My country and other selected poems - Dorothea Mackellar

‘My Country’, written in 1904 by a romantic and sensitive nineteen-year-old Dorothea Mackellar, has become Australia’s most-quoted and best-loved poem.

Submitted with some hesitation for publication, and immediately acclaimed, it has been reprinted, recited, set to music, and sung innumerable times — and remains an unofficial poetic anthem for Australia.

Her other poetry, published in four volumes, from which this collection has been taken, shows that she continued to pursue the themes of patriotism and her love of nature. In poems of noontide and night, coast and city, bushland, outback, mountains, and farmlands, she has extended her early triumph with the same perception and richness of language and imagery.

But Dorothea Mackellar explored, too, the landscapes of the heart and mind, and she writes with a deep emotion of life and love, and the chance and circumstance which are the hinges of our hopes.

Other poems were written during her travels and residence overseas, and reveal a romantic imagination which could be stirred to life by a fleeting encounter or fragment of conversation.

Dorothea Mackellar’s poems are as different from the poetry of today as the Australian Impressionist paintings are from today’s art. And yet, like the paintings, her poems remain moving and timeless.