I wake up on unseasonably cool day, very grateful to live in such a beautiful country. A country where we are free to be who we wish. With a government, who in spite of many of our jokes and complaints, actually looks after it's people.
Something has been irritating me this week. When I was looking around for Australian funnies this week, I happened across a site (which shall remain nameless) by a woman who migrated here from another English speaking first world country. Her blog is just a bunch of complaints about living here with us and our ways.
For example, we don't sell our bread rolls sliced - Our bakers dropped a lot of the preservatives as they were known to have behavioural effects in children and bring on other health problems, so shock horror, they leave the rolls together to keep them fresh. Now that's 2 seconds per roll slice we are never going to get back - poor backward us!
Her other main complaint is the toilet. Here, generally speaking, the toilet has a room to itself usually located next to the bathroom, instead of being in the bathroom.
I mean seriously, if these things are something complaint worthy I think she would have to agree things aren't quite that bad.
As for me, I love this country and today I'm leaving you with a poem by Doroetha MacKellar another woman who loved this country and all its quirks!
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.
Happy Australia Day!
Mel xo
