Even if you have absolutely no intention of going anywhere near Australia (and you may not, once you’ve read it) this is hilarious.

Being an Australian, I probably come at this book with a different perspective than most. For starters, I can tell you the name of the current Prime Minister as well as several of those preceeding her.

The book is written from two separate trips Bill Bryson made to mainland Australia. While nominally broad, it's essentially held together by a few points - Australia is large and mostly empty. It's not nearly as empty as it seems. No one outside of Australia really cares.

There are a couple of other themes that come out during the course of the book (so one doesn't assume Bryson's obsession with size is related to any insecurities on his part). One is that Bryson really does seem to like Australia and the people he meets here. The other is that he is terrified of the place. He is strangely obsessed with all the deadly animals that you can find in Australia. He writes like he has (reason to have) one eye constantly trained on his back just waiting for a crocodile or a poisonous snake to come creeping up and do him in. Yet, apart from one encounter with a jellyfish (no one comes close to getting hurt) Bryson doesn't actually see anything deadly and nothing happens. It's all sources he's read and the accounts of people he speaks to. It's rather boring actually.

He's also obsessed with Aborigines, and while he does actually see some (better than his record with deadly animals) he just watches from afar and recounts what he's found out from research. While it may serve to make Bryson's point about how people handle the issue of Indigenous people in Australia, it also demonstrates one of the flaws in his travel writing. While Bryson writes what is for the most part a good book, it's not really about travelling.

Down Under (sold as In a Sunburned Country in the US) is easy to read, wryly humourous and well researched. However, if it wasn't for the facts Bryson brings in from his research and the humour with which he treats his subject matter, it wouldn't make for interesting reading. He mostly drives everywhere, travels in an improvised manner, checks out a museum or otherwise spends his free time in bars having a beer or two (to be fair, so do Australians ) and writes about that. It doesn't seem like Bryson actually had much time on either journey. It's far from an in-depth account; he spends a day or two in a city, ventures to a couple of suburbs, and then makes big sweeping statements about the place and the people (Bryson is a big fan of sweeping statements) integrating whatever might be of interest from what he has read and researched. It's a bit of a disppointment that he didn't make it to Tasmania. If Australia is a forgotten continent, Tasmania is certainly the most often forgotten (or overlooked) part of it. And this made me wonder how much is really Bryson's own experiences in the places he visited and how much has been shaped to demonstrate what he has learnt through reading other resources? Still, it's a credit to him that he can make it interesting.

And it was an interesting book. Bryson is a good writer, he takes you along with him on his journey and keeps you entertained for what is quite a broad and lengthy book. I learnt things about Australian history that I didn't know (not saying much, Australians aren't hugely well informed on our nation's history) and was reminded of many more things I had forgotten. I laughed, at Bryson's depictions of Australians, at Bryson himself. And I recognised those parts of my own country that I love and those parts that I'm deeply ashamed of... so all in all, it's probably as good a reflection of Australia as you're going to get.

I felt more than a little bit weird reading a travelogue on Australia as an Australian while in Australia so, if nothing else, I can agree with Bryson that Australians are a very self-concious people...

Of all of Bill Bryson’s books, I didn’t intend this one to be my follow-up read to A Walk in the Woods. I was more interested in One Summer: America, 1927, but it wasn’t at my library. n  Notes from a Small Islandn was my second choice, but when my son, the nature lover, expressed an interest in seeing Australia, I took both books out. My husband grabbed Notes, and my son was still reading A Walk in the Woods, so journey to Australia it was.

I do have some partiality to Australia anyway, even though I’ve never been there. When I was a kid, I had a pen pal from Sydney named Linda. She had dark brown hair and big blue eyes. “I have never seen snow,” she told me in her first letter. My fondest memory connected with her happened at my eighth birthday party. Right when I was opening my presents, the mailman rang the doorbell with a package for me. It was a gift from Linda: a furry stuffed koala bear. It couldn’t have arrived at a better moment; it was like Linda was at my birthday party. It wasn’t a cloth doll either. It felt like real fur. Sorry, vegan friends, but I cherished that thing for years.

The book was very much in the style of n  A Walk in the Woodsn in that it alternated between Bryson’s travels, history, and science. Unlike A Walk in the Woods, Bryson had no steady travel companion in this book to get into scrapes with, so the laughs weren’t as frequent, but what was lacking in quantity was made up for in quality. In other words, the book didn’t make me laugh as often, but when it did, I laughed harder.

