Australian Quotes

“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!”
― Dorothea Mackellar, The Poems of Dorothea Mackellar

“...stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own ... you can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.”
― Angelica Banks

“You mustn't judge Australia by the Australians.”
― Dame Edna Everage

“The e-reading revolution may have reached our shores this year but it has yet to reckon with Australia's summer holidays. Intense sunlight plays havoc with screens and the sand invades every nook and cranny, so as convenient and sexy as your new iPad may be, the battered paperback, its pages pocked and swollen from contact with briny hands, will likely remain the beach format of choice for a few years yet.”
― Geordie Williamson

“Alice came upon treasure after treasure: everlasting daisies in pastel pinks and yellows, trails of grey and white feathers, boughs heavy with blossom buds on the gum trees. She breathed in the warm earth and appreciated the sky, a blend of soldier-crab blue and every shade of purple in a pipi shell. The desert's an old dream of the sea.”
― Holly Ringland, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

“When I returned home soon afterwards, it was with a newly awakened sense of what Australian literature was good for: helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance.”
― George Williamson

“River Lily

Meaning: Love concealed
Crinum pedunculatum | Eastern Australia

Very large perennial usually found on the edge of forests, but also at the high-tide level close to mangroves. Fragrant, white slender star-shaped flowers. Seeds sometimes germinate while still attached to the parent plant. The sap has been used as a treatment for box jellyfish stings.”
― Holly Ringland, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

“I just wished there was more room in my little body to accommodate all these violent wild feelings that kept screaming around inside me. I already had so much stuff squashed in there - liver and appendix and intestines and heart and all that junk. There was absolutely no room for feelings. But they still managed to squeeze in somewhere. Most of them lived in my stomach - a whole huge mess of them in there - but some kept crawling over my hands, and some stuck in my throat like I'd swallowed a doorknob.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“River red gum
Meaning: Enchantment
Eucalyptus camaldulensis | All states and territories

Iconic Australian tree. Smooth bark sheds in long ribbons. Has a large, dense crown of leaves. Seeds require regular spring floods to survive. Flowers late spring to mid-summer. Has the ominous nickname 'widow maker', as it often drops large boughs (up to half the diameter of the trunk) without warning.”
― Holly Ringland, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

“Desert oak
Meaning: Resurrection
Allocasuarina decaisneana | Central Australia

Kurkara (Pit.) have deeply furrowed, cork-like bark, which is fire-retardant. Slow-growing but fast to develop a taproot that can reach subsurface water at depths over ten meters. Mature trees form a large, bushy canopy. Many found in the central desert are likely to be more than one thousand years old.”
― Holly Ringland, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

“But what is freedom? I sing the only words left to me: 'A bit of a bloody worry.”
― Kevin Price, Poetic Licence

“Dreams
If I could mould the world
As if working with clay
I’d soften the hurt take the pain away
I’d paint the sky the brightest blue
With raindrops making wishes come true
The sun would shine so bright and strong
To dry the tears and right the wrongs”
― Deborah Hyland, For the Moment: An Anthology of Poems Straight From the Heart

“The more you know, the less you need.”
― Australian Aboriginal proverb

“I began to think the damage to our country, to us even, went so deep now that it would never fully be repaired. I realised the worst damage wasn't the bombed buildings, the burnt-out cars, the shattered windows. It wasn't even the neglected farms and the holes in the fences and the crops gone to seed. It was the damage deep inside us. Words like spirit and soul started to mean more to me now.”
― John Marsden, Burning For Revenge

“All I got out of it was a terrible feeling that I was a disgusting human being. It was so against everything I stood for, everything I believed in. The next day I felt awful. I had a terrible headache anyway, and my stomach felt like it was still doing slow spins, but worse, far worse, was the way I felt such a slut.
I felt sick at myself.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“While she waited for Nedim to say something, Evelyn found an unexpected item in the corner of her coat pocket – a rough, crumbling, dried-up eucalyptus leaf. Her mother had sent it in a letter, along with some articles she’d cut out from an Australian newspaper about mining in north-eastern Bosnia and a drawing by her sister’s younger son. She’d put them all by her bedside and cracked the then-fresh leaf like she used to as a kid, overcome by the rush of familiarity as the scent burst out.”
― Bronwyn Birdsall, Time and Tide in Sarajevo

“The woman at reception was anywhere between thirty-eight and fifty-eight. Country skin puckering, mouth drooping like she’d been passed over for Bowls Club Treasurer.”
― Dave Warner, Exxxpresso

