Wonderful - Day 4: At home or abroad

I've spent 9 years of my life living overseas. Four of them were spent in Papua New Guinea as a little girl, and five were spent in the United States as a BYU student. I probably have more vivid memories of my time in the USA than of my time in PNG (it was so long ago now!), but I have treasured memories from both periods and I'm so grateful for those experiences. They taught me a lot and gave me a greater understanding of the world we live in. I'm very aware, for example, that I live a life of unimaginable luxury compared to so many other people on earth. And having seen first hand as a little girl what everyday life is like in a third world country, I've always felt a deep since of gratitude for what I have and a desire to share where I can.

I've also loved the traveling I've been so lucky to do, and the wonderful things I've seen. But - and this will sound cliched - no matter how far or how wide I roam, I still love to call Australia home. I'm more grateful than I can possibly express to have been born here. They call it the lucky country - and I'd have to agree. The older I get, the more I start to realize just how much it means to me to be an Aussie.

I really love the Dorothea Mackeller poem 'My Country', it feels familiar, and as I read it I can almost smell, taste, hear and feel the landscapes. It stirs my blood and leaves me standing just a little taller :) These are a couple of my favourite stanzas:

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!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold -
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

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.















xo Tammy