
Poetry has often been a matter of nation building, including in Australia. Who hasn’t learnt by heart at school some verses from My Country (1908) by Dorothea Mackellar?
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!