Generations of Australians have become almost unwittingly familiar with Dorothea Mackellar’s poetic paean to the Australian landscape, My Country.
The lines closest to our tongues for more than a century come from the anthemic second stanza of the six verse poem, first published as Core of My Heart in London in 1908:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plain,
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
The poem rocketed then 22-year-old Mackellar to antipodean – and British – literary fame of the type previously reserved for mostly male Australian writers such as CJ Dennis, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson.
Over many years, Mackellar channelled acute observations and sensibilities – about light, season, weather and topography – into a poem that captured the nationalistic imagination of the fledgling white Australian federation. Her poem arguably resonates well beyond the muscular prose of those male bards of the bush, who tended to focus more on the masculine pioneering and taming of the country than on its complex, poetic beauty. But unlike them Mackellar is enigmatic, and her extraordinary literary and personal life is comparatively under-examined.
The author Deborah FitzGerald has addressed this in Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar. It is an authorised biography insofar as she required the Mackellar family’s permission to draw from the poet’s rich Mitchell Library archive. But FitzGerald has emerged with an objective and illuminating portrait of the privileged, contradictory and occasionally very unhappy life of Mackellar, as well as her legacy.
We discover a writer who, while rightly proud of My Country, never escaped the long shadow of its success. Mackellar lived and wrote in frustrating captivity to its prodigious acclaim, despite having penned many other volumes of poetry, novels and plays.
Mackellar loved that Australia embraced My Country as an unofficial anthem, to make her a household name. “And yet it constrained her,” FitzGerald writes. “She could not move on from it no matter how hard she tried.’’ Critics, in Australia and abroad, wouldn’t let her either. Today a creative such as her might be deemed a “one hit wonder”.
Mackellar was a product of colonial Sydney’s society, with its wealth, privilege and associated opportunities, and its social blinkers. Her father, Charles, had been a colonial MP, a doctor and leading eugenicist (though it’s not clear from the book how the voodoo sociology of eugenics influenced the daughter’s views) and as the daughter of monied parents Mackellar travelled widely overseas during much of her adult life. This was a privilege afforded to few women – and far fewer Australian female writers – of her epoch. Despite her worldliness, she seemed strikingly unobservant when it came to oppressive Australian racial and class strictures.
FitzGerald is upfront about the white blindfold through which Mackellar viewed and wrote about her country in My Country, inspired as she was by observing life on her family’s property on the New South Wales Liverpool Plains.
“I feel compelled to address the issue of the colonial eye and the invisibility of Indigenous Australians in this work,” she writes. “Dorothea was a product of her time and her class. Casual racism was common but Dorothea’s diaries reveal little of this.”
That said, the book perhaps explores too little how My Country might represent to later generations, and certainly to Black Australians; the very essence of wilful white amnesia over countless millennia of Indigenous connection to land, dispossession and oppression. (Then again, a whole genre of Australian fiction – bush noir – has far more lately largely done the same.)
My Country holds beauty and power, but having spent so much time on the Liverpool Plains – where violent dispossession was ongoing and where the big massacres were not a distant memory – it seems amazing Mackellar did not engage with Indigenous presence. Even Lawson and Paterson, while too often shamefully caricatured Black people as God-fearing and hapless, at least acknowledged they existed.
Mackellar certainly emerges in FitzGerald’s pages as complex, bucking societal expectations to marry and put raising a family ahead of artistic pursuit. Mackellar had many male suitors, but she never married. The book strongly suggests her long and intimate personal and literary relationship with the writer Ruth Belford was the bedrock of her private emotional – and sexual – self.
FitzGerald also makes it plain that unlike many other female contemporaries – journalists and novelists – Mackellar was no “jobbing” writer. She didn’t write to live, though she certainly lived to write. She wrote daily, was enormously productive and much of her work was up there with My Country.
This is no rose-coloured account. Mackellar’s lifetime of fragile mental health, her abuse of medication (morphia was sometimes prescribed for depression back then) and alcohol, and her approach to social and political issues of the day (she supported Billy Hughes’s first conscription plebiscite, referred to itinerant workers on the family property as “lazing nags”’, supported suffragettes though not always their tactics, and was an early, ardent environmentalist) renders her complex – and sometimes unlikeable.
But she also emerges as a literary superstar, nationally and internationally, of her day. Some of the most compelling material in this book relates to her very close friendship with Joseph Conrad. There is a book in that alone.
We all know a few lines from that poem. Now thanks to FitzGerald, not before time, we can begin to understand the poet.
Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar is out now through Simon & Schuster
