In a Sunburned Country (aka Down Under; Bill Bryson, 2001)

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ISBN 0-7679-0385-4

The first thing that strikes the veteran Bill Bryson reader about In a Sunburned Country, is that this is perhaps his most obviously commercial venture to date. Quite clearly, one morning Bill woke up and thought “I need some cash; better write a book.” I counted three separate trips to Australia from elsewhere in the world – there may have been more – specifically to compile the work, and the writer’s authority and comprehensive treatment indicates a great deal of detailed background research back at base, as well. Whereas Notes from a Small Island has the feel of sitting around the family room listening to a favourite uncle recounting funny anecdotes, ISC is a well-crafted, professional job. I'm not saying that’s a bad thing; it's just different to what we might have expected.

Bryson’s background research, unusually for the travel genre – with the sterling exception of Voyage of the Beagle, of course! – extends to natural history; an area in which most travel writers deliver inadvertent howlers with their every pronouncement (read some out-takes). In fact Bryson does err on p. 221, inadvertently dismissing the angiosperms as an unimportant component of the modern flora, but I won’t pillory him for that – mostly he does a damn fine job of it, even mentioning such esoterica as the Ediacaran fauna and the Shark Bay stromatolites.

I was less pleased with his glossing over Australia’s distinctly evil history of dealings with non-Europeans, however. Australian history is replete with examples of state-sanctioned brutality – even genocide – over the Aboriginal population, a whites-only immigration policy which persisted (if memory serves) well into the 1970s, and the Pauline Hanson phenomenon of the past few years. Bryson mentions all of these, but, the Myall Creek chapter notwithstanding, leaves the reader with the feeling that these things are all behind us now; that some gentle veil of time has somehow diminished their significance.

Far from it … sport.

(For a more, um, perceptive view, you might like to consult the chapter entitled The Trees Cry Out on Currawong Moor, which appears around the middle of David Quammen’s book, Wild Thoughts from Wild Places.)

One of the themes running throughout the book concerns the natural hazards of the country, which Bryson hams up for the sake of a lively and amusing narrative. But I think there’s a fine line between hamming it up and arrant nonsense, which he crosses a little too often. See what you think:

“Look out! There’s a bluey.”
Glenn took on an immediate expression of alarm. “Where?”
“What’s a bluey?” I asked, appalled to discover there was some additional danger I hadn’t been told about.
“A bluebottle,” she explained, and pointed to a small jellyfish of the type (as I later learned from browsing through a fat book titled, if I recall, Things That Will Kill You Horridly in Australia, volume 19) known elsewhere as a Portuguese man-of-war. ... The sting of a Portuguese man-of-war – even Iowans know this – is agony. – pp.16-17

To my delight, Bryson homes in beautifully on an event which seems to have escaped most New Zealanders and, I rather suspect, most Australians as well:

'The oddest aspect of all was [I would say “is”] that millions of Australians [and Kiwis], most of whom had never left the country, went through life thinking of England in some odd, ultimate sense as home.

'… In World War II [Australia] had suffered a kind of blunt trauma when, after the fall of Burma and Singapore, Britain pulled out of the Far East, leaving Australia suddenly alone and dangerously exposed. At the same time, Winston Churchill, a man whose presumptuousness was never less than enthralling, asked Australia’s military leaders to divert their troops to India – in effect, to abandon their wives and children and fight for the greater good of empire. ‘… Luckily the battle moved elsewhere after the American naval victory at Midway.' – p.158

Bryson seems to imply that “a realisation that Britain could not be counted on” has now become a foundation of antipodean thought. If only….

Well, Bill, I’d have been around eight or nine when I got my first sting from a bluebottle. (We get them here in New Zealand, too.) We were on a class trip to the beach after a storm, and there were hundreds of them washed onto the sand. Some of the more boisterous kids were throwing them around and I collected one in the face. It stung a little, I wondered what it was, plucked a few tentacles off my cheek, then got back to the serious business of persecuting small fish in the rock pools. No: it is not agony, regardless of what Iowans may or may not know about the sea.

By Chapter 6, Bryson has made it to Canberra – a famously boring, antipodean version of Brussells – which is the home of the Australian federal government. Here he feels compelled, for some reason, to slag off the Australian prime minister:

‘… John Howard is by far the dullest man in Australia. Imagine a very committed funeral home director – someone whose burning ambition from the age of eleven was to be a funeral home director, whose proudest achievement in adulthood was to be elected president of the Queanbeyan and District Funeral Home Directors Association – then halve his personality and halve it again, and you have pretty well got John Howard.’ – pp. 86-87

Now ordinarily I love a good slagging, but this is simple abuse. Presumably Bryson has met Howard (whereas I certainly haven’t) and genuinely feels this way, otherwise it is difficult to imagine where this obviously deep antipathy springs from. In any event, what it’s doing in this context quite eludes me I’m afraid. Maybe he’s just trying to emulate the trappings of Theroux without properly understanding the latter’s true substance. Seems unlikely.

Recommendation: Recommended.

Look and Feel: My edition is the usual matt-finish hardback. No index but the book has, unusually, a bibliography, including works by, astonishingly, Attenborough, Fortey, and Gould.

Out-Take.

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