In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

I did not expect to like this book as much as this. Australia was not high on my list of interests, but I found myself impatient at any breaks in my reading and anxious to get back to see what else Bill Bryson discovered in his extensive travels around and reading about this incredible and underrated country. If only there were more books like this! I am studying Bryson’s bibliography and marking things in it to get at the library.

The major charm of this book consists first of Bryson’s unflagging enthusiasm for the country, and second of the unending amount of interesting things there are about Australia to learn. Then as always you have the Bryson wit and flair for style, which is always a pleasure to read.

I kept a map open to follow him on his journeys around Australia by car, train, and plane and learned the geography of the country pretty well. I bet I could draw the states and territories on a blank map now, as well as locate the principal cities, seas, bays and harbors, and the Great Barrier Reef with little trouble. For an American that’s a novelty. We aren’t taught much of anything about Australia except where it is and that it has ties with Great Britain. Even then, my background as an older adult gives me better information. I mean, at least I read A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute. Today’s American students are lucky to get anything at all, barring the odd mention in popular culture. In the 1980s, the Crocodile Dundee movies gave a tiny bit of information and a whole lot of stereotyping; a generation later Finding Nemo nodded to the Sydney Opera House and the Harbor Bridge, which we also saw if we watched the 2000 Olympics (I did). If you’re at all aware of what various other movies have had Aussie settings and actors, you might have learned a little more. But a very little.

Bryson gets you interested in the flora, the fauna, the geology, and the history. Not only do you get a great introduction to these subjects here, but it is all done as well as can be done by someone with complete enthusiasm for his subject, surely the best of all teaching methods. Even the negative things, such as all the deadly creatures, all the deadly plants, and all the deadly ways the land itself has of possibly disposing of you are rendered not so much scarifying as interesting. I mean, he successfully travels all around this country and has no close encounters of a scary kind, so presumably I could do that too!

The more serious negative aspect of Australia, its infamous history of the treatment of the native Australians, gets an honest look, though short compared to the rest. But Bryson’s way of looking at it gives emotional impact and clarity to the very complicated issue of racism that Australia has continued to work at rectifying in the twenty years since this book was written. It stays with you. You want to research more about it. Surely that is the mark of a successful book about a country I probably will never get to visit in person.

On an upbeat note, the appendix contains the essays Bryson wrote for the newspapers at the Sydney Summer Olympic Games in 2000. As the Games were considered to be successful with no then-known downsides (later on Sydney and Australia suffered economic losses from the Olympic venues themselves), the book ends with a clear feeling of triumph.

Short-Beaked Echidna in Canberra

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=418045