Browse through my pictorial itineraries of Australian destinations:

Australian Capital Territory
> Canberra

New South Wales
> Sydney – The Entrance – Newcastle

Northern Territory
> Adelaide – Darwin

South Australia
> Adelaide – Yorke Peninsula

Tasmania
> Devonport – Launceston
     >> Tiagarra

Victoria
> French Island
> Grampians NP
> Great Ocean Road
> Lakes Entrance
> Melbourne
> Melbourne – Mildura – Bordertown
> Phillip Island
> Wilsons Promontory NP

Western Australia
> Fremantle
> Mandurah
> Perth

The Earth gave birth to a snake and it wriggled all over the Earth making all the river beds as it went.  The snake then asked for the frogs to be born.  The frogs were born in sacks of water so the snake tickled them and made them laugh.  They laughed so hard that the sacks burst, releasing the water and filling all the river beds.  With the coming of water to the land, all the plants, trees, birds and animals were made.

In the Burruguu one of the laws that the animals learned was about certain places they could not go.  Some of the animals broke the law by going to these places and they were turned into hills, mountains and valleys.  These animals that broke the law became law totems.  In Nhunggal country, the animal that broke the law was the long neck turtle, and so he is the law totem for the Nhunggabarra people.  The animals that did not break the law were turned into Aboriginal people.  This is how Aboriginal people got all their different yurrti (totems) – from the animals who were rewarded and turned into people.

The Rainbow Serpent story sourced from Sveiby K E & Skuthorpe T 2006, Treading Lightly, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.

Australia is a land of poetic quality, providing incessant inspiration and enchantment.  Dorothea Mackellar adequately encapsulated the beauty of this land in her 1945 poem, erringly titled 'My Country':

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!

A stark white ring-barked forest
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.

Dorothea certainly loved every acre of this majestic land, however, what she failed to mention is that this land rightfully belongs to the Aboriginal people who have been living here since long before the alluvial systems of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus supported early Mesopotamian civilisations.  The story of European settlement in this land is a gruesome and a harrowing one, fading away in people's minds with time.  We must therefore make every effort to remember, respect and honour these pulchritudinous and erudite people, and show them gratitude for looking after this land for millennia.  Click here to find out what you can do.

Other web sites by the author: Engineering Aerospace | Ataraxia

Updated on Tuesday, 02-Mar-2010 17:38:19 EST