Dorothea Mackellar

Isobel Marion Dorothea Mackellar (better known as Dorothea Mackellar), OBE (1 July 1885 – 14 January 1968) was an Australian poet and fiction writer. Her poem My Country is widely known in Australia, especially its second stanza, which begins: "I love a sunburnt country/A land of sweeping plains,/Of ragged mountain ranges,/Of droughts and flooding rains."

The third child and only daughter of physician and parliamentarian Sir Charles Mackellar and his wife Marion MacKellar (née Buckland), the daughter of Thomas Buckland, she was born in the family home "Dunara" at Point Piper, Sydney, Australia in 1885. Her later home was "Cintra" at Darling Point (built in 1882 by John Mackintosh for his son James), and in 1925, she commissioned a summer cottage (in reality a substantial home with colonnaded verandah overlooking Pittwater), "Tarrangaua" at Lovett Bay, an isolated location on Pittwater reachable only by boat (this home is currently the residence of the novelist and author Susan Duncan and her husband, Bob Story, and features prominently in a number of Susan's books). A woman of independent means, she published poetry and other works between 1908 and 1926 and was active in the Sydney literary scene of the 1930s, being involved with the Sydney Publishers, Editors and Novelists Club, the Bush Book Club of New South Wales and the Sydney P.E.N. Club. In her later years she ceased writing and, suffering poor health, her last eleven years were spent in a nursing home in Randwick where she died in 1968. She is buried in Waverley Cemetery, in Sydney's eastern suburbs.

Although she was raised in a professional urban family, Mackellar's poetry is usually regarded as quintessential bush poetry, inspired by her experience on her brothers' farms near Gunnedah, in the north-west of New South Wales. Her best-known poem is My Country, written at age 19 while homesick in England, and first published in the London Spectator in 1908 under the title Core of My Heart: the second stanza of this poem is among the best known in Australia. Four volumes of her collected verse were published: The Closed Door (published in 1911, contained the first appearance of My Country); The Witch Maid, and Other Verses (1914); Dreamharbour (1923); and Fancy Dress (1926).

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