Funny tales from Russell Crowe country

In A Sunburned Country
By Bill Bryson
Broadway Books, 331 pages

The fun of reading Bill Bryson’s travel books is that you end up becoming interested in subjects you thought you had scant interest in. Whether writing about England (Notes From A Small Island) or the Appalachian Trail (A Walk in the Woods), there’s something there for everybody. If you’re into his books for the sardonic wit (think Dave Barry with slightly – only slightly – more urbane tastes), you end up pleasantly surprised to discover you’ve learned an awful lot about his destination. And if you’re reading them simply for the history, you find yourself having to be hosed down occasionally from laughing too hard.

Born in Iowa but transplanted to England for 20 years, Bryson presents himself as a roly-poly figure of fun: a writer who is sometimes a bumpkin, who enjoys nothing more than several rounds of beer/stout/ale with his notebook out, yet who possesses a clear opinion about just about every phenomenon he comes across. His books often have a guiding theme or thesis, but you may overlook this because of all the mirth and humor with which he tackles his subjects.

He begins his descent into Australia with an observation about how difficult it is to keep track of events in that country.

Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who their prime minister is. I am forever doing this with the Australian prime minister – committing the name to memory, forgetting it (generally more or less instantly), then feeling terribly guilty. My thinking is that there ought to be at least one person outside Australia who knows.

In A Sunburned Country takes you by surprise by seeming vast and unapproachable, like the Australian outback, but then drawing you in with its gradual details about how the country came about, its many peculiarities and even eccentricities, and where it is heading today. (In the appendix, Bryson focuses on the Sydney Olympics held a couple of years back, the second time in a century this "country that doubles as a continent" has hosted the games.)

But this, of course, is his thesis: that a country so enormous and new and endlessly fascinating remains largely ignored by the rest of the world. Why is this?

Sure, there are excellent exported wines, even excellent exported actors (Russell Crowe, Judy Davis, Cate Blanchett, Guy Pearce). But very little in the way of actual news comes from Australia, does it?

It’s a good point, and Bryson tries to figure it out. Without mincing words on the subject, he goes into the country’s early history as a penal colony for England’s cast-offs and criminals. Thanks to fate and the American Revolution, by which the American colonies severed ties with England, a new place was needed to send England’s teeming underclass. In 1787, some 700-plus undesirables were shipped 1,500 miles south in the great "transportation" as it was called. These included some hardened criminals, but mostly unfortunates whose crimes seem light by any standard – steal some cucumber plants, or a book on Tobago, and you were headed in chains to an enormous unexplored continent where you had to make a go of it. There was no returning to England. The penal colony was run by the king’s men, who expected a marshy Eden (thanks to Lieutenant James Cook’s landing in Cape York during the "wet season"), but got instead a sun-parched dessert with little vegetation or habitable land.

Anyway, Bryson finds this remarkable, and so remarkable that most Australians today are ashamed – or inflamed – whenever someone brings up their past incarnation as a vast concentration camp.

Personally I think Australians ought to be extremely proud that from the most unpropitious beginnings, in a remote and challenging place, they created a prosperous and dynamic society. That is exceedingly good going. So what if dear old Gramps was a bit of a sticky-fingered felon in his youth? Look what he left behind.

Bryson tours the country from its unusual capital (Canberra, which resembles a huge park more than a nation’s capital) to Adelaide, from Melbourne to Sydney, Queensland to Darwin. He is fascinated by its variety of wildlife, much of it deadly ("It really is the most extraordinarily lethal country"), and this may be another reason why Australia seems forbidding to some. We know of course about the sharks, but there are equally deadly spiders, snakes, even jellyfish. The taipan snake is the most scary, "the most poisonous on earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so deadly that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: ‘I say, is that a sn–.‘" Then there’s the box jellyfish, which leaves its victims screaming in agony even after huge doses of morphine; or the funnel web spider, which can release enough toxic poison to drop a horse. The list goes on and on.

He loves Australian breakfasts, including the bacon which "you can almost hear squeal with every bite." He looks in vain for kangaroos, but tells how the continent’s vegetation was almost completely wiped out by rabbits, thanks to the misguided move by a landowner named Thomas Austin who, 100 years ago, dropped 24 imported rabbits onto his land in order to have something to shoot at. Today, the rabbits number 300 million.

It may be easy to mistake Bryson’s humor, sometimes as biting as the funnel web spider, for sarcasm. Yes, he is capable of this, but there is an overall affection to In A Sunburned Country. Bryson, an Anglophile at heart, really does seem to like the people and the country. He finds the politics mindboggling and impenetrable, and some of its contradictions leave him scratching his head (such as a rowdy good nature coupled with a strong conservatism that allowed many great novels to be banned up until the 1970s). But unlike, say, Paul Theroux, who displays a genuine cranky contempt for Australian customs in his book The Happy Isles of Oceania, Bryson finds a kinship with the genial, sunburned Aussies. Perhaps it has something to do with their generous drinking habits and their openness.

He doesn’t quite spell it out, but it reminds me of a European package tour I took with my wife many years back. We shared a tour bus with several Australians who, it is true, dressed in snakeskin clothes and had jars of Vegemite tucked into their backpacks. But what I found was that they seemed very much like Americans, with the circumstances and geography and history jiggled in some subtle parallel-universe kind of way. They were loud and relentlessly cheery and told dirty jokes every day, just like many Americans. And when the breakfasts started to grow pretty thin on the tour (around Italy, where it was pretty much bread rolls and coffee), we were very happy indeed to add the pleasures of Vegemite to our palettes. And they were happy to share.