Australia Day

This is the joy-inspiring day
That gave these blessings to our lot
Then let us share the social rites
Join hands, all malice be forgot!
This little star, once marked by none
Now shines a bright - a BLAZING SUN!

Among Australian public holidays, Australia Day is considered one of the most important as it commemorates the founding of the first white settlement in Australia in 1788.
On May 13, 1787, British Captain Arthur Phillip set sail from Portsmouth, England, to establish a convict colony in Australia.

He sailed with 11 ships, 759 convicts -- 191 of whom were female -- 13 children of convicts, 211 marines, 46 wives and children of marines, and his staff of nine.
Phillip landed at Botany Bay on the eastern coast of Australia on January 18, 1788, travelled some kilometres north to find a more suitable place for settlement and came ashore at Sydney Cove on January 26 in what is now the historic Rocks area at the southern end of today's Sydney Harbour Bridge. Having established Port Jackson, he then named the settlement Sydney after British Home Secretary Lord Sydney, who was responsible for the colony. Phillip was to be its governor.

This date — January 26 — is now commemorated yearly as Australia Day, but while it is a day that weaves together the past and present of a great land and its people.


MY COUNTRY
by Dorothea Mackellar

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,
That 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 splendors,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.