I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges, of drought and flooding rains,
I love her far horizons, I love her jewelled sea,
Her beauty and her terror, the wide brown land for me.

Dorothea Mackellar (1885 – 1968) wrote her quintessential Australian poem My Country when she was just 22, living in London, and homesick for her native land. In doing so she expressed a truth that is integral to much of life – that the things we love and appreciate most of all, are double-sided, beautiful and terrible, life-giving and life-destroying. And when we are separated from “the core of our hearts” we find ourselves longing for both aspects of those greatest loves – their intrinsic beauty, and their terror, or horror.

We were having coffee on our friend’s verandah. On the ground below lay the