Planting a Nation is on p. 78 of Poems For Your Heart
Stanza five of Planting a Nation says:
“And so the prison problem was solved.
But far from the fog of Britannia,
Unknown to the judges who stayed behind,
A sunburnt country was beaming a smile
At its ragged new residents laden with chains … ”
The phrase “a sunburnt country” comes from a famous poem called My Country by Dorothea Mackellar that all primary school children used to memorize, including yours truly (and I hope they still do). The phrase is in My Country’s second stanza which goes like this:
“I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of rugged 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!”
Mackellar was in London when she wrote this poem, aged 19, and missing her home country. As an Aussie myself, living long-term in America, I know the feeling well. In Poems For Your Heart, there are three poems about my own homesickness:
- Woy Woy (p. 10)
- Silent Sounds (p. 62)
- A Life Divided (p. 76)
MacKellar lived from 1885 to 1968. She wrote novels as well as poems and was very active in Sydney’s 1930s literary world. Her parents were well-to-do and she was what we would call “homeschooled”, becoming fluent in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. She was engaged twice but never married.
On this site’s Home page is a photo of Sydney’s Palm Beach (with the tide out, as you can see by the two sand surfaces). It backs onto a narrow strip of land on the other side of which is a long finger of water called Pittwater. Mackellar had a house on Pittwater with access only by boat. Protected from the ocean, it’s calm and excellent for sailing, kayaking and fishing. My brother had a big holiday house there for some years and his boathouse was one side of his front yard, the water lapping against the other side.
Palm Beach was a favorite of mine and is the northernmost Sydney beach. South of it is a long stretch of similar beaches that run to Sydney Harbor. Two beaches south of Palm Beach is Avalon Beach where my parents lived for some years. Their house was on the clifftop, the back yard dropping off to the Pacific ocean, and an easement path ran across their back yard and down the cliff to Avalon Beach. South of the Harbor are more surf beaches like those north of the Harbor, then Botany Bay, where Captain James Cook first moored his HMS Endeavour. For some time it was the location of the early penal colony but it’s a shallow bay and the sailors soon moved everyone to Sydney Harbor. You can listen to an old song here called The Shores of Botany Bay; it’s an Irish song about hitching a ride to Australia to search for gold. The group is called The Bushwackers and was popular in the 1970s when I was raising my two small boys in Sydney.