Too long a sacrifice...

“Eritrean nationals residing abroad celebrated the 19th anniversary of Independence Day in a colorful manner, according to reports from different parts of the world.
(Shabait.com, 28 May 2010)

So they did; and I shared the celebration with some of them, so far as it goes. But what a shame that the courageous and self sacrificing promise of those long years in resistance has been so little realised in freedom since independence. “Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart”, an Eritrean expatriate friend said to me a few years ago – quoting, of course, a poet caught up in another independence struggle not a million miles from where I am typing this. The poem is one which made a great impression on me when I was younger; later it was one of those studied on my A level English course; but I didn't finally realise how true it is until much later. The poet is caught up in the personal, his love for Maud Gonne, but the personal and the political are not to be untangled; my affection for Eritrea, despite its current darkness, lies in wonder at the resilience and warmth of many Eritrean individuals I know or have known.

Easter, 1916
William Butler Yeats

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

The terrible beauty in Éire brought a terrible civil war ... but, eventually, a modern and humane state, not without its problems but evolving along side the other European liberal democracies. I hope that Eritreans, at home and abroad, will eventually see the fruits, as well as the fact, of independence – and sooner, rather than later.

Pomposity deflated

I recently donned sackcloth and ashes over my failure to unambiguously “walk the walk” of my expressed support for open systems.

I didn't, at the time, mention my intense dislike of Facebook both as a tool and as a social/business model. In fact The Growlery may not have mentioned it at all, but it is very real. I do use Facebook where I have to, but never without feelings of irritation.

This evening, to my amused delight, my brother pokes gentle fun at both prejudices with an uncommented reference to this cartoon...

A confusion of cuckoos

This has been a week of cuckoos.

On Tuesday, on the recommendation of Gayle Reynolds, I left my usual furrow to read Good omens. I'm glad I did; it was both funny and thought provoking. It's a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman but, despite having read several Gaiman novels, I somehow hadn't heard of this one even though it's been around for twenty years. Anyway, to get the point ... at the heart of the story is a changeling: a baby swapped in the cradle at birth. Given Gaiman's part in this, it's no surprise that the changeling in question is none other than the Antichrist. Nor, given Pratchett's involvement, is it surprising that said Antichrist gets delivered to the wrong address. But enough of the detail ... my point, for now, is that I started the week with a novel built around the myth of the changeling.

Moving on a couple of days, and on Thursday came the announcement that Craig Ventner had created "synthetic life". I don't want to get bogged down in circular arguments about whether he has "really" created synthetic life or not (I have my view, but it's irrelevant here). Suffice to say that the actual mechanism was to mug a passing bacterium, whip out its genetic payload and replace with DNA built in the laboratory ... in other words, an ultra sophisticated version of the cuckoo trick. (Strictly speaking, this is a class libel ... most cuckoo species are not brood-parasitic at all: they raise their own young. But I'll stick with common parlance, based around Cuculus canorus, the common European cuckoo.)

Thursday was also the day when, setting off early, I suddenly realised that I didn't have a book for the journey. In the dark I found a pile of paperbacks recently bought from a charity shop, selected a slim one for there was little spare space in my bag, and slipped it into my pocket. So it was that, as I pondered the Ventner announcement, I found myself reading John Wyndham's The Midwich cuckoos.

Wyndham's fiction features a small village in which, after a period of mass unconsciousness, every woman of childbearing age finds herself simultaneously pregnant. The book was written at a time when social attitudes to conception outside marriage were very different from today, and so reads oddly to 2010 perceptions. It was also a world of cold war paranoia, only a few years after the end of the 1939-1945 war. But set aside that historical gloss and Wyndham, like Jules Verne, had the knack of seeing future technological possibility. More than two decades before in vitro fertilisation became a reality, Wyndham's "cuckoos" were exotic ova implanted by an (unknown, but presumed to be extraterrestrial) agency. Biotechnology more generally was often the core of Wyndham's fictions (for example genetic modification in The day of the triffids or an age retardant serum in Trouble with lichen), along with its pitfalls; an alternative parallel to Verne would be Huxley's Brave new world. Anyroad ... to get back to the point, Wyndham's cuckoos started not in the nest but in the womb ... as close as the 1950s could reasonably get to Ventner's synthetic cuckoo within the cell itself.

Unlike the antichrist (back in paragraph two ... do try to keep up!), the young cuckoo emerging from an egg left in somebody else's nest is not really a changeling. It is added to the clutch of eggs in the nest, rather than replacing one. On the other hand, once that egg hatches the interloper chick evicts its acquired pseudosiblings so the effect is the same.

