Reviews for The Land's meaning

The average rating for The Land's meaning based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-02-28 00:00:00 John Barnes I am not a big reader of Australian Lit. although there is much I want to read. I was accused by one of my brothers-in-law of being unpatriotic when my first big trip was...to Indonesia, NOT locally. Fact was, I yearned for the exotic and here it was right next door. I couldn't have chosen better. Indonesia blew my mind. It was about ten years later, after trips to Europe and the Pacific Isles that I found myself lying on my back looking up at multitudinous stars on the edge of a Queensland rainforest. A huge tree was silhouetted against this twinkling background, and it looked like a Xmas tree naked of its baubles which floated all around it. A surreal vision. I felt, as the trees on the edge of the clearing where we were camped came into my vision, that I was lying on the floor of a huge outdoor cathedral, the most astounding 'cathedral' I had so far seen...and I blessed the fact that I was seeing Australia last and bringing to it the riches of my unpatriotic travels. Since then I have found my penchant for my Australian holiday destinations has been those where white habitation has been nil to negligible...the desert, isolated country towns which are simply smears on the vast landscape which surrounds and will one day envelop and annihilate them, lighthouse cottages in very isolated locations and islands largely uninhabited. My vision of the future is of us becoming the boatpeople we have so often rejected, deserting this country we have destroyed in our 200 years plus of mainly European domination, while the indigenous inhabitants wave us farewell from the cliff tops, ready to resume their 50,000 years of continuous habitation. To me, THIS vision is not surreal. I also placed this book of poems on my History shelf, because the poems are in chronological order and illustrated with prints, paintings and photographs from the corresponding period. I've read many of these before, and many are familiar by name only and others completely unknown .So it feels very much a READ book. They only cover the last 200 years or so, since 1788 when the first convict ships arrived to found Sydney. Significantly the first of the two poems to mention an aborigine is titled "The Last Of His Tribe".There are no aboriginal legends in the book.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-10-26 00:00:00 Neil Duyck Excellent book to using for teaching in social studies.