Edited Extract from Her Sunburnt Country by Deborah FitzGerald

'Lying on the grass by the Namoi River under the veil of a weeping willow one summer’s day early in 1908, a twenty-two-year-old Dorothea was far removed from the social pressures she had left behind in the city. Kurrumbede station, a property north-west of Gunnedah on the Liverpool Plains of New South Wales, was a refuge for her, and she visited often.

Ever fond of the water, Dorothea could never resist the oppor­tunity to remove her shoes, roll off her stockings, and ease her feet into the water of the river that ran through the property. It was cool and clear but shallow and deathly still as there had been no rain to fill the river and send the water surging and bubbling downstream. Refreshed, she pulled an exercise book and a pen from her bag and set to work. She was trying to refine a poem she’d been working at, off and on, for several years.

She had begun writing the lines that were to form the first stanza before leaving for England in 1904, while the family was staying at Buckland Chambers. According to a Women’s Weekly article, Dorothea had been ‘lounging around after a game of tennis with two teenage friends, all speaking of their trips to England. One friend especially lauded the English countryside as “so green, tidy, and civilised”’ compared to the sprawling Australian landscape.

‘You shouldn’t try to compare the two,’ retorted the budding poet. ‘They’re so different. I do admire England, but don’t feel at one with it.’ Walking home mulling over the conversation, Dorothea began that famous poem with her friend’s ‘love of field and coppice’.[1]

She had also taken umbrage, in the lead-up to her trip to London, at some of her fellow Australians’ references to England as ‘home’. As Howley reported it, Dorothea was quick to put them right:

‘You are so lucky to be going home,’ some told her.

‘I’m not going home, I’m leaving home,’ said Dorothea.

‘Oh Dorothea . . . don’t you feel when you come back the Heads are closing behind you like prison gates?’

This attitude annoyed Dorothea. ‘The Heads are the gates to my home,’ she insisted. ‘And I return through them with joy.’[2]

Dorothea carried a deep affection for England, writing in her diary as she sailed into Plymouth, ‘England came nearer and nearer and it was so lovely, so lovable, so utterly unlike any other country in the world that I found myself crying’. But she wanted to draw attention to the stark differences between the landscapes of England and Australia. At a time when many of her class struggled with the duality of being Anglo-Australian, or saw themselves as British expats, Dorothea was proud to call herself Australian. The English countryside seemed to her too far away and fantastical, almost like an Impressionist painting, a little out of focus. She hoped the poem would be less a mournful longing for the familiar and more a powerful love letter to a land which ignited such great passion in her. She was happy with the opening verse, which captured England’s austere beauty, even as it softly disowned it:

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.

The opening stanza, while designed to evoke the ordered, subdued English countryside, was also laying the groundwork for what was to come. The images are soft and subtle, ‘brown streams’ and skies that are ‘dim’ and ‘blue-grey’. The formal English gardens are stark in comparison with the wild nature of the Australian bush, and this would provide the perfect background for the bold brushstrokes that were to follow. The rough edges of the Austra­lian countryside suited Dorothea’s restless spirit and desire for freedom, and she was ready to declare her love for her country.

She wanted to write a poem that would capture the ancient and mysterious country of Australia; its ambiguities, its dangers, its grandeur. Her country was like no other continent on earth, yet capturing its essence always seemed slightly out of reach. Every time she thought she had found the right words, the right rhythm, it slipped away. It was like trying to hold the river’s water in her cupped hands.

*

Throughout the first half of 1908, as the devastating drought wore on, Dorothea continued to tinker with the poem.

The young poet wanted to capture something of the land­scape’s specificity: she hoped to describe that moment in the middle of a hot summer’s day when the air seemed to be sucked out of your lungs and it appeared, for a whisper in time, that everything stood still; the exotic native plants that shocked with their audacity were alive in her mind.

But Dorothea wanted to say something, too, about the inhos­pitable nature of this land, and how much its inhabitants had suffered in return for its beauty and bounty. That year, the news­papers had been punctuated with stories about drought and drought-busting rains. Columns recorded the woes besetting the bush and the men and women trying to eke out a living there. The Bong Bong Picnic Races near Moss Vale in the Southern Highlands attracted only thirteen horses that year. Beneath its dust, the track was ‘too dangerously hard for many to risk their steeds’, according to the Town and Country Journal. On 15 January, the same journal reported that conditions were dire: ‘Nothing short of water famine is feared unless rain soon falls.’ Crops were described as ‘withering up’, with farmers resorting to measures they had not tried for forty years, such as sinking casks in swamp beds to try to find water for stock. Dorothea had seen the devastation first-hand as crops perished, animals died of star­vation or dehydration or both, and hard men of the bush were brought to their knees. But how to render their pain, and how it affected her, in a poem?

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die—

The poem was taking shape, and in late January, as Dorothea continued to whittle away at it, the rains finally came.