Most of the jokes involved Bryson imagining a painful death in an encounter with one of Australia’s many deadly animals and plants. It’s not just cuddly koalas living down under! Most of the science was about that, but me being me, I preferred the history. He devoted a full chapter to the genocide of the Aborigines, which Australians themselves tend to cover up. He also discussed Australia’s open immigration policy after World War II. Most of the immigrants then and now are Asians, but I happen to know, even though Bryson didn’t mention it, that Australia accepted a greater percentage of Holocaust survivors, in proportion to its overall population size, than the United States. Just about every Australian Jew I have ever met is a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. That’s not so for most American Jews I know, including myself. My family got to the States much earlier.

All in all, Bryson makes Australia seem like a fascinating place to visit, though he also makes it clear that large parts of it are completely deserted and nearly uninhabitable. And since it’s unlikely that I’ll ever get there myself, I’m grateful for Bryson for his thorough, entertaining and informative account.

Bryson is one of my favorite non fiction authors, and his books cover such a range of topics, from Australia, to general history, the Apalacian Mountains, the beginnings of the English language. I've enjoyed every single one of his books, he would be a fascinating person to talk to - he's lead such an adventerous life.

True to his form, this book was written to be both entertaining and informative. It's not often where you laugh out loud during a non fiction novel, but his are usually littered with golden moments that make you smile.

I knew basically nothing about Australia before this book, I knew that they were "founded by prisoners" and that their seasons are backwards from ours in the Northern Hemisphere, and that their water goes backwards down the drain. That's basically it.

This book is told as a sort of true life story of his adventures through Australia and he gives a brief history of the places he visits, interesting anecdotes, and personal stories about his experiences in Australia. His adventures boogie boarding and running from 2 feral dogs had me laughing out loud.

I learned so much from his book, and it expanded on the little bits that I had known before reading. Yes, Aussie started out as a penal colony - but they weren't bad people. It's not like they sent a bunch of murderers rapists and other violent criminals... the people who ended up getting sent to Aussie (New South Wales as it was known then) were people who did things like stealing cucumbers, books, vagrants and other stupidly mild crimes. Essentially a group of people 200 mariners and 500 "criminals" to a remote land in the middle of the summer. The explorer who had charted out where they were going to send these people had come during the 'wet' season and drastically overestimated how hospitable the land was going to be for colonization. The planning for this trip was also abysmal. No one aboard the ship was a botanist or even a gardener, there were no medically trained people, there were no carpenters or builders, and very little supplies were sent with them. Somehow they managed to make it work - Bryson stated that he feels the negative view of starting out as a penal colony shouldn't be as stigmatized as it is. The people sent there were at worst guilty of petty theft and managed to build a colony from nothing. He has a rather different view on the first Australians than many people do.

I learned a bit about how Parliment works and why it's significantly more entertaining than USA politics. Apparently it's not uncommon for Parliment members to cuss each other out, call each other clowns, pigs, pissants, cunts, and a plethora of other colorful language that doesn't grace the discussions in the US Senate and Congress. CSPAN (usa politics channel) would get a lot more attention if we loosened up a bit.

I was also surprised how sparecely populated Australia is, in 2000, the year the book was written there were only 18 million people living in Australia, which was a bit mind blowing because i thought given the size of the place they would have considerably more people living in it. I looked it up and the current population is around 23 million. The entire middle section of Australia is mostly uninhabited, with the wild outback remaining mostly untouched. What's neat about Australias outback is since it's largely untouched, and since the continent doesn't have much in the way of geological activity - no volcanoes or things like that - the fossil records are wonderful. It's a haven for archeologists and many full skeletons of creatures long gone have been discovered there. Unlike most places where you are lucky to get a few bones from the same specimin.

Australia also has a shit ton of things that will kill you, and people have just seemed to have adapted to it and become a tougher sort of person. On Brysons boogie board adventure he came across a Man-O-War jellyfish, but he didn't recognize it for what it was. He asked his Aussie tour guide what it was, and he said "nah mate, you don't want to touch that, it may be uncomfortable". Uncomfortable is such an understatement and such a show of how the Aussies view things differently. I would have flipped the fuck out and gotten out of the water immediately. They did shortly there after when they spotted a few more and the tour guide mentioned sometimes "they come in waves". Jesus christ.

Of the top 10 most deadly snakes in the world, all 10 reside in Aussie. Aussie also has the deadliest spider - the funnel web spider which burrows in the ground and is known for coming out and biting at toes.


