In a Sunburned Country

It is only recently that I have discovered Bill Bryson, and in short order he has managed to become one of my favorite authors. This work is the epitome of what a travel book should be. Bryson seamlessly weaves together history, wit, insight, and personal anecdote into a memorable tale that greatly increased my desire to see this enormous and remote continent.Firstly, it is clear throughout the entire length of the book that Bryson genuinely loves this nation. My appreciation of his affection may be somewhat heightened by the fact that I also listened to the audio book (read by the author), and his tone betrays his endearing lack of subjectivity. His love of the people does not keep him from making some sharp comments about particular subjects however. He observes that Australians tend to engage in the art of argumentation without actually wishing for change, as with the topic of them becoming a full-fledged independent republic. Also, he doesn't pull punches when relating how some of the inhabitants of this great nation were anything but hospitable.The historical narrative he weaves into the tale would undoubtedly be more interesting when traveling through the towns and countryside. Brief historical sketches of the small communities he passes through tend to be boring but his more generalized Australian history about the founding is fascinating and well told. The countless failed explorations into the interior were mostly forgettable, but they successfully conveyed the brutality and ruthlessness of the natural Australian environment. Also, the migration of peoples 45,000 years ago onto the continent was right on the nail.When discussing the plight of the aboriginals he makes some cutting observations about the Aussies and himself. After mulling over the `problem', and considering ways that the position of the aboriginals in Australian society might be bettered, he finds that he has no genuine answers to the problem. "So without an original or helpful thought... I did what most white Australians do. I read my paper... and didn't see them [the aborigines] anymore."His humorous obsession with deadly animals continues in this work as well, as he documents fish, reptiles, mammals, and amphibians that are particularly adept at maiming and killing unsuspecting or careless travelers. Also, he makes note of the introduction of wild rabbits onto the continent by Thomas Austin, a resident of Victoria in 1859. The 24 rabbits originally released for sport soon grew to a population in the millions. Temporarily curtailed by the governments' introduction of a rabbit-killing disease, the hardy survivors eventually began breeding again until the figures reached a staggering 300 million (at time of publication.Lastly, the most personally impactful aspect of the book is Bryson's narrative style. As an avid traveler, I log my own journeys and document where I've been, as well as interesting tales, brushes with death, etc. His descriptive ability is superb and he draws the reader into the scenes with a comic and conversational style. His lonely encounters in bars, awkward picture taking with other solo travelers (as they stare at an enormous fabricated lobster) and drunken nights with his traveling companions are hilarious and genuine. I hope to bring his vividness to my next trip, when writing about it later.Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who likes travel, has gone to Australia, or wishes to go in the future. He inspired me to do so, and even made me believe that Uluru (Ayers rock) might be worth seeing, and not just the world's most useless geological artifact. Five stars.

The 2001 book entitled: “In a Sunburned Country” by Bill Bryson is an entertaining book about Australia recommended to me after I read and enjoyed another excellent Bryson book ( “The Body’). This book too is worth purchasing and reading; perhaps more so if you are planning a trip to Australia, have done so or considering doing so. Illustrative of both style and content, Bryson writes: “I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. No trace of the poor man was ever seen again. This seemed doubly astounding to me—first that Australia could just lose a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me… Australia… Its population, just over 18 million… as an economic entity, it ranks about level with Illinois… Australia is the world’s sixth largest country... It is the only island that is also… a continent, and the only continent that is also a country… It is the only nation that began as a prison… It is the home of the largest living thing on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, and of the largest monolith, Ayers Rock (or Uluru…). It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world’s ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian.” Bryson writes: “perhaps 45,000 years ago… but certainly before there were modern humans in the Americas or Europe—it was quietly invaded by a deeply inscrutable people, the Aborigines, who have