Wide Brown Land

Marcus Tatton, Futago  and Chris Viney

Wide Brown Land

2010

Corten steel and steel rod. 

35m x 3m

This artwork celebrates Dorothea Mackellar's popular Australian poem My Country which was written in 1908. The sculptural forms that make up the work are inspired by the cursive style of Mackellar's own hand-writing. The artwork frames a wide vista that stretches across the National Arboretum Canberra to the hills that mark Canberra's western and southern boundaries.

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!"

Dorothea Mackellar was born in Sydney's Point Piper in 1885 and died in Sydney in 1968. To learn more about Dorothea Mackellar and her poetry, visit the website Dorothea Mackellar.