Flood Waters

It's not that long ago that I watched in horror and disbelief as my country was engulfed by bushfires and many lost their lives. Today it's been the severe flooding in Queensland and Northern New South Wales that has caused the tears to run down my face as I've watched the evening news and my sons to look at me strangely.

It may say "Australian" on their passports or birth certificates but they've spent so few years of their lives there that they don't possess the same ties to the land or have the sense of grief that one who was born and bred there experiences at such a time as this. So they look at me strangely and I just want the pictures to go away.

Not that going away is forgetting.

I've grown up on flood stories. The town I grew up in experienced floods regularly. Flood banks and other measures protected the town - measures put in place after a devastating flood that destroyed the town years before I was born. A flood that my mother and my grandparents and my great-grandparents lived through - when many died. A flood that created an inland sea the size of England and Wales. A flood whose mark is still evident on the town.

My mother and her father stood on a hill and watched the flood waters tear down the street sweeping up houses and people in its path. Their own home was completely inundated with water and virtually everything that they owned lost. I have in my possession one book that somehow survived that flood. It still has mud caked inside its spine that over the years has loosened and still occasionally flakes away. It is a vivid reminder of what flood waters can do.

Watching the news tonight, I don't need any more vivid reminders. There are at least eight dead. Many more missing. An "inland tsunami" is how the flood waters have been described in one small town. The devastation is ... well ... devastating. And no one knows the worst. Communication with the outside world is virtually impossible. No one able to get in or out.

We can only watch and pray and once again ask that God will have mercy on the land of my birth.

My Country by Dorothea McKellar (1885–1968)

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies -
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

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!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
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!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

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.