …\u00a0I was homesick.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t understand the food, the humour, even the greetings. Oak trees were a revelation to me, but the colours all looked too bright and even soft. It was only in England that I began to truly understand what it is to be Australian, to yearn for a big sky. As is so often the case, a writer had been there before me, and put my feelings so well into their own words.<\/p>\n

The love of field and coppice,
\nOf green and shaded lanes.
\nOf ordered woods and gardens
\nIs running in your veins,
\nStrong love of grey-blue distance
\nBrown streams and soft dim skies
\nI know but cannot share it,
\nMy love is otherwise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those are the words of Dorothea Mackellar OBE<\/a>, the opening stanza of her famous poem. Like me, she was a third generation Australian, grown up with stories of the \u201chome countries\u201d and indeed she wrote this poem while visiting England and feeling homesick (source<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know this stanza at the time, but I have often reflected on it since. There are in fact six stunning stanzas to this beautiful poem, which it is not currently in vogue to love, as I unashamedly do. But I also hate it, as I sometimes hate the way our country is so very hard to live with. I\u2019m watching the footage on the television of the State of Victoria burning, and I\u2019m feeling terror flood my body. I can hear the popping of the oils in the gums and smell the heavy smoke rushing ahead of the roaring fire front. I feel for the people fleeing their houses, with pets and livestock if they have the time, treasured photos and documents, or just their lives if the wind makes an unexpected push. Next week it could be our neighbours, or Queensland. People wonder at our humour when the farmers of the west can say, \u201cNot much here to burn since the four years of drought.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can’t laugh. Grief overtakes me. Floods may come soon after, or the rains may not come for years yet, as El Nino grows in strength here<\/a> and sends La Nina to Argentina.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I hear city people say \u201cWhy do they live there if they know it is a bushfire zone?\u201d and it is a reasonable question for all those millions of Australians who\u2019ve always lived in suburbs or the cities. But not for those who love those \u2018far horizons\u2019 that you get in the bush. If you\u2019ve lived in the country, then the odds are that the country lives on in you. We\u2019ve made these nests of humans along the coasts where cyclones and storms might be the seasonal threats and when they pass through the locals shrug and say \u201cIt is just part of life, part of living here.\u201d They would never leave either. They love the \u2018jewel-sea\u2019. Why does this love hurt? It is love, we all chose to stay \u2013 far though we may roam.<\/p>\n

Sunburnt and happy<\/h2>\n

Australians like to travel, we all have stories to flesh out and names to bring to life in the far distant lands. We are the long-haul hard-core travellers. It is long hours to even our nearest neighbours. Nearly all of us come back here, gratefully, to this place with the contradictions that form us and the skies we miss and the beaches for endless holidays. We boast of our sunburn and deadly animals, much as we work hard to avoid them all at any cost. Sometimes I think the bush ballads are too honest now for our desire to be sophisticated and urbane. I am torn between the unendurable summers and their suffering and the longing I have when I\u2019m gone. I envy Dorothea the clarity of her vision, and the resilience of her spirit in facing a lifetime without air-conditioning!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a long way from resolving my passionate confusion over this country and even my relationship with this poem. I will grieve for our brothers and sisters in Victoria who face such hardship this week, and support them when the times comes to rebuild as we all know and trust that we will do for each other here. Because one thing is always true in Australia, this is not a land tamed by humans, it is not domesticated. Slowly, every generation, it seeps into our souls ever further and we are trained to live with it, we are the ones who must learn her long and secret ways. We are stubborn, but she is eternal. I may well spend many years trying to hear that gum-soft whisperof her love. For now we shall leave the last words to Dorothea (listen to her recite the poem<\/a>).<\/p>\n

An opal-hearted country,
\nA wilful, lavish land –
\nAll you who have not loved her,
\nYou will not understand –
\nThough earth holds many splendours,
\nWherever I may die,
\nI know to what brown country
\nMy homing thoughts will fly.
\nImage source<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been lucky enough to travel to the other side of the world and visit the \u2018home country\u2019 (as it was still being called when I was little). I\u2019d always aspired to this cultural \u2018homecoming\u2019\u00a0 in an unconscious way due to a steady childhood diet of English culture, books, stories, myths, music and television. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[70,168,14],"tags":[36,64,57,109,84,128,13,26,209,78,210,29,79,61,3],"class_list":["post-606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elemental","category-travel","category-writing-2","tag-choice","tag-earth","tag-fire","tag-gratitude","tag-honesty","tag-love","tag-nature","tag-poetry","tag-summer","tag-sun","tag-sunburnt","tag-time","tag-together","tag-water","tag-writing"],"yoast_head":"\nI love and hate a sunburnt country - 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