The trouble with a chance cluster of anything is that it sets the mind on a track which is no longer chance but a self structuring chain. The coincidence of three changelings in three days generates thoughts about changelings. So on Friday I had to pull down from the shelf and reread the most achingly sad but stunningly superb changeling fiction I know: Keith Donohue's The stolen child.

Where the changeling comes from (and the human child goes) is variable, depending on where your mythologies originate, but broadly speaking it is usually a magical offspring. Sometimes it is a magical geriatric. Donohue's changelings, though, are the geriatrically preserved result of previous exchange. That is, child "A" is stolen so that "B" can take it's place and live as human. Child "A" then becomes the most junior member of a band of similar beings living lives of suspended childhood in the woods. The senior member of this band, when the opportunity arises, is substituted for child "C" who is abducted and becomes the new most junior member below "A". There are a dozen or more of these sprites in the group, and opportunities for changing are not frequent. "A" may wait, suspended in prepubescence but ageing in mind, for a century or more before the opportunity comes to kidnap "Z" (who becomes the newest recruit to the woodland band) and resume interrupted human life in a time and family utterly unlike that from which s/he was originally stolen. It is all worked out in heart breaking detail, but with irresistible empathy, and there is an epiphanous ending (on both sides of the theft) to crown it all.

And so a week of cuckoos has passed.

---

• Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good omens. 1990, London: Gollancz. 057504800X (hbk) or 1991, London: Corgi 0552137030 (pbk) and more recently 2007, London: Gollancz. 9780575080485 (hbk).
• John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos. 1957, London: Michael Joseph. More recently republished 2000, London: Penguin. 014118146X (pbk).
• John Wyndham, The day of the triffids. 1951, London: Michael Joseph. More recently republished 2003, New York: Modern Library. 0812967127 (pbk).
• John Wyndham, Trouble with lichen. 1960, London: Michael Joseph.
• Aldous Huxley, Brave new world, a novel. 1932, London,: Chatto & Windus. More recently republished 2003, Lodi, N.J.: Everbind. 0971075697
• Keith Donohue, The stolen child. 2006, London: Jonathan Cape. 9780224076968 or 0224076965 (hbk.), 9780224076975 or 0224076973 (pbk.).

Full dark house

A month after JSBlog recommended the Bryant and May novels, today's read was the first case in their partnership: Full dark house. Triangulating from this different point in the series, I endorse JSB's recommendation. You'll have to be prepared for a horrible crime (which turns out to be a ... but no ... if you're going to read it, I'll let you find out for yourself what it turns out to be ... and if you're not, then it doesn't matter) or two, but they only punctuate what is on the whole a humanly engrossing puzzle.

In many ways, it's not a crime or detection novel at all, but whatever the literary equivalent might be of a buddy movie. Bryant and May are (if you'll forgive the cliché) like chalk and cheese. Bryant is a dreamer and visionary who takes the intellectual road less travelled to its apogee beyond all sense; May is a feet on the ground sceptic, driven to distraction by is partner's flights of degree which threaten not only the case and their careers but the unlikely existence of their department. In the end, both cases (past and present) are solved in the disconnect space between the two, after both have failed to make progress using their own approaches.

One of the things that impressed me was the author's ability to move back and forth between a nineteen year old May in the London Blitz of the 1940s and a May in his eighties in the early 21^st century, consistently maintaining believability and texture in both cases.

Around the pair are other intriguing minor characters: the stock forensic scientist, the woman sergeant whose gender keeps her from being taken seriously (and whose daughter is still with May in the present day), the diligent closed minded constable who is won over in the end ... not to mention assorted witches, actors, spiritualists, landladies, Greek millionaires, and a carnival of others, amid bombed sewers and falling masonry

A wonderful ride. I shall certainly move on through the sequels.

---

• Christopher Fowler, Full dark house. 2003, London: Doubleday, 0385605536 (hbk) or 2004, London: Bantam, 0553815520 (pbk)
  

More poison games

I posted "Poison games", last night, on a momentary whim that moved from peripheral thought to keyboard without passing though critical faculties, just before going to bed. I then woke in the night to the thought that it was a pointless post: the chances of any given reader having read both novels seemed small. I resolved to take it down again this morning.

This morning, however, there are more than thirty incoming emails about the post. I obviously have more like minded readers (or, more egotistically and less credibly, more influence) than I could have imagined.

