New South Wales - Australia
Ode to the journey
The water and land covered planet we call home is a unique rock in an endless universe. This Bella Gaia, with all her biodiversity, is so diverse, one lifetime doesn’t suffice to explore her entirely, and to completely figure out her grandeur. But every footstep is the beginning of a journey that brings you closer, and every visited destination offers new panoramas, pals and pleasures.
That is why Wideoyster, in collaboration with Mastercard, presents Ode to the Journey: a series of travelogues and videos in which we document odes of local poets to their country, region, city or street. In this edition, we bring an oath to New South Wales in Australia.
At the age of nineteen, Dorothea Mackellar wrote the iconic poem ‘My Country’. In this poem, she brings an ode to her homeland Australia, while being in England herself. Even though she grew up in the city, she often travelled to the farms of her brothers, around the village of Gunnedah. That journey inspired her to write the poem. And us, for documenting her ode:
Video: Ode to Australia
Meet the poet
Dorothea Mackellar
Homesickness for her home land inspired the writing of one of Australia’s most well-known poems. Poet Dorothea Mackellar (1885-1968) lived in England in 1904 and longed for the time she lived in the state of New South Wales, in a district east of Sydney.
Surprisingly, she does not dedicate the poem to the city, but to the country where her brothers live. The bush, with horses, droughts, valleys and mountains. That is what the poem ‘My Land’ is about:
The Australian poet Dorothea Mackellar
Poem: Dorothea Mackellar
Direction & edit: Alessio Cuomo
Camera: Andy Lloyd & James Mills
Voice: Caroline Pemberton
Creatieve supervision: Marco Barneveld
Project manager: Daan Vermeer
Wideoyster Media ©
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!
The stark white ring-barked forests,
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.