The box jellyfish which is the deadliest known jellyfish, it looks gorgeous but its lile playing with Death.

The Blue Ring Octopus which is the deadliest known octopus, and deceptive bevauae of its size. Its itty nitty and is cute in its own way, but that shit will kill you if youre not careful.

The Paralysis Tick which has a name that speaks for itself.

The stone fish.... The stone fish is a fucking menace that looks like a fucking rock but if you step on it you're going to double over in pain and barely be able to move. It can be lethal, but it's always incredibly painful, they are in shallow water sometimes and it's easy to tread on one without knowing what you're doing.

It's not uncommon for Australias temperature to get into the 40's (C's) 140 (F) in certain locations - so going hiking in the summer can be a deadly trek. It is strikingly gorgeous though. Bryson visited several towns with less than 500 residents and asked them what it is that lured them there and then kept them there despite the harsh environment. They ended up having a cold beer on the porch looking at the most gorgeous sunset he'd ever seen and got his answer. The land is as beautiful as it is harsh.

In 1993 in the Victorian desert there was an explosion that caused seismographs all over the continent to register something that was over 193X the magnitude of the largest known mine explosion. There were some reports of a flash of bright light off in the distance. It may have been the first ever nuke set off by non military/non govt personel. It's speculated that a group named Aum Shinkriko, which is a Japanese cult, got a hold of large amounts of land in the desert, hired two soviet nuclear scientists, and were experimenting with bombs in the middle of the desert.

This book is full of interesting and mind blowing facts about a huge continent that never came up in my studies at school. We all know it exists, but for whatever reason our educational system just leaves it out. I'm hankering to go visit Aussie and I think I've fallen in love with it the same way Bryson has - his descriptions of the landscape, the people, and the culture are glowing and passionate and it's sparked a new interest for me.

In 1986, a friend and I threw maple leaves on our backpacks and, with a few hotels booked and Eurorail passes in hand, made our way around Europe. While in Paris, we met a fellow traveller who happened to hail from Australia, and over a modest dinner in a cozy café, we asked him about his homeland and we answered his questions about what it was like to be from Canada -- this was a time when Reagan was in his second term and, with the Iran-Contra stuff coming to light, the invasion of tiny Grenada, and his government trying to force our country to become a launching base for ICBMs against the USSR, we expressed the viewpoint common amongst our University-student friends: we were scared to death of America and lived in fear of the war-machine crouching just to the south of the longest unprotected border in the world. After a pleasant meal and discovering how much more we had in common with this Australian than with our North American partners, our conversation was interrupted by two quite beautiful young women and, standing with their backs to me and my friend and addressing the Australian only, one of them said, "We have met many smart and friendly Canadians on our trip. Maybe one day you will, too." As these Americans strode haughtily out, I was mildly stung by the words that they had obviously rehearsed to put us in our place, but I remember spreading my hands in a gesture of explication and saying, "You see what bullies Americans are? They could have tried to join our conversation and correct anything we got wrong but they dropped a bomb and moved on." Our newfound friendship none the worse for wear, we continued to talk and discover all of the political and cultural commonalities we had between our two Commonwealth nations. After we left the café, I remember how we taught each other our national anthems and walked the cobblestoned streets of the Left Bank belting out, "Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free!" (And I should pause to say that I no longer fear America and wish Americans nothing but the best.)

Okay, so I'm not a travel writer, but Bill Bryson is, and with In a Sunburned Country he does a great job of making Australia sound like the most fascinating place that a person could visit -- he hit all of the major cities, a few off-the-beaten-path towns, and remote tourist destinations like the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru; humorously and exhaustively describing each from a tourist's perspective. With obvious affection for the landscape and the people he meets, Bryson uses a story-telling tone to blend history and science with his eyewitness accounts, keeping everything light and fun but also very informative. As for this information, Bryson quotes from so many different books that he maintains a tone of authority, but he curiously includes this common misrepresentation: Australia is the only island that is also a continent, and the only continent that is also a country. I was also taught this in school, but I'm sure the other countries in the continent of "Australia" (Tasmania, New Guinea, Seram, possibly Timor, and neighbouring islands) are as tired of being left out as the Central American and Caribbean countries must be of being left out of the official list of North American countries (and when I was in school, North America was just Canada and the U.S. on maps. Mexico was later added, but even now, who can name all 23 independent states? And what about New Zealand? Why am I only now discovering that it exists on its own submerged continent of Zealandia? Why didn't Bryson tell me that?)

