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My Country – Dorothea Mackellar Analysis

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My Country – Dorothea Mackellar Analysis
My Country – Dorothea Mackellar

My Country is an iconic nationalistic poem about Australia written by Dorothea Mackellar in 1908. Dorothea Mackellar was born in Sydney in 1885. Her education was comprised of private home tutoring until she attended University of Sydney. She travelled broadly with her parents and also become fluent in Spanish, French, German and Italian. She highly educated and lived an adventurous life. Though raised in a professional urban family, Mackellar's poetry is usually considered as typical bush poetry, inspired by her experience on her brothers' farms near Gunnedah, North-West of New South Wales.

Dorothea began writing at a young age and astonished her family when magazines paid to buy the rights to publish her prose pieces of literature. On September 1908 a poem, 'Core of My Heart', appeared in the London Spectator. It also reappeared several times in Australia before being renamed as 'My Country' in her first book, ‘The Closed Door and Other Verses’. During World War I 'My Country' became one of the best-known Australian poems which successfully appealed to the sense of loyalty nurtured by the war and post-war patriotism. This was all because of its frequent inclusion in anthologies. The Mackellar family owned several properties in the Gunnedah area in New South Wales, and it is this country that inspired her writing career.

An Anthology is a collection of priceless pieces of literature. An anthology will include all types of literature; fiction, poetry and drama to journals, letters, essays and speeches. An anthology records the enhancement of one of the great literatures in all its energy and variety. Hence, ‘My Country’ deserves a place in such as collection because there is a strong contrast between the Australia she saw from the current one. ‘My Country’ is a rhyming poem which consists of fourteen stanzas. The descriptive language is evocative/ expressive of various Australian landscapes and will attract readers of

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