Australia, The Brown Island, My Island Home

David Rowbotham's poem, The Brown Island

Peter Porter, Sydney Cove, 1788

Compare and contrast:

Christine Anu, My Island Home

Warumpi Band, My Island Home

Erasmus Darwin, Visit of Hope to Sydney-Cove, near Botany-Bay

Nostalgia for Australia

Literary Links

Cultural Attache


(Not to forget Corfu, The Green Island (Kerkyra, Kerkyra)

See also, Corfu)

Eileen Slake, Medal with quotation from Erasmus Darwin

Visit of Hope to Sydney-Cove, near Botany-Bay


WHERE Sydney Cove her lucid bosom swells,

And with wide arms the indignant storm repels;

High on a rock amid the troubled air

HOPE stood sublime, and waved her golden hair;

Calmed with her rosy smile the tossing deep,

And with sweet accents charmed the winds to sleep;

To each wild plain she stretched her snowy hand,

High-waving wood, and sea-encircled strand.

"Hear me," she cried, "ye rising realms!
Record Time's opening scenes, and Truth's prophetic word.

There shall broad streets their stately walls extend,

The circus widen, and the crescent bend;

There, rayed from cities o'er the cultured land,
Shall bright canals, and solid roads expand.

There the proud arch, colossus-like, bestride

Yon glittering streams, and bound the chasing tide;

Embellished villas crown the landscape-scene,
Farms wave with gold, and orchards blush between.

There shall tall spires, and dome-capped towers ascend,

And piers and quays their massy structures blend;

While with each breeze approaching vessels glide,

And northern treasures dance on every tide!"
Then ceased the nymph -- tumultuous echoes roar,

And JOY's loud voice was heard from shore to shore --

Her graceful steps descending pressed the plain,

And PEACE, and ART, and LABOUR, joined her train.

Erasmus Darwin



Sonnet.
Written on Board the Medway, off Hobart Town, Van Dieman's Land.

O I COULD gaze the live-long summer day
On such a scene as fills the raptured eye
In this fair haven! Mountains that reach the sky
Rise on the right and left, shadowing the bay
With their huge forms, and diadem'd with grey
And castellated rocks, whose hues may vie
With the dark tints o' the sombre drapery
That waves i' the wind adown their sides for ay.
Yet all is wild and waste, save where the hand
Of man, with long-continued toil and care,
Has won a little spot of blooming land
From the vast cheerless forest here and there!
So is the moral world—a desert drear
Where but a few green spots amid the waste appear!

John Dunmore Lang



Treaty, Yothu Yindi