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Aussies have just celebrated Australia Day. Commemorating the day that Captain Cook landed on Australian soil.

We celebrate all things Australian in a myriad of ways. People fly or wear the Australian flag - we have BBQ's (with lamb?), we sing Aussie songs, and shout a lot of Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Ois, watch cricket on television or play backyard cricket.

In 1908 Dorothea MacKellar's poem was published in a newspaper in London - she was in London and very homesick.

You can read the full poem here, and read about her.

The second stanza of the poem reads

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!

This Australia Day weekend some parts of Queensland were recovering from some of the worst floods in many years, and the brown swollen rivers were sending their water to Rockhampton on the central Qld coast, and the locals were watching this massive torrent of water as and made it's way through the centre of the city and flooded low lying areas. It may be two days before the peak of the floods in his area. (One of the new hazards are the large crocodiles that are moving long distances in the waters!)

Some 700 kms south the area is still in drought - the rainfall in this area far below the expected - as it has been for a few years. It's amazing watching this huge mass of water in the floods, while further south we'd do anything to get a small percentage of that water. But that is Australia - flooding rains and drought - all at once!

We are hopeful that we will get good rains down south - but time will tell. We celebrated well over the long weekend - plenty of beer, wine, BBQ's, and fellowship with family and friends.

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