“My old Corona sat in front of the majestic iron gates of 4 Gwendolin Close, Dalkeith, like herpes on a beauty queen’s mouth”
― Dave Warner, City of Light

“The empty block at the end of my street is probably the best hang-out spot of the lot. While these places aren’t that exciting, they’re all we’ve got, and we make the most of them. It only takes a little imagination to navigate Merri like it’s our own secret
world and only we have the keys. The empty block isn’t just a dusty patch of land; it’s a meeting place, a safe haven to share secrets among the tall grass, a blank canvas for whatever projects Claire forces us into next.”
― Karys McEwen, All the Little Tricky Things

“My Flower
A seed it was planted
Inside my heart
And as it started to grow
I was filled with joy
And overwhelmed
By the beauty someday it would show
I watered this seed
With wishes and dreams
And hoped for sun filled days
I watched from afar
As it started to bloom”
― Deborah Hyland, For the Moment: An Anthology of Poems Straight From the Heart

“Moments hanging by a thread
Tortured twisted memories
Where angels fear to tread
If I could put together the pieces
Of the the puzzle in my mind
I could finally become whole again
And fill the void inside”
― Deborah Hyland, For the Moment: An Anthology of Poems Straight From the Heart

“Those who lose dreaming are lost.”
― Australian Aboriginal proverb

“Traveler, there are no paths. Paths are made by walking.”
― Australian Aboriginal proverb

“After all, it's natural for humans, isn't it? To want to learn. Being curious, wanting answers: that's the way we are.”
― John Marsden, The Night Is for Hunting

“She was studying a nearby bush covered with vibrant yellow pompom flowers.
"Wattle," he said.
"Golden wattle," she corrected.
"You're right."
"Did you know," she began, "that the seedlings from a golden wattle can live for up to fifty years?"
"That so?"
"That's a long time."
"It is."
"How old are you?"
"Younger than fifty." He was thirty-six, in fact.
"Wattle seeds are germinated by bushfires." Evie Turner nodded with vague disdain toward her parents, still engaged in heated discussion in the distance. "She's frightened of bushfires. That's because she's English. But I'm not. I'm Australian and golden wattles are my favorite flower and I'm not going to live in England no matter what she thinks."
With that, before Percy had a chance to tell her that golden wattles were his favorite, too, she'd run off to join the adults, sun-browned legs leaping over fallen logs with the expertise of one who seemed more familiar with this lonely place than she ought to be.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“It’s not that koalas can’t live with these changes. Often they can: if there are enough trees, of the right kind, for them to live in, in linear parks that follow old creeklines; if enough trees are left in the paddocks for them; if there are places for them to cross roads safely; if new urban developments retain old eucalypts and maintain habitat corridors; if dogs are managed and confined; if rural and urban fences are constructed for wildlife safety instead of as traps to entangle, ensnare and obstruct; if swimming pools have slopes and steps for animals to exit; if we take the time and make an effort.”
― Danielle Clode, Koala: A Life in Trees

“Why shouldn’t we be sentimental about a river? If you think of a river as a sewer, you’ll treat it as a sewer, then it will become a sewer. Perhaps if you care for a river instead, the river will in turn care for you.”
― Harry Saddler, A Clear Flowing Yarra

“… and if you’ve ever seen a tree that you’re just admiring for its having been there for a hundred years and it’s so solid, so big and so tall, and it just comes down so quickly, a hundred years is finished in a matter of five seconds. It’s just very emotional.”
― Harry Saddler, A Clear Flowing Yarra

“What had Chris Hurley dreamt of being? What had Cameron Doomadgee? When Hurley was doing rugby training at a Christian Brothers school, Doomadgee was in a youth detention centre. By the time Hurley was setting up a sports club for kids on Thursday Island, Cameron had a child and a broken relationship. As Hurley picked his way along the police career path, the other man was like his shadow. The date of their meeting was gaining on him. Hurley had success in his name, Cameron had doom in his. But the bitter joke of reconciliation in Australia was that the lives of these two men were supposed to be weighed equally.”
― Chloe Hooper, Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee

“Blunder Down Under (The Sonnet)

Humans be human, alive and aware,
not tokens of ancestral blunder.
Awake, arise and right the wrongs,
whether in the west or down under.

We gotta fight on the beaches,
We gotta fight on human grounds.
This time we gotta fight as human,
not as puppets to colonial clowns.

Fight as brave lions for sacred inclusivity,
not for saffronication as domesticated cows.
Fight for justice, rejuvenated by reason,
not for prejudice, decreed by apeman vows.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets