Core of my heart

1908
Manuscript,
Permanent loan from the Estate of Dorothea Mackellar, 1970
MLMSS 1959 / Box 16 / Item IV / C

Dorothea Mackellar wrote her first draft of ‘Core of My Heart’ in London around 1904, when she was 19 and homesick for Australia while travelling with her father. The poem was originally published in the London Spectator Magazine in 1908, but Mackellar rewrote it several times before it was published in Australia in 1911 in her first book, The Closed Door. She also changed the words in later recordings of her reading the poem.

Mackellar 'never professed to be a poet. I have written – from the heart, from imagination, from experience – some amount of verse'.* Following The Closed Door, she continued writing poetry and published several novels, but wrote very little after her father’s death in 1926.