Australia: Land of Timeless Beauty

By Mary Mageau

An engaging collection of lyric essays and musings is found here. Each one celebrates a place that is unique within the ‘Great South Land’ while every location, with its beauty and variety, establishes a living link to the land that nurtures and sustains it. Diverse parts of Australia—deserts to mountains, rainforests to beaches, rugged escarpments to lush tropical wetlands—provide the special compass points on the longitudes and latitudes of our homeland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DoctorZed Publishing
• Release date: Sep 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304329547

Mary Mageau

Mary Mageau is an award-winning composer and writer. Born and educated in the United States, she has lived in Australia since 1974. Her writings in the Japanese verse forms of haiku, tanka and haibun are published in the United States by Red Moon Press, The MET Press and Kei Books. Mary's poetry also appears in American, Canadian and Australian anthologies and literary journals: Gusts, Atlas Poetica, Eucalypt, Take Five, Paper Wasp and Yellow Moon. In 2010 Blemish Books, published twenty of her haibun poems in Triptych Poets, Volume I. Mary also loves to travel, gathering stories for her historical fiction. Two romances, The Trousseau and An Antique Brooch, explore the early South Pacific settlements of New Caledonia and Norfolk Island during the 1850s and 60s. A third novella, In the Eye of a Storm, is set in Paris during the time of the French Revolution while her latest book, Vanquished, unfolds in medieval France during the Catholic Church's persecution of the Cathars in Languedoc. These four novellas are written for young adults and general readers alike.

Book preview

Australia

Land of Timeless Beauty

Mary Mageau

Australia

Land of Timeless Beauty

Copyright © 2013 by Mary Mageau

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned or transmitted in any printed or electronic form without prior permission from the publisher.

Please do not participate in the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

ISBN  978-1-304-32954-7

Cover photograph by Mary Mageau

Boab Tree, West Australia

Table of Contents

Minuscule

Who Has Seen the Wind?

A Place Too Far

Bones of the Earth

Woman of Flowers

Lavender Fields

Hunting the Boab

Landscapes Remembered

Eucalypt

Eating Close to the Earth

Bush Heritage Australia

Interconnections

Jacaranda Time

In the Moment

The Mighty Oak

Written in the Land

About the Author

Introduction

This book presents a collection of lyric essays and musings, all of which celebrate a place that is special and unique within our ‘Great South Land.’

Each essay is a point of intersection between imagination and nature, exploring the ways these influence one another. Each piece is about my relationship to a particular place and occasionally about society’s relationship with the natural world.

Every place looks for words to shape the stories embedded within them, including stories of the people who have claimed them and whose lives somehow articulate them. Every location provides a living link to the land that nurtures and sustains us.

I draw inspiration from using the material world as metaphor and as place. Every part of Australia—from deserts to mountains, from rainforests to beaches, from rugged escarpments to lush tropical wetlands—provides a compass point to the longitudes and latitudes of the land that is our home.

Minuscule

The sunrise was glorious this morning and I’m standing under a pale blue sky, speechless at the array of flowers spread before me. Dew still clings to their vibrant petals as they lift themselves toward the sun.

The plantings in my friend’s heritage garden first captured my attention. Based on an original design from the 1840s, masses of snapdragons, forget-me-nots, scarlet impatients and brown-eyed Susans are offset by tall stalks of hollyhocks and larkspur. Beds of roses and French