Wide Brown Land

by Leanne Seymour

Title

Wide Brown Land

Artist

Leanne Seymour

Medium

Mixed Media - Photopainting

Description

This is an artwork I've adapted from an awe inspiring image I found online taken of an old mangrove tree over 700 yrs old in Australia. I marvel at the tenacity of something living and yet so old that can survive centuries of weather ravages as well as all the other natural elements surrounding it. Here in Australia, one of the oldest land masses in the world, there is so much history or story captured in the landscape that often is translated into myths and stories by the Australian indigenous culture and labelled as a form of dreaming.

I have added and transformed this image somewhat in the process of adding my own dreaming to this image through color and line. This is the 2nd image I've created through using the original image and with this I've added sepia tones to highlight the connection to land with this image - ergo the title.

One of our most famous Australian poets, Dorothy Mackellar wrote an iconic piece of poetry honoring this wide brown land of Australia called "My Country" and wrote these words:

"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."

I love this poem and most children in Australian schools learn this one.....it's an absolute gem and expresses so much of what Australia is as a country.

Artist: Leanne Seymour






Artist: Leanne Seymour

Uploaded

February 14th, 2020

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