In a Sunburned Country
Bill Bryson
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0767903862
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ONE SUMMER
Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the most peculiar and lethal wildlife to be found on the planet. The result is a deliciously funny, fact-filled, and adventurous performance by a writer who combines humor, wonder, and unflagging curiousity.
Despite the fact that Australia harbors more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else, including sharks, crocodiles, snakes, even riptides and deserts, Bill Bryson adores the place, and he takes his readers on a rollicking ride far beyond that beaten tourist path. Wherever he goes he finds Australians who are cheerful, extroverted, and unfailingly obliging, and these beaming products of land with clean, safe cities, cold beer, and constant sunshine fill the pages of this wonderful book. Australia is an immense and fortunate land, and it has found in Bill Bryson its perfect guide.
something I had no idea still existed and certainly never expected to see. No guidebook I have ever seen draws attention to it; even the local tourism literature contained no hint that it is there. But for a few fretful days in 1929 it was the most famous and sought-after object in Australia—and here it was in a small aviation museum in Alice Springs, of all places. I refer to the remains of a light aircraft known as the Kookaburra, which went down in the desert while searching for a lost pilot
rural woodland, which gradually morphs into a slightly more urban boulevard, though still in woodland, until finally you arrive at a zone of well-spaced but significant-looking buildings and you realize that you are there—or as near there as you can get in a place as scattered and vague as Canberra. It’s a very strange city, in that it’s not really a city at all, but rather an extremely large park with a city hidden in it. It’s all lawns and trees and hedges and a big ornamental lake—all very
1991, so I was prepared to excuse him the last decade or so of Australia’s eventful saga, but I would have thought he would find space for, let us say, World War II. Although his history was written long after the war (specifically, between 1962 and 1987 as a series of six books, of which I held the distilled essence), it contains not one mention of the most important event of the twentieth century. There is not even a hint of gathering storm clouds. Nor does the text find room for the Cold War,
years later our old friend Lachlan Macquarie authorized soldiers in the Hawkesbury region to shoot any group of Aborigines greater than six in number, even if unarmed and entirely innocent of purpose, even if the number included women and children. Sometimes, under the pretense of compassion, Aborigines were offered food that had been dosed with poison. Pilger quotes a mid-nineteenth-century government report from Queensland: “The niggers [were given]…something really startling to keep them
interesting little town. It was small and half dead and on a road to nowhere, yet it had not only a tourist office but also its own newspaper. At the Advocate office I was told that Paulette Smith had popped out and that I should try back in an hour. Slightly at a loss, I went into a café and ordered a sandwich and a coffee, and was mindlessly consuming both when a woman, red-haired, late-thirtyish, and looking faintly breathless, abruptly slid onto the seat facing me. “I hear you’re looking for