ART installations are becoming a feature of the Outback landscape – from larger than life silo paintings to repurposed relics of the goldrush and pioneering eras – and this week we begin a series highlighting these cultural tributes.
We launch the series with the town of Gunnedah’s tribute to its best known daughter, the poet Dorothea Mackellar, and the best known lines to her famous poem, My Country.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains ...
Biographies on the life of Mackellar (1885 – 1968) record that she never professed to be a poet. “I have written - from the heart, from imagination, from experience - some amount of verse.” Henry Green, a journalist and literary historian, and a contemporary of Mackellar, described her as a “lyrist of colour and light”.
And Gunnedah’s connection to the poet? The Mackellar family built a homestead known as ‘Kurrumbede’ north of the NSW town in the early 1900s and lived there for about 35 years. The reverence in which the poet is held in the town is evidenced by the life size statue of Mackellar on horseback in Anzac Park and the 29-metre-high portrait of the poet and the famous second stanza of her poem, My Country, on the silos in one of the main streets.