Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar by Deborah Fitzgerald

‘I love a sunburnt country.’

Lisa’s review of this book led me (as her reviews so often do) to read this book.  I was curious.  I cannot remember when I first encountered the poem ‘My Country’, and I really only know the second verse. Memorising poems is not one of my skills, so I went searching for the entire poem, and here it is:

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!

A stark white ring-barked forest

All tragic to 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 warm dark 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.

It is a wonderful anthem to Australia.

Dorothea Mackellar was born on 1 July 1885 in Sydney. She was a third generation Australian. Dorothea was the third of four children born to Dr Charles Mackellar and his wife Marion. Dorothea had two older brothers, Keith and Eric, and a younger brother, Malcolm.

In writing this biography, Ms Fitzgerald was able to draw on the Mackellar Papers held at the Mitchell Library which included Ms McKellar’s diaries from 1907. Ms Mackellar lived a privileged life: born into wealth she did not have to seek paid work; unmarried and childless she had more time to pursue her own interests. She was, I read, a keen traveller. In addition to spending long periods in Europe, she also travelled to the Caribbean, Egypt and Japan. She was also, clearly, a keen observer. And, while ‘My Country’ may be the only poem many of us are familiar with, it is not her only work.

Ms Fitzgerald does a wonderful job of taking the reader into Ms Mackellar’s life, of making us aware of her ties to family and her appreciation of the Australian landscape. Privileged her life may have been but it was not always happy.

I finished this book, pleased to have learned something about the life and times of Dorothea Mackellar. Ms Mackellar loved that Australia embraced My Country as an unofficial anthem, making her a household name.  But this success, as Ms Fitzgerald writes was a constraint. ‘She could not move on from it no matter how hard she tried.’

Which makes me want to locate and read more of her work.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Book 23 in my 2024 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. I’ve entered as a ‘Nonfiction Grazer’ and this book should be included under the heading of ‘Memoir/Biography’.