Book review: In a Sunburned Country
Australia, Bill Bryson says over and over again, is special. Though its critters and landscape can kill you in a thousand more horrible ways you can imagine, he insists that it can also captivate and thrill you. And by every way and route imaginable-on boat, on train, on a rickety 4-wheel drive in the dusty outback-he takes you along to explore perhaps one of the most uncharted continents left in the world.
My thoughts
It is with a bit of apprehension that I opened this travelogue, because by complete coincidence, Australians make up more than half of my LJ friend list. Perhaps Australians and I just see eye to eye, especially when it comes to books and blogging? Whatever the reason, I was a bit nervous to read and review a book all about their country-one that I’ve known mostly known through my stay in New Zealand, and through Steve Irwin reruns on Animal Planet. Not the most authentic, I realize, but it was all I had. Plus I’m always wary of any travelogue because unless the writer is very, very good, such books can make one more acutely aware of not having been to a certain place than of the desired opposite.
Bill Bryson, thankfully, more than delivers: not just in terms of content, for he travels all around most of Australia (everything except its deserts and Tasmania), but also in his writing style. With his uniquely dry, exaggerated, self-deprecating humor, the man is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s not so much a travelogue rather than a series of his misadventures: there isn’t a journey he started in Australia, I suspect, that he doesn’t start off with the question, so what can kill me now? Whether in the outback or in a Melbourne art museum, Bill often taps into one hidden truth about traveling: it’s the hair-raising, stressful, unexpected moments that end up being the most memorable.
And while traveling in a continent that has an impressive array of poisonous, deadly, touch-and-you-instantly-die flora and fauna, Bryson is particularly obsessed with them, perhaps because he comes from the relative benign wilds of the American Midwest. He takes almost every opportunity to bring up anecdotes about unfortunate ends: the young American tourist who met her end in croc-infested waters; the couple who were left behind out on the Great Barrier Reef (although whether it was suicide is still up for debate)…there’s seemingly no shortage. More entertaining, though, are his Australian friends’ nonchalant attitude to their country’s lurking dangers. Bryson remarks: “Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country’s dangers are vastly overrated and that there’s nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that it’s okay now because he’s off the life support machine and they’ve discovered he can communicate with eye blinks” (152).
In addition to his delightfully morbid curiosity, Bill is an engaging travel guide, seamlessly incorporating bits of history, natural science, sociology, and plain weird, “only-in-Australia” facts into his narrative. I was surprised to learn great many things: that the convicts who were originally sent from England were doing time for petty crimes like shoplifting, and that sending them to Australia was a way to relieve crowding in prison; that Canberra is as much as an overlooked capital city (culture-wise) as Washington, DC, and more. He even tries to explain cricket but my mind kinda glossed over that part. He also dips into Australia’s race relations in terms of both immigrants and the Aborigines, with a journalistic, matter-of-fact attitude. Since I was an American Studies major in college, and race is always going to be hot topic in my country, it’s always interesting for me to compare how race is perceived in other countries. Though he talks about the White Australia policy and the prejudices against Aborigines, I suppose I was a bit disappointed that as someone writing in the late 1990s, he didn’t delve in how multicultural its cities are now. (I don’t know personally, but I do know because Anthony Bourdain recently went to Melbourne, and it seems he just went to one delicious ethnic restaurant after another in his Travel Channel episode.)
But that’s another book by another author, I suppose. His mission, really, is to explore, and he does so wonderfully. Wherever he set off next, and no matter how remote it seemed (um the likelihood of having time to go to Western Australia besides Perth? Rather low for me…), he made me want to go there. I consider this a feat considering that all I had to visualize what everything looked like was a map and some iconic images in my head. Reading this book is like walking alongside an upbeat, slightly odd, but 100-percent adventurous guide, who leaves you with the impression that Australia is indeed special.