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Down Under

• ISBN: 9780385408172
• Author: Bill Bryson
• Description:
  After tales from the USA and Britain, Bill Bryson turns his roving eye to Australia, the only island that is also a continent and the only continent that is also a country. It is the driest, flattest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents. It has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way that anywhere else. Yet when Bill Bryson travelled to Australia he promptly fell in love with the country. And who can blame him? The people are cheerful, the cities safe and clean, the food is excellent, the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines. He tries to find out why Aussies are so cool, digging up a past that reveals convicts, explorers, gold diggers and outlaws. From the Publisher Bill Bryson at large down under! --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From the Back Cover 'It was as if I had privately discovered life on another planet, or a parallel universe where life was at once recognizably similar but entirely different. I can't tell you how exciting it was. Insofar as I had accumulated my expectations of Australia at all in the intervening years, I had thought of it as a kind of alternative southern California, a place of constant sunshine and the cheerful vapidity of a beach lifestyle, but with a slightly British bent - a sort of Baywatch with cricket...' Of course, what greeted Bill Bryson was something rather different. Australia is a country that exists on a vast scale. It is the world's sixth largest country and its largest island. It is the only island that is also a continent and the only continent that is also a country. It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still it teems with life - a large proportion of it quite deadly. In fact, Australia has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way than anywhere else. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistable currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. Ignoring such dangers - yet curiously obsessed by them - Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country. And who can blame him? The people are cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted and unfailingly obliging; their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water; the food is excellent; the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines. Life doesn't get much better than this. About the Author Bill BrysonBill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. He settled in England in 1977, and lived for many years with his English wife and four children in North Yorkshire. He and his family now live in America. He is the bestselling author of The Lost Continent, Mother Tongue, Neither Here Nor There, Made in America, Notes From a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, Notes From a Big Country and Down Under. Excerpted from Down Under by Bill Bryson. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I hadforgotten again who their Prime Minister is. I amforever doing this with the Australian PM -committing the name to memory, forgetting it(generally more or less instantly), then feeling terriblyguilty. My thinking is that there ought to be one personoutside Australia who knows.But then Australia is such a difficult country to keeptrack of. On my first visit, some years ago, I passed thetime on the long flight from London reading a historyof Australian politics in the twentieth century, whereinI encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the PrimeMinister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach inVictoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished.No trace of the poor man was ever seen again. Thisseemed doubly astounding to me - first that Australiacould just lose a Prime Minister (I mean, come on) andsecond that news of this had never reached me.1The fact is, of course, we pay shamefully scantattention to our dear cousins Down Under - though notentirely without reason, I suppose. Australia is, afterall, mostly empty and a long way away. Its population,about 19 million, is small by world standards - Chinagrows by a larger amount each year - and its place inthe world economy is consequently peripheral; as aneconomic entity, it is about the same size as Illinois.From time to time it sends us useful things - opals,merino wool, Errol Flynn, the boomerang - but nothing we can't actually do without. Above all,Australia doesn't misbehave. It is stable and peacefuland good. It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish,arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocativequantities or throw its weight around in a brash andunseemly manner.But even allowing for all this, our neglect ofAustralian affairs is curious. As you might expect, thisis particularly noticeable when you are resident inAmerica. Just before I set off on this trip I went to mylocal library in New Hampshire and looked upAustralia in the New York Times Index to see howmuch it had engaged attention in my own country inrecent years. I began with the 1997 volume for no otherreason than that it was open on the table. In that year,across the full range of possible interests - politics,sport, travel, the coming Olympics in Sydney, food andwine, the arts, obituaries and so on - the New YorkTimes ran 20 articles that were predominantly on orabout Australian affairs. In the same period, forpurposes of comparison, it found space for 120 articleson Peru, 150 or so on Albania and a similar number onCambodia, more than 300 on each of the Koreas, andwell over 500 on Israel. As a place that attractedAmerican interest Australia ranked about level withBelarus and Burundi. Among the general subjects thatoutstripped it were balloons and balloonists, theChurch of Scientology, dogs (though not dog sledding),and Pamela Harriman, the former ambassador andsocialite who died in February 1997, a calamity thatevidently required recording twenty-two times in theTimes. Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightlymore important to Americans in 1997 than bananas,but not nearly as important as ice cream… --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

• Pages: 319
• Format: Hardback
• Genre: Travel and Holiday
• Rating: Not yet rated

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