The common thread linking every one of those email responses was a suggestion that my linkage of Due preparations for the plague to one section in Catching fire is too timid and restricted. All of my correspondents suggest that there are strong parallels between Hospital's novel and the whole setting for the Hunger Games idea.

Both are built around groups of people snatched from their usual lives by an arrogant, malevolent other to live or die by criteria they cannot foresee or influence in a constrained area specifically designed for the purpose. In both cases, the other is an interaction of political forces playing games at a level where individuals are merely counters – but where individual pique can prompt the very personal torturing of a particular victim or victims. Love, loyalty, compassion, and other flashes of and humanity, manage to flicker intermittently and surprisingly through the sordid grime of both scenarios. Both ask fundamental questions about the contradictions at the heart of ordered society.

It's an interesting and compelling comparison. So, I shall leave the post in place and recommend both books to those who have not yet encountered them.

---

• Suzanne Collins, Catching fire. (The Hunger Games trilogy.) 2009, New York: Scholastic Press. 9780439023498 or 0439023491
• Janette Turner Hospital Due preparations for the plague. 2003, Pymble, NSW: Fourth Estate 0732277302 (pbk.)

Poison games

Months after reading Suzanne Collins' Catching fire, (impressive and compelling first sequel to The hunger games), the section that stays most vividly with me is chapter 21 in part 3 ("The enemy").

In that chapter, the contestants are afflicted by a creeping fog of nerve gas which drives them before it down hill towards a lethal shore.

When I read it, I was reminded of the bunker scenes in Janette Turner Hospital's appallingly bleak Due preparations for the plague. As time goes by, the bond between the two grows stronger in my me, As either is brought to mind (as Hospital was, a few minutes ago, by a chance remark on the news), the other follows it.

I wonder whether Collins had read Hospital – or whether the linkage is entirely mine.

---

• Suzanne Collins, Catching fire. (The Hunger Games trilogy.) 2009, New York: Scholastic Press. 9780439023498 or 0439023491
• Janette Turner Hospital Due preparations for the plague. 2003, Pymble, NSW: Fourth Estate 0732277302 (pbk.)

When the temperature sinks, think pink

Today my friend Niamh, five year old grand daughter of colleague Seán, gave me a present. She chose it herself, and bought with her own money.

I am now the proud owner of the only pair of Barbie ankle warmers in my circle of acquaintance. In the year ahead, nobody will be cosier or pinker than I.

An act of betrayal

I started the new year with an act of betrayal.

I passionately believe in the principle of open source software. I ardently support the UN's support for it as the future of world development. Yet, in January of this year, when I decided that I need a web book with more RAM and a faster processor than the Asus eeePC which had served me well for nearly two years, I ... abandoned Debian Linux along with the Asus and installed Windows XP on its replacement.

Why?

Two answers, in essence. One is the availability of particular software tools; the other is simplicity. I'll deal with them the other way round, taking simplicity first.

Matt Revel (who, unlike me, enthusiastically keeps the faith intact) wrote a fascinating post, a couple of days back along, about conversion of an old spec Neoware thin client machine into an Ubuntu Linux server. Read it; it's wonderful. I used to do a lot of that sort of thing, back when computers were large boxes with plenty of space inside and visibly modular components. I still do it with the one remaining tower system I possess (my desktop network server and archive sentinel) but when I look inside the cramped innards of a laptop or smaller I quail; I back away, feeling old and hamfisted.

Reading Matt's post, I learned a number of things, and have taken away a number of ideas. One of them is the idea that I might, perhaps, be able to replace the 810Mbyte hard disk in an elderly but still beautiful Toshiba Libretto 50 (75MHz, 16Mb RAM, running Windows Me) with a flash card. But none of them include returning to Linux for a machine upon which I regularly rely for my core activities.

The truth is, I am not only too old and too short of time now for that sort of hardware wizardry ... I also cannot face the sort of time which Linux requires at the software end. Just as I used to fiddle around inside computers, so I fiddled around getting the best out of command line software shells ... but not any more. The sad fact is that when I install or remove a new program (something I typically do twice a day on average), Windows just installs or removes it, wham, in one go while Linux requires (in return for its many superior qualities) that I assemble several packages (often from different sources) and coördinate them. I do it on two machines (one 32 bit, one 64 bit), so that I have access to the greater efficiency and quality of Linux when it really matters, for particular purposes ... but the rest of the time I use Windows

This is not true of all open source software. Having made the decision to slob out in the flabby upholstered comfort of Windows, I can and do use (and promote the use of) OpenOffice (this post is being written in its word processor), Firefox (I use five different browsers, but Firefox is first choice 95% of the time), Thunderbird (since I discovered the terrible vulnerability of my archives in Outlook) – and each of them arrives as a one click Windows installer. All of those applications I just mentioned, by the way, are superb. I have (legal, paid for) copies of the Microsoft equivalents, simply because in my lines of work I have to operate within coöperative environments based on them as standards, and I must check that every document works exactly as expected within those environments ... but for my own working tools, chosen from preference, I go to the open equivalents: not just out of ideology but because they seem to me better.

