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.

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 watch 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

This site was created on the 23rd September 1999, as a naturalized Australian, I have respect for all Nations,  that includes our Aboriginal Community.

In retrospect, I can but marvel at a nation that has withstood the winds of time, who, with the colonization of Australia and the immigration of countless nationalities, have never lost their priceless heritage; a God given right to practice what their forefathers have handed down, primarily purely orally, generation after generation.

Australian Aborigines, the original inhabitants of the continent, are one of the best known and least understood people in the world, and as some would have us believe, supposedly the world's most primitive culture and the living representatives of the ancestors of mankind. But in the face of all that, they have not sucumbed to the ever changing face of Australia!

Aborigines are better known to the world than are the non-aboriginal Australians, who immigrated from Britain and other European countries.

In reality, Aboriginal culture is a complex, subtle and rich way of life; what it was in the past and what it has become today. Their culture remains unspoiled.

Aborigines, due to their relative cultural isolation, were forced to develop solutions to the problems of human adaptation in the unique and harsh Australian environment.

The result was a stable and efficient way of life, seeming slow to change. Records reveal, however, a number of innovations, among them the earliest known human cremations, some of the earliest rock art and certainly the first boomerangs, ground axes, and grindstones in the world.

Aborigines altered the landscape in significant ways, using what has been called "firestick farming" to control underbrush growth which in turn aided them with their hunting.

Aboriginal groups influenced each other. Waves of change swept the entire continent; such as changes in tools and implements, in social organisation, and in ceremonial practices and mythological concepts.

Aboriginal culture was, and is dynamic, not static. The Aboriginal culture of the last two hundred years, the period after the arrival of the colonists, has also been dynamic.

Aboriginal culture was, at the point of first contact, as it is today.

The Aboriginal population of Australia at the time of the arrival of the whites in 1788 was probably between 250,000 and 500,000. The pattern of Aboriginal settlement was like that for present-day Australians, except in the tropical north, with most of the population living along the coasts and rivers.
Densities varied from one person for every thirty-five square miles in the arid regions to five to ten persons for every one square mile on the eastern coast.

Residential groups ranged in size from ten to fifty people, with some temporary ceremonial gatherings reaching up to five hundred.

Most people tend to think of Aborigines as a unified, homogeneous group, albeit that no individual Aborigine, in the pre-colonial past, would have known of the existence of other Aboriginal peoples and regions of the vast continent of Australia, which covers nearly three million square miles, almost the area of the United States.

Aborigines, through loss of land rights, loss of identity, have, without a doubt, never lost sight that the reality of their culture is precious and of benefit to Australia.

Their land, 'our Land' 'our birthright,' is too rare to be given or taken away