Identity

Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ is a poem expressing Mackellar’s deep passion and love for her country, Australia. The whole poem’s intention seems to evoke the sense of praising for the country and express Mackellar’s deep relationship and passion with her land. Mackellar attains this response from the audience by using numerous language techniques such as; juxtaposition, personification, sound patterns including alliteration and assonance, imagery, and paradox. The use of first person throughout the whole poem suggests that the theme of this poem has been evoked by personal experience.
Mackellar introduces the idea of Australia’s distinctiveness firstly in the opening two stanzas, by juxtaposing Australia’s wild landscape compared to England’s tame landscape. England’s landscape is described as with ‘grey-blue distance, brown streams and soft, dim skies. Where as Australia’s landscape is depicted as ‘a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains’. This characterisation of the two countries imply that the poems persona believes that Australia’s wildness makes it beautiful and incomparable to England’s landscape, which is the completely opposite. From ‘I love a sunburnt country’, which introduces the following stanza on Australia, Mackellar begins evoking the idea of Australia not just being a lifeless piece of land but equivalent and sharing similar characteristics of a person. This idea is presented through personification by referring to the land as she or her: ‘I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, and’ -‘for flood and fire and famine she pays us back threefold’. By applying this technique Mackellar is able to express how deep her relationship and passion for her land actually is.
To evoke the sense of the praising of the country and also to convey a clear awareness of the theme, Mackellar applies sound patterns including alliteration and assonance.