The last 10 years of Dorothea’s life were spent in a Randwick nursing home in increasingly ill health. She outlived her younger brothers however, dying in her sleep on 14th January 1968. The funeral service was held at the historic St Mark’s Church at Darling Point, and her poem “Colour” was read at the service.

Deceased (1885–1968)

1906

Jan

Although she was raised in a professional urban family, Mackellar’s poetry is usually regarded as quintessential bush poetry, inspired by her experience on her brothers’ farms near Gunnedah, in the north-west of New South Wales.

Mackellar was feeling homesick for Australia. Dorothea Mackellar wanted the verse to express her deep and true love for her country. It was re-written several times before a satisfactory completion. She resented the tendency of acquaintances in her youth to discredit Australia, and to refer to England as ‘Home’.

She wrote little after her father’s death in 1926, although she did act as treasurer to the NSW Bush Book Club and in 1931 was involved in establishing the Sydney branch of PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists) with Ethel Turner and Mary Gilmore. Her literary activities appear to have ceased after this time.

It reappeared several times in Australia before being included as ‘My Country’ in her first book, The Closed Door and Other Verses (Melbourne, 1911). This famous poem is believed to have been directly inspired by Dorothea Mackellar’s experience of life on the land, and her love of the Allyn River district, NSW.

The first stanza, lesser-known, refers to England, and the fact that the vast majority of Australians of that era were of British birth or ancestry. The second stanza describes Australia and is amongst the best-known pieces of Australian poetry.

So Hope does not give a benevolent image of Australia rather for him Australia is a worn out land.  Hope is even more vehement in his criticism of Australia in the second stanza.  He says that though people call Australia a young country, he considers it a falsehood.  He calls her the ’emptiest’ of the lands.

Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ is a poem expressing Mackellar’s deep passion and love for her country, Australia. The whole poem’s intention seems to evoke the sense of praising for the country and express Mackellar’s deep relationship and passion with her land.

Isobel Marion Dorothea Mackellar OBE

noun. the realization of all one’s hopes and dreams; ultimate success, fulfillment, or happiness: to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Instead, her country is metaphorically part of her being, a part that cannot be divorced from the woman, lest she die. As one cannot live without the heart, so she cannot live without Australia. She, therefore, becomes the land of “Rainbow Gold” ; she becomes the “Opal-hearted country”.

Dorothea Mackellar

Australia is an island continent and the world’s sixth largest country (7,682,300 sq km). Lying between the Indian and Pacific oceans, the country is approximately 4,000 km from east to west and 3,200 km from north to south, with a coastline 36,735 km long. Canberra is Australia’s capital city.

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!

“Australia is, to use the famous phrase, a land of droughts and flooding rains.” But the climate that shaped Mackellar’s Australia of the early 20th century is going through rapid changes thanks to the long march of human-caused climate change.

Where lithe lianas coil, And orchids deck the tree-tops, And ferns the warm dark soil. Core of my heart, my country!

rhyming poem