I Love a Sunburnt Country Trivia Quiz

Answer: My Country

The second verse of this poem is by far the best known, written when the author was just nineteen years old, in 1904.

The whole poem is:

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

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!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze ...

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

It beautifully encapsulates the love we Aussies have for our land. It speaks of the vast differences in the landscape, and tells of the fickleness of nature; flooding rains one year, and drought the next!

Answer: 1981

Now available both in hardback and online, this book has become the authoritative reference for Australian English.

An initiative that took more than 10 years to come to fruition, the Macquarie Dictionary was developed primarily by a working group led by Professor Arthur Delbridge from the newly established Macquarie University. Academics from across the nation's biggest universities contributed to the project and lexicographer Susan Butler was the chief editor at the time of its first publication.

It provides a timeline of the development of the language in Australia, including the 'flash' language spoken by convicts, the influence of those who rushed to Australia for gold, the more refined tones of those who made up the governing class at the time of the country's founding, and the integration of words from local indigenous groups.

Answer: Northern Territory

Arnhem land is really big - for a size comparison, Tasmania's mainland area is only 65,519 square kilometres (25297.027 square miles). Not an Aboriginal name as assumed by most, it was so-named by the captain of a ship owned by the Dutch East India Company after his native Dutch city of Arnhem.

Seventy-five percent of its population is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, whose people give the area a rich and varied cultural heritage. It is thought the world's oldest stone axe is located here, and possibly the oldest trading treaty in Australia. Traders from nearby South Sulawesi (Indonesia) visited the area for several hundred years to trade.

The area was proclaimed an Aboriginal reserve in 1931 and traditional laws and customs are practised by several of the largest local people groups.

Answer: True

Australia is a big country. Really big. Most of the population have settled around the fertile edge but there are huge sheep stations, cattle ranches, mining settlements, and Aboriginal settlements dotted across the country. If you live far away from the larger cities and are injured or sick, it's days of driving to get the help you need.

In the 1920s, Reverend John Flynn has a vision to provide "a mantle of safety" to pioneers and indigenous folk who lived in the bush. The impetuous for his goal came from two places - a stockman who was injured during a stampede, and from a letter Flynn had received from Lieutenant Clifford Peel in suggesting aviation be used to bring medical help to the Outback. Peel had read John Flynn's "Northern Territory and Central Australia - a Call to the Church" and this had got the young Victorian medical student and airman thinking of how help might be provided.

Peel answered his country's call and volunteered for Australian Flying Corps in 1917, and corresponded with Flynn, planning in great detail how the operation might be run. When Peel made the ultimate sacrifice in 1918, Flynn saw their plan brought to fruition with the founding of the Royal Flying Doctor Service in 1928.

Answer: Sheep

There has been a strong world demand for Australian sheep products for more than two hundred years. Wool was harvested from sheep initially run in Queensland and northern NSW on the western side of Great Dividing Range. From the second half of the 19th century wool was exported to Japan and the UK and Europe, mostly from the Merino sheep introduced from Spain. The sheep were developed extensively to produce longer stands of finer wool and shearing techniques were refined to get the very best product available. In fact, by the late 19th century, wool was Australia's biggest export earner.

Apart from wool, lamb and mutton were also produced, and over the years a live trade market in sheep has been developed to the point where in 2022, Australia is the world's largest sheep exporter.

Answer: Robert Menzies

Born in Jeparit, Victoria, on 20 December 1894, Robert Gordon Menzies was a country boy who graduated with first class honours in Law in 1917 from Melbourne University. In 1929 he was appointed a King's Counsel, at the time the youngest in Victoria. He was elected to the Victorian state parliament in 1928 but quit that in 1934 and won the seat of Kooyong. His first stint as Prime Minister was in 1939 with the death while in office of Joseph Lyons.

This was a strategic time for the world with the declaration of war in September that year. Menzies was briefly knocked off the Prime Minister perch, but got back on in 1949 and won the next six general elections, the last in 1963.

Menzies oversaw a period of enormous economic prosperity and stability, as well a series of important initiatives that included the Snowy Hydro scheme. He died in May 1978 of a heart attack.

Answer: Alfred Deakin

Alfred Deakin was a Victorian politician who spent a long time in politics, first taking a seat in 1879 at the age of 23. He moved from state politics to federal politics, serving as the second Prime Minister of Australia, as well as two further terms. A university in Melbourne is named for him, as well as an electoral boundary.

While a Victorian parliamentarian, Deakin made representation to Imperial Conference in London, arguing for a reduction in the payment for defensive support provided by the United Kingdom. In 1907 his government brought in a bill to establish compulsory military service, which was the first in the country's history. The first independent navy in the British empire was created at that time.

Answer: South Australia

It is said (anecdotally only) that the reason the good folk of South Australia have a slightly different from the rest of the general populace of Australia is because they never had their posh tones sullied by the flash chat of convicts.

But in fact, while South Australia was never the destination of convict ships, some managed to find their way there. In fact, two police constables and a Lord Mayor were escaped convicts. There is the other small matter that the English never intended that South Australia or Western Australia would receive convicts, but WA ended with some, nonetheless, from 1850. Transportation to New South Wales stopped in 1840 while it continued for several more decades to other Australians destinations. Most convicts settled in Australia after their incarceration ended and without doubt contributed to the wealth and prosperity of the nation.

Answer: Waratah

Waratahs grow in the wild from the coastal town of Ulladulla across to the Blue Mountains area and gets its botanical name, Telopea, from the Greek word telopos, (seen from afar). A member of the Proteaceae family, it grows to 3m (about 10ft) tall and its flower heads grow up to 15cm (6 in) in diameter. It was first described by Robert Brown in 1810.

Aboriginal lore says that the flower sprang up from the ground where the woman 'Krubi of the red cloak' died of a broken heart after her chosen lover died in a war with another tribe.

Answer: 1901

The development of the Australian constitution was a deliberate process of consultation and discussion which started in the last decade of the 19th century. The starting point was a draft constitution that had been proposed in 1891. The reason to have a such a charter was both to end a situation in which there were effectively six separate countries, and to start breaking the apron strings held by the English. There were other benefits; self-determination, ability to develop trade agreements, and a unified approach to defence and other national matters.

When the idea was floated, people in every state were consulted and ideas of how it might work through a series of people's conferences and premier's conferences that brought the results back to Federation Convention. The proposal was presented in British Parliament by a delegation of Australian representatives. It was signed into law in July 1900 and declared on 1 January 1901.