Weekend reading....in my dreams...

I would love to be planning a weekend with nothing more arduous than re-reading some of my favourite books...I love these...I bought the first one 'Salvation Creek' for a plane trip back to the U.K from Sydney and was hooked!





Upon my return I had to get hold of the sequel which I enjoyed just as much:

I don't want to spoil your enjoyment if you haven't read either of them but just to give a bit of background info - the first book is the story of how Susan ends up living on beautiful Pittwater, just north of Sydney after a series of life dramas which make her re-assess her priorities about work and where she wants to live. If you know Pittwater and have ever dreamed of living the island life, you will love it. If you don't - it will make you realise what you have missed!

The second book continues her story when she marries Bob who lives, rather fortuitously, at 'Tarrangaua' built as a holiday home for the iconic Australian poet Dorothea Mackellar. Anyone who ever went to school in Australia will know of her most famous work:

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!

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.

I have left out the 3rd, 4th & 5th verses but these three hold the conundrum which dominates a lot of my thoughts and plans...if only I had the conviction of Ms. Mackellar. She evoked, with this poem, the passion of a young nation tired of being seen as 'Britain's grubby apron'. In a single line - 'I love a sunburnt country' she embraced everything Australian and made fools of an establishment that continued to yearn for 'green and shaded lanes'. I think maybe my indecision about green & shaded lanes or the wide brown land is best left for another post.......have a happy weekend whether your love is green or brown........s