The sky and the seas, the gum trees and koalas, the rocks and the hills, the ocean and the peoples from all around the globe—white, black, brown, indigenous, euro, anglo, asian, pacific, african, middle eastern—all that make up the beauty of Australia, Gondwanaland. How I miss thee! Oh, the air and the space!
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!
A stark white ring-barked forest
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.
***
PRAYER
With fervent hope I pray, that my fellow Aussies will come to know Jesus—as if for the first time—and giving their hearts to Christ, will come to taste and see that God is good and His mercies endure forever. And in the aftermath of the mighty Spirit’s outpouring into our broken land and her heartbroken peoples, may Australia arise and shine as the southern land of the Holy Spirit, even as we await our Lord’s coming again. In Jesus’ name. Amen. Amen. Amen.