no clearly evident racial or… linguistic kinship to their neighbors in the region, and whose presence in Australia can only be explained by positing that they invented and mastered oceangoing craft at least 30,000 years in advance of anyone else, in order to undertake an exodus, then forgot or abandoned nearly all that they had learned and scarcely ever bothered with the open sea again… Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else… Australia is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile, and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents. (Only Antarctica is more hostile to life.)” Bryson writes: “EACH TIME YOU FLY from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international date line. I left Los Angeles on January 3 and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on January 5. For me there was no January 4. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you… they do give you the day back on the return journey when you cross the date line in the opposite direction and thereby manage somehow to arrive in Los Angeles before you left Sydney, which in its way, of course, is an even neater trick… I love to come to Australia… The people are immensely likable—cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean… They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian… The sun nearly always shines… I have never entirely understood why when people urge you to see their “real” country, they send you to the empty parts where almost no sane person would choose to live, but there you are. You cannot say you have been to Australia until you have crossed the outback.” Bryson writes: “Today downtown White Cliffs consists of a pub, a launderette, an opal shop, and a grocery/ café/ gas station. The permanent population is about 80. They exist in a listless world of heat and dust. If you were looking for people with the tolerance and fortitude to colonize Mars, this would be the place to come… I don’t know how much money you would have to give me to persuade me to settle in White Cliffs—something in the low zillions, I suppose… No electricity at all, unless you had your own generator.” “So when did you get electricity in White Cliffs?” He thought for an instant. “Nineteen ninety-three.” I thought I had misheard him. “When?” “Just about five years ago. We have telly now, too,” he added suddenly and enthusiastically. “Got that two years ago.” Bryson writes: “On our second day out from Broken Hill, we entered the mighty Nullarbor… a corruption of the Latin for “no trees,”… Just after breakfast, we entered the longest straight stretch of railroad track in the world—297 miles without a hint of deviation… surveying the emptiness and trying to conceive the ungraspable fact that if I walked north from here I wouldn’t come to a paved surface for eleven hundred miles” Bryson writes: “in 1606… a party of Dutch sailors… stepped briefly ashore in the far north… A pair of Portuguese cannons, dating from no later than 1525, was found in 1916… a map, drawn by a Portuguese hand and dating from roughly the same period, that shows not only a large landmass where Australia stands but an apparent familiarity with the jogs and indentations of Australia’s east coast—something supposedly not seen by outsiders for another two and a half centuries… in April 1770, Lieutenant James Cook… aboard HMS Endeavour sighted the southeast corner of Australia… it wasn’t so much a discovery as a confirmation.” Bryson writes: “Never before had so many people been moved such a great distance at such expense—and all to be incarcerated… their punishments were ludicrously disproportionate. Most were small-time thieves. Britain wasn’t trying to rid itself of dangerous criminals so much as thin out an underclass… passage to Australia was effectively a life sentence. But then this was an unforgiving age. By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were weighty with capital offenses; you could be hanged for any of two hundred acts” Bryson writes: “the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, began to agitate for a concert hall… A competition was held… Unable to reach a consensus, the judges sought the opinion of… Saarinen, who… selected a design that the jurors had rejected… “The plan” … “was bold, unique, brilliantly chosen—and trouble—from its inception.”