Piers Akerman: Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country recognises Australia’s climate

The ABC and its leftist allies like to say weather extremes are recent phenomena, but a legendary Australian poem written in 1908 shows different, writes Piers Akerman.

A year after devastating bushfires obliterated ill-prepared villages in NSW bushland hamlets, unleashing wild claims of extinction by human-induced global warming, the state’s coastal areas are being battered by flooding rains.

No mention of global warming from those who so recently predicted that the continued use of fossil fuels would bring about such a prolonged drought that the dams would never fill again and rivers would never run.

The constant drumbeat of doom from those heavily invested in the renewable energy sector and the cult-like obsession with inefficient wind and solar power was paused when the real and clear danger of the coronavirus pandemic struck but, as vaccines are created at unprecedented speed, the climate extinction camp is again ramping up its propaganda.

Sydney is being hit by record rain this weekend. Picture: Julian Andrews

The cheerleaders for the as-yet unproven claims of links between weather events and human activity are given an open microphone at the ABC, courtesy of the taxpayers, who have no recourse and as the ABC lacks any independent oversight, they stay shut out of the conversation.

Listening to the public broadcaster, a visitor might think that the nation was preoccupied with the rapidly growing alphabetical jumble of self-identified “genders”, public celebrations of minority sexual attractions and opposition to traditional families.

It takes a storm to relegate these issues to their rightful place in the natural order.

As Dorothea Mackellar wrote — unchallenged — in her heartfelt poem My Country (first published in The Spectator in London on 5 September 1908): “I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.”

The poem has not yet been cancelled by the Orwellian woke folk but its honest depiction of our climate defies those who would prefer us to believe that bushfires and floods are recent phenomena, caused by greedy capitalists.

Before they boot up their energy-hungry laptops and fire off intemperate comments, the historical record is firmly with Ms Mackellar.

Time has proven Dorothea Mackellar right over Australia’s climate.

Floods and bushfires are in the DNA of the nation, pre-European settlement, post-European settlement, before the Industrial Revolution and since the Industrial Revolution.

Gundagai, on the Murrumbidgee, has recorded floods since the earliest days with reports of the river bursting its banks in 1831, 1844, 1852, 1891, 1925, 1974, 2010 and 2012.

The Hunter Valley floods of 1955 were the subject of a feature film, flooding of the Hawkesbury and Georges River 70 years earlier followed what was claimed to be Sydney’s wettest day with a rainfall of 327.6mm (12.9 inches) in 24 hours.

Honest examination of the weather has been blocked at the ABC, where Ita Buttrose ineffectually presides over the Leftist-controlled organisation.

Even the 10th anniversary of the lethal Fukushima tsunami this month was treated by ABC as an opportunity to launch into an anti-nuclear diatribe though as its sometime friend, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, pointed out, the findings of a UN report published to coincide with the anniversary concluded that no adverse health effects among residents of Fukushima had been found that could be directly attributed to radiation.

The ABC’s blatant political agenda was openly displayed in its dishonest portrayal of Cardinal George Pell, but even the High Court’s comprehensive dissection and destruction of the case made against him did not dissuade the ABC from targeting Attorney- General Christian Porter last month.

Attorney-General Christian Porter is suing the ABC over the report alleging he raped a woman in 1988. Picture: AAP Image/Lukas Coch

Porter has now brought a defamation suit against the ABC and Louise Milligan over its report of an alleged historical rape made by friends of a dead woman who made it clear that she didn’t wish charges to be laid, and whose parents expressed concerns that mental illness could have caused to have “confected or embellished” the allegation against him.

The Left is already in defence mode, claiming that Porter controls the courts and laws and that there is a clear conflict of interest.

This is yet another attack on the rule of law and a further push to replace the traditional justice system with the luvvies’ favoured model, which The Castle’s scrabbling lawyer character Dennis Denuto described as: “The vibe”.

Unfortunately, the vibe has no place in the law.

The law must be applied equally to all, Attorneys- General or the ABC.