I Love a Sunburned Country

‘Lost’, Frederick McCubbin 1886. The painting is also known as ‘The Lost Child’, and was created at the Box Hill Artist’s Camp. It is Australia Day today, and in reflecting on what it means to be Australian one must eventually come to think about the land itself.

Although I grew up in the city, there were many visits to the country, and several camping trips in the bush. I even recall once trying my hardest to get romantically lost at Hanging Rock – but that was rather difficult with a fifty other tourists scrambling around pretending to do the same thing.

In my early teens I bought a print of Frederick McCubbin’s (1855–1917) painting Lost. I found the picture so evocative; dreamy. It is a quintessential image of the Australian bush: mysterious, frightening, unsettling.

I even recall once trying my hardest
to get romantically lost at
Hanging Rock…

It still looks just like that today, and looking at the painting I can easily imagine myself sitting on a stump amongst the itchy grass, hearing nothing but the incessant buzzing of the insects and birdcalls, or the rustle of some creature in the underbrush, the sun all the while beating down overhead.

Today I celebrated the day with friends on a picnic in the Botanic Gardens – and annoyingly I still managed to get sunburned despite the cloud cover (darn those UV rays). I should have been wearing a straw hat like the girl in the painting.

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!

(Excerpt from Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country)