… The final cost came in at… fourteen times the original estimate.” Bryson writes: “WHEN AUSTRALIANS GET HOLD OF A NAME that suits them they tend to stick with it in a big way… as governor, Ralph Darling, managed to get his name all over the place, too. In Sydney you will find a Darling Harbour, Darling Drive, Darling Island, Darling Point, Darlinghurst, and Darlington. Elsewhere Darling’s modest achievements are remembered in the Darling Downs and Darling Ranges, a slew of additional Darlingtons, and the important Darling River.” Bryson writes: “A hundred miles or so north of where I was driving now, on the edge of this grassy zone, stands the little town of Nyngan. In 1989, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1996, and 1998 it was devastated by torrential flash floods. For five years during this same period, while Nyngan was repeatedly inundated, the town of Cobar, just eighty miles to the west, recorded not a drop of rain. This is… one tough country… And yet the… farms were neat and trim, and the towns I passed through gave every air of a comfortable prosperity… [and] a metropolis of 4 million people lay just over the hills...” Bryson writes: “I knew nothing about Cowra, but I quickly learned that it is well known to Australians as the site of the infamous Cowra breakout. During World War II a large prisoner-of-war camp stood just outside Cowra. One side held two thousand Italian POWs; on the other were two thousand Japanese. The Italians were model prisoners… They worked on local farms and were only lightly guarded. Their officers—I just love this—weren’t guarded at all. They were free to come and go as they pleased… The Japanese presented a somber contrast. They refused to undertake work or offer any measure of cooperation… in August 1944, in the middle of the night, 1,100 of them staged a suicidal mass breakout, bursting from their barracks with a banzai cry and charging en masse at the guard tower clutching baseball bats, chair legs, and whatever other weapons they could contrive. The startled guards poured bullets into the mass but were quickly overwhelmed. Within minutes, 378 prisoners had escaped into the countryside… It took nine days to round them all up. The farthest any of them had gotten was fifteen miles. The Japanese casualties were 231 killed and 112 wounded.” Bryson writes: “[A] gold rush transformed Australia’s destiny… a stampede rose from every quarter of the globe. In less than a decade, the country took in 600,000 new faces, more than doubling its population… But the real effect of gold was to put an end to transportation. When… transportation was seen as an opportunity rather than a punishment, that convicts desired to be sent to Australia, the notion of keeping the country a prison became unsustainable… essentially the gold rush of the 1850s marked the end of Australia as a concentration camp and its beginning as a nation.” Bryson writes: “BEFORE AUSTRALIA’S SIX COLONIES FEDERATED IN 1901, they were, to an almost ludicrous degree, separate. Each issued its own postage stamps, set clocks to its own time, had its own system of taxes and levies… in 1891 the six colonies (plus New Zealand, which nearly joined, but later dropped out) met in Sydney… to discuss forming a proper nation, to be known as the Commonwealth of Australia… on January 1, 1901, a new nation was declared… the capital… was called Canberra… In 1911, with the capital site chosen, a competition… was won by Walter Burley Griffin of Oak Park, Illinois, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright.” Bryson writes: “It is a fact little noted that the Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture on earth, and their art goes back to the very roots of it… In 1972…. Whitlam’s government embarked on a program of ambitious reforms—it gave Aborigines rights they had not previously enjoyed, began to disengage Australian troops from Vietnam, made university education free, and much more. But, as sometimes happens in parliamentary democracies, the government gradually lost its majority and by 1975 Parliament was in a deadlock” Bryson writes: “The monumental emptiness of Australia is not easy to convey. It is far and away the most thinly peopled of nations. In Britain the average population density is 632 people per square mile; in the United States the average is 76; across the world as a whole it is 117. (… in Macao… it is a decidedly snug 69,000 people per square mile.) The Australian average, by contrast, is 6 people per square mile…” Bryson writes: “Whereas Canberra is a park, Adelaide is merely full of them. In Canberra you have the sense of being in a very large green space you cannot ever quite find your way out of; in Adelaide you are indubitably in a city, but with the constant pleasant option of stepping out of it from time to time to get a breath of air in a spacious green setting. Makes all the difference… Adelaide is the most overlooked of Australia’s principal cities. You could spend weeks in Australia and never suspect it was there, for it rarely makes the news or gets a mention in anyone’s conversation. It is to Australia essentially what Australia is to the world—a place pleasantly regarded but far away and seldom thought about. And yet it is unquestionably a lovely city.” Bryson writes: “In 1959–60 Australia was the third wealthiest country on the planet—I hadn’t realized this—exceeded only by the United States and Canada. But what was particularly interesting was how modest were the components of material well-being back then. With admiration bordering on amazement, Ms. MacKenzie notes that by the end of the 1950s three-quarters of city dwellers in Australia had a refrigerator and almost half had a washing machine (there