Many seek comfort in 'My Country' as climate change tightens its grip

Many retreat to the emotional comfort of “My Country” when forced to confront the reality of Australia’s changing weather patterns.

The legacy of Cyclone Oswald charges down Australia’s east coast bringing with it record rainfalls and subsequent flooding to many coastal areas and brutal winds that have ripped apart those same communities.

Dorothera Mackellar.

Tornadoes erupt without warning from this decidedly different combination of winds and heat over the oceans and land producing circumstances described as “never seen before” by a meteorologist.

Storms and rains of that never seen before intensity in the north of Australia, brutal bushfires in Victoria, heat of such intensity in central Australia that the Bureau of Meteorology had to use new colours on its maps to depict the event and still we argue and procrastinate about the realities of climate change.

It is unquestionably a reality and the longer we drag our feet, and continue with “business as usual”, the worse these so called “weather events” become.

However, the more dramatic and damaging the apparently disparate “weather events” become the more many people turn to the writing of Dorothea Mackellar for comfort.

Writing early last century, while in England, in a time absolutely unrelated to what is happening early this century, Mackellar attempted to assuage her loneliness by writing her memorable poem, “My Country”.

The second verse is the most quoted:

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!

Those eight lines of poetry written remote in time and distance from what is happening today in Australia are still alive in the minds of those unable to accept the reality that humans, a plague on the planet according to some, have changed the world’s climate systems.

You and I alone cannot have any measurable impact on the world’s weather systems, but we can change our attitudes and work together to build a more resilient community; a community that might be in a position to endure the unfolding changes to our weather patterns.

Writing on Saturday, social researcher, Hugh Mackay, discussed that in recognizing the early signs of climate change, some countries had embarked on clean and renewable energy sources, but there appeared no sense of urgency in Australia.

Writing an imaginary retrospective view for Australia day, Mackay said: “Even if it was too late to avert disaster for much of the world’s population, surely people realised a clean planet would be better than a dirty one for the survivors.”

Yes, Mackellar lived in a different time and wrote for a different time and although that Australia still exists, it demands a different response.