The former Meggitt Ltd Silo site at Gunnedah is one of many Silo Murals around Australia.
Core of My Heart. [a.k.a My Country] By Dorothea Mackellar
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 ’neath 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 treetops,
And ferns the crimson soil.
Core of my heart, my country —
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die …
And 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 three-fold …
Over the thirsty paddocks
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as you 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.
Dorothea wrote this poem whilst homesick in England.
Dorothea lived in a time where many thought colonial Australia was inferior to "Mother England". Core of My Heart [a.k.a My Country] quickly became Australia's best known poem where schoolchildren once were taught remember and recite the second stanza.
She also lived in the Gunnedah area.
[first published in The Spectator (London, UK) on 5 September 1908; it was originally entitled “Core of My Heart”, although it was later re-titled as “My Country”. The poem was published in some newspapers in 1908-1909 as “Core of My Heart — My Country”, and in 1910 as “My Country”. It was included in Dorothea Mackellar’s first book of poetry, The Closed Door and Other Verses (1911), under the title of “My Country”..]
We also visited Pensioner's Hill Lookout and appreciated the view of Gunnedah along with the artworks depicting the history of the area.Pensioners Hill gets its name from being a shanty town during the Great Depression.
