She wrote it in 1904 while in England, homesick for the "sunburnt country" of "droughts and flooding rains".

It is a short poem, just two stanzas, written by a young woman who loved Australia for "her beauty and her terror", as much as those "sweeping plains".

There is a comfort today in knowing this has always been a harsh land, but peopled for tens of thousands of years before European explorers arrived. And despite the harshness it has been rich - the modern country of Australia developed on a sheep's back and with a miner's lamp.

There was terror on Tuesday on the eve of this new decade. Bushfires that have destroyed all in their path for months, and choked cities for days, roared across three states to remind us how powerless we are at times during natural events.

And because it is 2020 and the social media age there was beauty as well as terror. People fleeing the flames could not keep the awe from their voices as they described blood red skies and smoke clouds billowing up and over before they obliterated the sun. Across our screens we saw giant eucalypts blaze high and bow to the roaring wind generated by catastrophic fires.

The word dominion is used to describe the control we like to believe we exert over the planet. Bushfires demolish that word as comprehensively as they have blackened hundreds of thousands of hectares of our country this fire season, with months yet to come.

For decades scientists have warned of the consequences of unchecked fossil fuel use. Their modelling of what could happen has been denied, minimised and ridiculed. And despite mounting evidence over the years that the science was right, the politics of climate change has divided Australians and made toxic an issue that should have united us.

Our country - our wide brown land - is burning, with fires that scientists and firefighters say are undeniably linked to a warming, changing climate.

Let us start 2020 by counting the cost, mourning the dead and committing to the debates we have to have.

Issue: 39,491.