Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas any more

Yorkshire Pudding is always taking us along on his walks through the English countryside. I thought today I would take us someplace else.

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,
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.

Stumped? It could almost be somewhere in the American West -- Arizona maybe, except for the jewel sea -- but it is not.

Dorothea Mackellar (1885 - 1968), author of the poem, was from Australia. She began writing the poem in 1904 while visiting London, England. The spectacular 12-foot-high metal sculpture of a phrase from the second stanza is located at Australia's National Arboretum in Weston, a suburb of Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT).

Thank you, Sue (Elephant's Child), for introducing me to this beautiful poem.

I have been named a tall poppy

...and the 101st National Living Treasure of Australia by Carol in Cairns (here’s proof) but as a new adopted Australian I am not supposed to revel in the fact.

Unaccustomed as I am am am to public speaking speaking speaking (can’t someone do something about that reverb? -erb? -erb?), I do want to say a great big “Thank you” to Carol -- did I mention that she is in Cairns? -- and, by extension, to all those wonderful people out there in the dark of the Great Land Down Under. I shall try to be worthy of your trust.

*takes seat, waving to Helsie in Brisbane*

I suppose now I will have to try to work words like “billabong” and “Great Barrier Reef” and “dingo” and “Tasmania” and “koala” and “skivvies” into my everyday vocabulary.

If you click on that link up there in the first paragraph, you can see the names of all 100 of Australia’s National Living Treasures. I recognized eleven. How many do you recognize?

Shame on us.

Willkommen, bienvenu, welcome!

Unlike my blogging friend Lord Yorkshire Pudding of Pudding Towers, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, in the United Kingdom, I do take notice of my blog’s followers. Pudding seems to be above all that.

They are not my “disciples” (as Pudding suggested), just people who like what I happen to have written.

Two more people decided to become followers this week:

Helsie, who makes her home in Brisbane, Queensland Australia; and عبده الضحوي‬‎ (Abdo Aldhoi), a طالب جامعي (college student) who hails from الحديده المراوعة (Hodeidah Alemrauap).

I know where Australia is, but I had to investigate further to learn that Hodeidah Alemrauap, which is also known as Al Hudaydah, is the fourth largest city in the country of Yemen. Hodeidah/Hudaydah is located on the southeastern coast of the Red Sea, just across the water from the countries of Eritrea and Djibouti. Here is a map of Yemen and its neighbors:

I know that people from Yemen have passed through here before because Yemen’s flag is in my treasure-trove of little gif and jpg files that I copied from that Feedjit thingy over in the sidebar, but Mr. Abdo Aldhoi is our first registered guest from there.

Yemen’s flag looks like this:

Australia’s flag (I didn't forget you, Helsie) looks like this:

Any vexillological disparity you might perceive is not my fault; I merely used what I found.

People have to come to blogs like mine to find the phrase “vexillological disparity.”

Yorkshire Pudding, eat your heart out.

This just in: Auckland is now a suburb of Sydney...

Not really. But it could happen. Read this.

For those of you who never follow instructions, here’s an excerpt:


Massive quake moves NZealand closer to Australia

WELLINGTON (AFP) – A massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake last week has moved the south of New Zealand closer to Australia, scientists said Wednesday.

With the countries separated by the 2,250-kilometre-wide (1,400-mile-wide) Tasman Sea, the 30 centimetre (12 inch) closing of the gap in New Zealand won’t make much difference.

But earthquake scientist Ken Gledhill of GNS Science said the shift illustrated the huge force of the tremor, the biggest in the world so far this year.

“Basically, New Zealand just got a little bit bigger is another way to think about it,” he told AFP.

While the southwest of the South Island moved about 30 centimetres closer to Australia, the east coast of the island moved only one centimetre westwards, he said.

The biggest quake in New Zealand in 78 years caused only slight damage to buildings and property when it struck the remote southwest Fiordland region of the South Island last Thursday.

A small tsunami was generated by the earthquake, with a tide gauge on the West Coast of New Zealand recording a wave of one metre.

(end of excerpt)


So if the article is correct and the distance across the Tasman Sea is 1,400 miles and the gap was just diminished by 12 inches, I calculate that if a 7.8 magnitude earthquake occurs once a year moving forward (no pun intended), the title of my post will become fact in a mere 7,392,000 years (that’s 5,280 years to move one mile -- because there are, you know, 5,280 feet in a mile -- multiplied by the 1,400 miles across the aforementioned Tasman Sea). Actually, that is wrong. Including the foot already gained by last week’s earthquake, I should have said 7,391,999 years.

I have my own theory about last week’s earthquake. I think it was caused by Kiri Te Kanawa attempting to hit an extraordinarily high note whilst rehearsing an aria.

The spelling of “metre” and “centimetre” and “kilometre” can be explained by the article’s having been originally published in a country that is a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations. The use of the term “NZealand” in the headline is somewhat curious. My use of the word “whilst” cannot be explained at all.