MONARO IN SUMMER by Mary Lang

It is winter in temperate Australia and many thousands travel each weekend to the snowy mountains to ski and to enjoy all the secondary fun that goes with that most elegant of sports.  However, the region has its attractions in summer too and Mary Lang's poem, written in the 1930s, provides ample evidence.

Here are the humping plains, treeless, pale brown,

Where half-grown hills romp roundly, up and down,

And fat, white clouds dapple the rippling miles

With great deep-coloured shadows.  In long files

The sheep move down to water where a spring

Gushes beneath two willow trees which bring

A patch of deep shade to long, summer days.

Against the far-off mountains, piles a haze,

The blueness of great distance, thick below

The pricking peaks that summer caps with snow;

And winter cloaks the whole long range with white,

From Canberra to Mount Kosciusko's height.

And on, beyond the mountains, travellers say

Plains wider far than these, stretch west, away

Right to the setting sun; I do not know.

I only love to see these grasses blow

Shyly beneath the truant summer breeze

Slipped inland from his lonely eastern seas;

Then, as a mob of sheep at break of day

Move off from camp, the slow clouds gather way

Before the little sea wind; and along

The happy earth the shadows slide, and pass

Into the dipping hollows, and along

The wide-flung purple of the cork-screw grass.