So much for simplicity. Now for availability of particular software tools. It is an unfortunate fact that some software is not available under every operating system. Usually one can find equivalents that are just as good, or sufficiently good for one's purposes ... but not always. The deal breaking killer apps will vary from person to person, and from context to context, but for me on a machine which is predominantly used for serious volumes of writing on the hoof, there was just one. Ironically, it was an open source utility from SourceForge which emulates a Unix facility: AllChars, which gives Windows a quick and easy way to instantly type the characters which don't appear on a standard keyboard.

AllChars won't be essential to everyone. I have a frequent need to type the Euro symbol, the a+e ligature in words line encyclopædia, accented vowels, and so on. Some people happily use memorised numeric Unicode combinations to do this. The key sequence 2248[Alt-X], for example, yields (in most but not all modern Windows applications) the mathematical character ≈ which is also very useful to me ... but it takes five keystrokes and memorisation of that numeric code every time I enter that character. So long as I can remember the number, that's quicker than hunting though special character tables ... but still painful if I have to use the character often, or if I need to remember more than a couple of the codes. Life is, to be blunt, too short.

There are word processors which incorporate quick and easy ways to do this. Honourable mentions go to NotaBene (built from the ground up as the world's best tool for academic work involving multilingual text) and WordPerfect (in my opinion the best general purpose word processor available). In OpenOffice's word processor and spreadsheet there is an extension which adds the same utility. In each case, the sequence to access a particular character involves a master key (F6 in NotaBene, Ctrl-W in WordPerfect, a user selected key in the OO extension) plus a mnemonic pair of characters such as ~= for that ≈ symbol , for example, or ae for the ligature in encyclopædia. This same principle is used in AllChars – but it works across any program ( though the trade off is a narrower range of available characters).

Linux does allow addressing of these mnemonic pairs, and there are international keyboard layouts which allow modifier keys to accent vowels in particular. I noted a while back the availability of these options on the Linux variant Asus eeePC ... but also the fact that I couldn't find any way of making them instantly available on reboot without repeating the keyboard selection steps.

To be honest, life is too short for either four digit codes or repeated keyboard selections when I am offered a lazy alternative which works. Especially when (as now, as I write this) I have opened my carry along vade mecum machine in a transport terminus for ten minutes writing before packing it away again and boarding the next leg of my journey. AllChars is that alternative, and it is only available under Windows. And that one fact was what finally decided my return from Linux to Windows when I upgraded my netbook.

Having made the decision, however, I joyously returned to other software for which I had with equanimity accepted substitutes whilst using the Linux eeePC. WordPerfect, for example. I love OpenOffice Writer, and would always use it in preference to Microsoft Word; in fact I use it in preference to anything else for many, many things; but when I settle into heavy duty and complex writing over a long period, WordPerfect saves me enough time to make a significant difference. WordPerfect is not available under Linux, and I did without it without complaint; but now that I'm back on a Windows platform, I have welcomed the return of WordPerfect with open arms.

Four and a half months in, I still feel guilty about my act of betrayal, abandoning an open source operating system for a commercial one from Microsoft. This is the first time I have felt able to publicly talk about it. But, in honesty, I don't see myself going back until my reasons for it become redundant. May Matt forgive me.

Puerile and reprehensible...

This image illustrates a brazen heinous act of bibliovandalism perpetrated by one of my students.

My reason for posting it at this particular moment lies in a much more interesting, intelligent, philosophical and generally worthwhile Husserl reference by Unreal nature, "I am there, you are here".

I have to make the immature confession that it did make me laugh, though...

---

Jocelyn Benoist et al, Husserl. 2008, Paris: Les Editions du cerf. 9782204085939.

Roll up! Roll up!

Coming up to a full day since opening, it's being jostled down the recency list but don't let that make you overlook ... The Big Crab Contest 2010!!!

Next...!