That pet peeve aside, I was constantly amused during this book by the way that Bryson seemed to regard the Australians he met as an entirely different species -- whether describing them as merely quirky or "as mad as cut snakes", the strangest attributes of their culture were the ones which were simply the least American (like watching cricket or having a Parliamentary system of government with a Governor General) and again I was reminded of how compatible my friend and I were with the Australian we met in Paris. Bryson's few stories about Australia's Aboriginal peoples were fascinating -- so often overlooked, these original inhabitants likely sailed to Australia ages ago (tens of thousands of years before any other peoples were braving the seas) with a viable breeding community and eked out a living in one of the most inhospitable landscapes on Earth, giving them the longest continuous culture in the history of the world. Without pottery or agriculture or iron tools or settlements, the Aboriginals thrived before European contact, but were hunted down and marginalised and had their children taken from them by the government "for their own betterment". That's such a shameful history (so similar to ours in Canada) that it's a pity that Bryson didn't attempt to talk to some Aboriginals to get their own perspective.

As for the humour, Bryson keeps his tone entertaining but periodically dips into the hyperbolic self-deprecation when talking about himself that I found so tiresome in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. A random example:

n  

Dogs don't like me. It is a simple law of the universe, like gravity. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never passed a dog that didn't act as if it thought I was about to take its Alpo. Dogs that have not moved from the sofa in years will, at the sniff of me passing outside, rise in fury and hurl themselves at shut windows. I have seen tiny dogs, no bigger than a fluffy slipper, jerk little old ladies off their feet and drag them over open ground in a quest to get at my blood and sinew. Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.

n
If you find that funny, then you'll have no worries, mate (and if you don't, it doesn't happen too often). Overall, this was a light summer read that I hope Australians would agree shows off their country favourably (if one can forget that the ten most lethal creatures on Earth are all found there, it sounds like a lovely place to visit). And maybe it's an American thing, but Bryson concludes with the point that it's unfair that the rest of the world never thinks about, much less hears about, Australia. As this book was written before the Crocodile Hunter and the Wiggles became bona fide superstars, maybe he had a point, but this was also long after Crocodile Dundee, Midnight Oil, and "put another shrimp on the barbie", so who in the Northern Hemisphere didn't have some basic consciousness of the Land Down Under in 1999? Either way, it's a worthwhile note on which to conclude:

n  

Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. 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. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn't need watching, and so we don't. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely ours.

n
I would give In a Sunburned Country 3.5 stars if I could, so consider the 4 a rounding up.

This time around Bryson kind of meets Australians, heads into a few pubs, wanders about the cities, complains, makes jokes and has some serious fears of Australia’s nature.

He is right, Australia has the most poisonous critters on earth, and he names them, while I sat and wondered how the Australians managed to make it all these years without being poisoned, without dying. Many probably did. Well, according to some articles online they don’t die from venom much anymore because they have anti-venom. I wondered if they carried suitcases of it when they went into the Outback, different kinds of venom for each poisonous creature. After reading, I see that people die more from car accidents there, but I imagine that if they ran into a kangaroo they could get kicked to death.

And so I asked my sister if she knew any Australians, and she did. She emailed him, giving him my questions, so I received some fun answers, and then I decided that if you are in the Outback with no cell phone coverage, and you get bitten by a poisonous critter, then you just die, unless someone comes by to help you. Here is what my sister’s friend said, and I must say it was the most interesting part of this book even though it wasn't in the book:

“we have 6 of the top 10 most venomous snakes on earth, including the top 2. if u were in the middle of absolute nowhere and got bitten..ur probably gonna have a bad time, but u would also just be airlifted lol and snakes dont like attack u lol they bite u if u mess with them lol. i have the poisonous ones in my back yard. You would actively have to be looking for something to bite u, like run into the bushes and step on something. I don’t see snakes when camping, and I have only seen two spiders that can kill you. I have had snakes in my house; two of my cats were killed by snakes. Had one cat that kill three. Spiders are also crappy little things that die if u step on them…I have big spiders in my house, but they are chill…daddy long legs are a living cobweb. if u swim in the 2 states that have crocs..u will be eaten haha. snakebites usually make the news here, it doesnt really happen much. ”

I have always wondered why man couldn’t get rid of the poisonous creatures, but I suppose they breed too fast and are hard to find, which means that it is rare for someone to run into one, get bitten, and die, just as my sister’s friend had said. But Bryson is drawn to them, at least in word, so we can rest assured that he will be alive to write another book. And what about those rabbits that they have that just keep multiplying. Maybe we can send them some coyotes.