wasn’t yet enough electricity in most rural areas to run big appliances, so they didn’t count). Nearly every home in the nation, she went on, had “at least one radio”” Bryson writes: “To pass the time, I sang Australia’s unofficial national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda.” It goes (and I think the record should show that these are the words precisely as set down by Paterson): Oh! there once was a swagman camped in the Billabong Under the shade of a Coolibah tree And he sang as he looked at his old billy boiling Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me… The main distinguishing feature of “Waltzing Matilda,” you will notice, is that it makes no sense.” Bryson writes: “Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip airplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney. With the introduction by Qantas of larger Lockheed Super Constellation airliners in 1954, prices began to fall, but even by the end of the decade traveling to Europe by air still cost as much as a new car. Nor was it a terribly speedy or comfortable service.” Bryson writes: “… until 1949 there was no such thing as Australian citizenship… People born in Australia were not in any technical sense Australians at all but Britons—as British as if they were from Cornwall or Scotland… In the half century after 1945 its population soared, from 7 million to 18 million. Britain alone couldn’t provide the necessary bodies, so people were welcomed from all over Europe, particularly Greece and Italy in the immediate postwar years, making the nation vastly more cosmopolitan. Suddenly Australia was full of people who liked wine and good coffee.. By 1970 the country could boast of 2.5 million “New Australians,” as they were known… Today Australia is one of the most multicultural countries on earth. A third of the people in Sydney were born in another country; in Melbourne the four most common surnames are Smith, Brown, Jones, and Nguyen. Across the country as a whole almost a quarter of the people have no British antecedents on either side of their families.” Bryson writes: “At the beginning of the century it was thought that Aborigines had been on the continent for no more than 400 years. As recently as the 1960s, the time frame was estimated to be perhaps 8,000 years… in 1969 a geologist named Jim Bowler… The bones were collected and sent off for carbon dating. When the report came back, it showed that the woman had died 23,000 years ago,.. Since then, other finds have pushed the date back further. Today the evidence points to an… arrival date of at least 45,000 years ago, but probably more like 60,000… The first arrivals could only have come by sea, presumably from Timor in the Indonesian archipelago, and here is where the problems arise… In order to put Homo sapiens in Australia you must accept that at a point in time so remote that it precedes the known rise of behaviorally modern humans there lived in southern Asia a people sufficiently advanced that they were fishing inshore waters from boats of some sort, rafts presumably. Never mind that the archaeological record shows no one else on earth doing this for another thirty thousand years. We have got to get these people waterborne… All that is certain is that Australia’s indigenous peoples are there because their distant ancestors crossed at least sixty miles of fairly formidable sea tens of… thousands of years before anyone else on earth dreamed of such an endeavor, and did it in sufficient numbers to begin to start the colonization of a continent… It is generally accepted that the… Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture in the world… no one knows how many Aborigines were in Australia when Britons first settled it. The best estimates suggest that at the beginning of occupation the Aboriginal population was about 300,000, though possibly as high as a million… By the end of the nineteenth century the number of Aborigines was probably no more than 50,000 or 60,000. Most of this decline, it must be said, was inadvertent. Aborigines had almost no resistance to European diseases: smallpox, pleurisy, syphilis, even chicken pox and the milder forms of influenza often cut swaths through the native populations.” Bryson writes: “we would fly on to Darwin in the Northern Territory—the Top End, as… it is fondly known to Australians—for the thousand-mile drive through the scorched red center to Alice Springs and mighty Uluru.” Bryson writes: “Because it is so bang in the middle of nowhere, Alice Springs ought to seem a miracle—an actual town with department stores and schools and streets with names—and for a long time it was a sort of antipodean Timbuktu, a place tantalizing in its inaccessibility. In 1954… Alice’s only regular connection to the outside world was a weekly train from Adelaide. Its arrival on Saturday evening was the biggest event in the life of the town. It brought mail, newspapers, new pictures for the cinema, long-awaited spare parts, and whatever else couldn’t be acquired locally. Nearly