Caring for Country is a collection of Aboriginal and white poetic responses to Australia’s changing environment.
Love of country has been expressed since the earliest days, when Aboriginal song-makers celebrated the relationship between the land and its people. Colonists gradually adapted to the unfamiliar landscape, writing paeans to its beauty and magnificence, as did white poets born in Australia.
Aboriginal poets such as Jack Davis Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Kevin Gilbert were quicker to lament threats to the environment in the name of progress - the appropriation and mining of Aboriginal lands, destruction of old-growth forests, the erosion caused by land-clearing and farming - a poetic protest joined by contemporaries Roland Robinson, Mary Durack and Judith Wright.
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