“The nature and future of Afghanistan’s war is now bound to international political calculation, not least the United States’s electoral timetable. ... ... ... while the Pakistani army is combating militias in northwest Pakistan, including Pakistani elements of the Taliban, Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and other agencies will be increasing their links with the Afghan Taliban.”

(Paul Rogers, Afghanistan: a phantom endgame)

---

• Paul Rogers, Afghanistan: a phantom endgame. 2010-05-03, Open Democracy Global Security: http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/afghanistan-phantom-endgame

Scrabbling for territory

Courtesy of JSBlog's "out-takes" section, I recently discovered Ian Sansom's His own peak, a piece on John Fowles. This was one more link in a decades long conversation between JSBlog's Ray Girvan and myself about Fowles as an exemplar of disconnection between talent and humanity. The JSBlog description “great writer but egotistical git” pretty much summarises our area of agreement – most discussion concerning the exact balance between the two, how far they interpenetrate, to what degree one spoils the other, and so on. (We also both agree that The Aristos does Fowles no favours even on the great writer front.)

This is post is not about Fowles, however; he is simply the trigger for actually writing something which has hovered o the edge of my mind for at least a year. Towards the end of His own peak, Sansom quotes from Fowles' journal; his neighbours invite him over for a game of Scrabble, and he writes:

“The poverty of minds that can spend such evenings playing such rubbish . . . The Ms are wonderfully slow, really; like human snails, hardly credible.”

Lovely man. Not.

I am one of those human snails who enjoy Scrabble – though less as a game to win or lose than a fascinating process with numerous interacting aspects to observe.

Scrabble is, at the top level, a competitive game in which chance (the letter tiles drawn, the words and dispositions already played) interact with skill, knowledge of vocabulary, and so on. At that level, it would be fun but wouldn't hold me or inspire me to extol its joys. More interestingly, it is also a game which can be played coöperatively, or in which instances of tacit and tactical coöperation can benefit otherwise competing players. More interestingly still, to me, are the forces which act upon a game to decide the patterns which evolve within the playing space.

It is a game governed by a web of rules which, in large part and unlike other tactics/strategy games, derive in one way or another from natural language. It is goal driven, with maximum point scores being the game target. It is (again unlike most tactics/strategy games) played on a contoured terrain, the scattered double or triple letter and word score squares acting as attractors for letter chains. It begins at the centre of the board but the most powerful attractors, the eight red squares, are placed around the edges.

The result of all this is that a Scrabble game in play is a variety of finite cellular automaton with its own evolutionary pattern. The ways in which the physical pattern evolves in the game space from empty board to final arrangement of one hundred tiles (or nearly so) are complex and numerous.

The most interesting period is often the middle of the game. In the two examples shown here at top left, just under half of the one hundred tiles have been played. The first example (45 tiles) started with the word "TWILL" and has evolved upward and downward while staying mainly in the left hand side of the board. The second (41 tiles), starting from the word "PART" in exactly the same left of centre board position, has instead raced out to two diagonally opposite corners.

In the second pair of illustrations on the right, a single game is shown at two stages. At two thirds of the way through (upper frame, 22 words and 67 tiles in) the "organism" (or perhaps "colony"?) is confined to the left half of its environment. Immediately afterwards, however, the next move ("GAMUT") broke out of that straightjacket and by the end of the game (lower frame, 32 words and 99 tiles) both upper and lower right hand corners are utilised although a blank space remains between them.

Beating the bounds, again

Amongst the responses to "Beating the bounds" came an email from someone whose opinion I value, who disagreed with my separation of "observation" and "people watching" pictures.

“I was interested in the 'boundaries' post, and saw boundaries in the conversation triptych too, but not so much visual ones as interpersonal ones.”

Which is interesting, and I hope to hear more. It has helped to keep me wearing the boundary spectacles, and seeking to see outside the boundaries of my vision, when looking at what I do...

The same person also sent me an intriguing poem written by his daughter, which envisaged a fence not only as a boundary but as “a gateway of sorts” – which has drawn me into a whole new territory of introspection and bounds beating, not to mention pulling down Ursula K Le Guin's Threshold from the bookshelves yet again.

Another poem

I haven't posted a landmark poem for a while. As a direct result of coincident conversations both with my two brothers and with Jim Putnam over at TTMF, here is one which enthralled me when I learned it at an Australian primary school in the early 1960s and still calls back a mythical golden childhood time.

I'm not a fan of patriotism, and don't usually go for purple pastoral, but I forgive this one on both counts for its power to call up my own good ghosts.

My Country
Dorothea MacKellar, 1904

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.