Down Under [Paperback]

These evocative descriptions of Australia and its lifestyle are accurate and interesting. Facts, figures, history, extent and division of territories, flora and fauna; how they look, how deadly or how tame they are, and how many of them exist, will stir exciting memories for those who have been Down Under and paint a precise picture in the mind for those who haven't.

Events, how people look and what they say are recorded faithfully and with master of observation Bill Bryson's wonderful facility for making you laugh out loud, there are plenty of reasons for doing so. His running commentary on a radio broadcast cricket match, a game about which he knows nothing, is brilliantly inventive. There's not a single actual word or expression associated with the game but the nuance is stunning. Spiky conversations with his English producer friend as they drive to Ayres Rock, the sighting of a rotary clothes-line in the depths of the outback, confrontations with receptionists and waiters, a beer-drinking man at the bar of the Nambucca telling him "Dining room's closed mate. The chef's crook. Must have ate some of his own cooking" and a full tuckerbag more, are entertainingly, albeit rather hastily, delivered by the reader. --Running time 3 hours

-- Lyn Took --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

As his many British fans already know, bearded Yankee butterball Bill Bryson specialises in going to countries we think we know well, only to return with travelogues that are surprisingly cynical and yet shockingly affectionate. It's a unique style, possibly best suited to the world's weirder destinations. It's helpful here: Bryson's latest subject is that oddest of continents, Australia.

For a start, there's the oddly nasty fauna and flora. Barely a page of Down Under is without its lovingly detailed list of lethal antipodean critters: sociopathic jellyfish, homicidal crocs, toilet-dwelling death-spiders, murderous shrubs (yes, shrubs). Bryson's absorbing and informative portrait is of a terrain so intractably vast, a land so climatically extreme, it seems expressly designed to daunt and torment humankind.

This very user-unfriendliness throws up another Aussie paradox. If the country is so hostile how come the natives are so laid back, so relaxed? As Bryson shuffles from state to state, he seeks the key to the uniquely cool Australian character and finds it in Australia's tragicomic past, her genetic seeding of convicts, explorers, gold diggers, outlaws. This is a country of lads and mates, of boozy gamblers--nowadays mellowed by sunshine and sporting success.

Down Under is a fine book. So it may not be quite as deliciously malicious as Bryson's The Lost Continent, nor as laugh-out-loud funny as Neither Here Nor There. But so what? A Bill Bryson on cruise control is better than most travel writers on turbodrive. --Sean Thomas --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Bill Bryson at large down under!

'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.

Bill Bryson at large down under!

It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still Australia 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.

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.

Bill 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 then moved to America for a few years but have now returned to the UK. His the bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Neither Here Nor There,A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. He is also the author of the prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything, and his most recent book is The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

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 PM -
committing the name to memory, forgetting it
(generally more or less instantly), then feeling terribly
guilty. My thinking is that there ought to be one person
outside Australia who knows.
But then Australia is such a difficult country to keep
track of. On my first visit, some years ago, I passed the
time on the long flight from London reading a history
of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein
I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the Prime
Minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in
Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished.
No trace of the poor man was ever seen again. This
seemed doubly astounding to me - first that Australia
could just lose a Prime Minister (I mean, come on) and
second that news of this had never reached me.
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The fact is, of course, we pay shamefully scant
attention to our dear cousins Down Under - though not
entirely without reason, I suppose. Australia is, after
all, mostly empty and a long way away. Its population,
about 19 million, is small by world standards - China
grows by a larger amount each year - and its place in
the world economy is consequently peripheral; as an
economic 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 peaceful
and good. It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish,
arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative
quantities or throw its weight around in a brash and
unseemly manner.
But even allowing for all this, our neglect of
Australian affairs is curious. As you might expect, this
is particularly noticeable when you are resident in
America. Just before I set off on this trip I went to my
local library in New Hampshire and looked up
Australia in the New York Times Index to see how
much it had engaged attention in my own country in
recent years. I began with the 1997 volume for no other
reason 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 and
wine, the arts, obituaries and so on - the New York
Times ran 20 articles that were predominantly on or
about Australian affairs. In the same period, for
purposes of comparison, it found space for 120 articles
on Peru, 150 or so on Albania and a similar number on
Cambodia, more than 300 on each of the Koreas, and
well over 500 on Israel. As a place that attracted
American interest Australia ranked about level with
Belarus and Burundi. Among the general subjects that
outstripped it were balloons and balloonists, the
Church of Scientology, dogs (though not dog sledding),
and Pamela Harriman, the former ambassador and
socialite who died in February 1997, a calamity that
evidently required recording twenty-two times in the
Times. Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightly
more important to Americans in 1997 than bananas,
but not nearly as important as ice cream…