the whole town turned out to see who got off and what was unloaded. In those days Alice had a population of 4,000 and hardly any visitors. Today it’s a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of visitors—350,000 of them a year—which is of course the whole problem. These days you can jet in from Adelaide in two hours, from Melbourne and Sydney in less than three. You can have a latte and buy some opals and then climb on a tour bus and travel down the highway to Ayers Rock. The town has not only become accessible, it’s become a destination. It’s so full of motels, hotels, conference centers, campgrounds, and desert resorts that you can’t pretend even for a moment that you have achieved something exceptional by getting yourself there.” Bryson writes: “Uluru and Alice Springs are so inextricably linked in the popular imagination that nearly everyone thinks of them as cozily proximate. In fact, it is almost three hundred miles across a largely featureless tract to get from the one to the other. Uluru’s glory is that it stands alone in a boundless emptiness, but it does mean that you have to really want to see it; it’s not something you’re going to pass on the way to the beach. That is as it should be, of course, but it is equally a fact that when you have just completed a thousand-mile passage through barren void, you don’t really require another five hours of it to confirm your impression that much of central Australia is empty.” Bryson writes: “Perth is a cheery and welcoming place… Perth is far and away the most remote big city on earth, closer to Singapore than to Sydney, though not actually close to either. Behind you stretches seventeen hundred miles of inert red emptiness all the way to Adelaide; before you nothing but a featureless blue sea for five thousand miles to Africa. Why 1.3 million [people] would choose to live in such a lonely outpost is a question always worth considering, but climate explains a lot. Perth has glorious weather… [and] the possession of one of the world’s largest and finest parks…” Bryson writes: “It is a fact… that no other nation lost more men as a proportion of population in World War I than Australia. Out of a national population of under 5 million, Australia suffered a staggering 210,000 casualties—60,000 dead, 150,000 injured. The casualty rate for its soldiers was 65 percent. As John Pilger has put it: “No army was as decimated as that which came from farthest away. And all were volunteers.”” Bryson writes: “In another day or two I would be back in New HampshireIt seemed a particularly melancholy notion to me that life would go on in Australia and I would hear almost nothing of it… Life in Australia would go on, and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be. What a strange, sad thought that is… I can understand it, of course. Australia is mostly empty and a long way away… It doesn’t need watching, and so we don’t.”

I love his books and enjoyed this one as well. Bryson has a remarkable ability to relay history and his travels in a delightful way while still being informative. He skips effortlessly from historical figures to current day events and people and often leaves you smirking or outright laughing in delight.I especially appreciate he took the time to point out the scarcity of information and attention given to the Aboriginal peoples. It's never preachy- just a telling of how it was which lets the reader draw their own conclusions and comparisons.His personal exploits and observations as he travels around provide a picture in the readers mind of a country so that you feel you know it at least a little bit. For those who probably won't visit- it's a wonderful stop-gap to exploring a strange, beautiful, and far away land. For those that live there- an even better tool to highlight yet-to-be explored places of a native land.A must-read.

I read this book on the plane on my home from Australia and it made me laugh out loud in parts, so I had to apologise for waking my sleeping neighbours. It gives a very accurate view of Australia but I think it is possibly better reading after you have been there (as I did) because you can relate it to your own travels in this amazing and unique country.

What a perfectly charming book, makes one realise how much we don’t know and the little joys of discovering, thank you Bill Bryson.

Libro para disfrutar

Brilliantly funny anecdotes about Australia as seen by a northern hemisphere visitor with a keen eye and ear for the unusual, the quirky, the fascinating, the absurd and the incredible.

Bon achat, très bon sujet; et il est intéressant d e trouver des occasion de bonne qualité (!) dans un format autre que le " poche " broché... la grosseur de la typographie a également son importance, pensez aux personnes âgées !! je relirai ce livre avec plaisir et intérêt, j'ai découvert que l'auteur est assez prolixe pour d'autres voyage-reportages !...** Accessoirement je vous dirais bien de lire ce roman de Cordwainer Smith : " NORSTRILIA " qui traite de l'Australie ..du futur !?!