| “ | 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! |
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Indeed, this is how all of us who call this land our ‘home’ feel. She enthrals us with her beauty and scares us with her ferocity.
To outside eyes and ears it can seem incomprehensible that within the one country we can experience both extremes of fire and rain. I know that friends and family around the world still find it difficult to accept that we have snow fields and a healthy ski industry.
Perhaps, for my foreign colleagues and friends, a little introduction into the size of Australia is in order. We are the sixth largest country (by area) in the world. Consider this:
As the blog says, “Adelaide is in Kosovo!”, followed by,
“You can fit the bulk of Europe into the centre of Australia, with room to spare for some Northern Africa, Middle East, Balkans and bits of Siberia.”
Another view of this is courtesy of this map:
Looking at this from another perspective:
Yes, we are a big wide land. Even our farms (called ‘stations’ when they get to be bigger than your average farm) are somewhat impressive in size. Says Tim Saxon,
“Known as Bayrick Station it covers approximately 60,000 acres and has hundreds of cattle and tens of thousands of sheep. Putting the size of this station in perspective it is roughly the size of Luxembourg. Compared to other cattle stations in Australia it is relatively small as one of the largest stations located in the Northern Territory is approximately 12 times larger than Bayrick.”
The sheer size of our land both entices us to search it and scares us into staying in our safe city communities at the same time. But for those brave souls who have moved away from the cities, or never left the land in the first place, our country offers delights and disasters all of their own.
Which makes it all the more plausible that we can embrace and be engulfed by floods and fires at the same time. As I type, Victoria is ablaze, with lives lost and damage currently unfathomable. Victoria is in the South-East of Australia; in the North-East lies far north Queensland, a region currently awash with rain and floods.
Two-thirds of Queensland is currently a flood disaster; that’s about the total size of South Australia.
Why do I tell you all this?
To help prepare you for my next post, an exploration of the role Social Media has played in ‘getting the story out’ amongst our fellow Australians and the world, about the Victorian bushfires.
To finish with Dorothea Mackellar’s last verse of her poem:
| “ | 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. |
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