In A Sunburned Country
 Bill Bryson
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Broadway Books
 ISBN: 0767903862

Bill Bryson travels all the way Down Under to Australia, a shockingly undiscovered country with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather & the most peculiar & lethal wildlife on the planet.

I'd not read a Bill Bryson book before so as I began his trek around & across Australia, I found myself chortling & enchanted. This reporter has an unflagging curiosity whether it's for towns on the edges of this strange & wonderful continent or for the great barren interior or for the people who live wherever.

Bill Bryson has a mischievous sense of the absurd, packs a whole mess of historical, geological, botanical, biological & unusual travelogue details into his writing.

Like the fabled Road Trains hurtling across the two lane highway that connects North Australia with the South(shades of Mad Max), Bill Bryson's travelogue is fast, funny & furious. He & his traveling companions do seem to find adventure wherever they meander.

He is a keen observer of culture & cupidity. Whether he's relaxing in Alice Springs with a brew at a sidewalk cafe, watching the white Saturday world mill before him, into which stumble 20th Century Aborigines & this author puts down his newspaper & ponders on the history of Australia's First People. Muses on the incoming European settlers' morals with regard to these elusive inhabitants who had survived, quite nicely thank you, for thousands of years only to be devastated by the plague of prejudice.

Or whether he's off on a train to Western Australia, each stop, each desert is meat for his mind as he again & again meets up with friendly residents & breathtaking views; or whether he's entranced by the beaches of New South Wales & the Great Barrier Reef where he takes a couple of memorable dips.

Or whether he's pondering on how a nation can lose a Prime Minister one afternoon & have a fit over the Royal mess in their self determination as a nation or continued association with the British mind set.

Whether on a visit to a museum where the remains of Australia's extraordinary past are quietly kept or a detour to the Devil's Marbles where geology seems to have stood still; or to an Outback shack in which reposes a long forgotten aeroplane from the era of hit-or-miss flight - Bill Bryson offers you a rollicking good read about a people, a place & a paradox.

Few details about his explorations escape this intrepid traveler, he's especially good when illuminating the early sorties into the forbidding interior which, because he crisscrosses it a few times, he describes in bright, busy visions. He populates a barren waste with the multitude of life most tourists wouldn't see & he does not scrimp when describing sunsets, spinifex or socializing with the locals in every watering hole he visits. Watering holes in the Australian Outback, you see, are vital stations of replenishment, human contact & ribaldry.

I would have liked a glossary at the end of In a Sunburned Country, so varied & interesting are the words that make up the Australian experience. Nonetheless, a charming account of Bill Bryson's antipodean adventures, of the making of a nation & the history of a land locked away by time & oceans. He has certainly whetted my appetite to take a gander Down Under.

More From Bill Bryson:
A Short History of Nearly Everything,
A Walk In The Woods,
I'm A Stranger Here Myself,
The Lost Continent,
The Mother Tongue,
Bill Bryson's African Diary,
Made in America &,
Notes from a Small Island.
(Updated 10/11/03)

Australia resources - australia related news, books and regional resources.

Rebecca