As I continued to read on in this book, I came to a comment that he made that struck me as odd because it really applied to the first half of this book, and so I will capitalize which part does:

“As I sat at the bar now I pulled out my one-volume history of Australia by Manny Clark and dutifully plowed into it. I had only about thirty pages left and I WOULD BE LESS THAN CANDID IF I DIDN’T TELL YOU THAT I COULDN’T WAIT TO HAVE MR. CLARK AND HIS EXTRAVAGANT DRONING OUT OF MY LIFE FOREVER.”

And so that was how I feel about Bryson’s almost arm chair travel book, which is where I think most of his writing of Australian history comes from, reading in the bars, instead of spending time exploring, like digging around in the bushes looking for those poisonous critters just to see them. Well, that would be a bad idea; it sounds like something I would do.

I had put the book down about 4 times in my own travels through it, but then it picked up some. He talked some about the history of the Aboriginals, and how they were treated, then he went to see where the great outlaw Ned Kelly hid out, and next he went on Great Barrier Reef tour, where he began having more fears, this time of “sharks, boxfish, scorpion fish, stinging corals, and sea snakes, and groupers.” I would also have those fears. And then as he got out of the pontoon boat and into the water, he feared drowning. At least he got out of the boat and into the water. He wrote: “I discovered that I was perhaps sixty feet above the bottom. I had never been in water this deep before and it was unexpectedly unnerving…then my mask and snorkel filled with water and I started choking.” He got back in the boat, and I am not putting him down for this, because I never learned to swim well either and find deep water to panic me. I remember snorkeling in a lagoon in the Yucatan, and while I was having fun seeing the colorful tropical fish, I looked up and found that I was heading out to sea. I didn’t panic, thank God, instead I swam sideways to get back, and if it had not been for the duck feet that I was wearing, I would have drowned.

I really picked this audiobook only because I thought it would be mildly interesting and entertaining enough for my commute. It hadn't really occurred to me to be all that interested in an overview of Australia. But I have basically cleaned my library out of audiobooks I might want to listen to.

So, on the good, after opening with much real but mindlessly entertaining humor, the book did later bring me onboard. Bryson is Bryson and he can make stuff you didn't care all that much about become really interesting. I picture him having a tough time figuring how to go about this book, how to write a travel book that isn't really a travel book. First throw in as much humor as possible and then eventually stumble into substance. Anyway, that is what he seems to have done and it works.

That bad is that, after all this very interesting and sometimes wonderful stuff, he sidesteps the Australian Aboriginal issue. Of course it's a thorny issue and something rather complicated and negative for what is supposed to be a fun and non-controversial book. But, it felt like a great mistake, like the whole book became somehow half effort all because he couldn't figure out his way in. Did he try and just encounter too many problems? Did he decide that at 1.5% of the population maybe they aren't such a big deal? I don't know and wish he had found a better answer.

This is the third Bill Bryson book I've read, and maybe I'm growing tired of him, but here's the thing: I wanted to read a book on Australia and mostly read a book about Bill Bryson. Considering this is a travel book, it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did, but I was still distracted by him. The best parts of this book are when he's not talking about himself and chooses, instead, to tell stories about the history of places he visits and leaves his personal anecdotes out of it, because it isn't done in a self-deprecating way, like many travel narratives are. Instead, he comes off as an arrogant and condescending prick, and that can't be fixed in the last paragraph.(less)

Bill Bryson is not exactly known as an adventurer despite having written a few "travel guides". In fact, he's known for being constantly looking up and subsequently freaking out about all sorts of dangers. Him going to Australia ...

... what could possibly go wrong?

I just KNEW this would be fun. Bryson is clumsy, pale and already of a certain age so just picturing him in Australia of all places, among the boogie-board-surfing tanned Aussie hunks made me chuckle.

And I wasn't disappointed. He managed to combine important historical information about the continent's discovery and colonization with chuckle-worthy stories of him freaking out on land and in the water alike.
Through his (mis-)adventures we're taught some of the local slang

meet the truly weird people (you can tell how much the place has shaped them)

and get to travel from one side of Australia to the next - visiting city parks such as Perth's Kings Park, marvelling at sights such as Mount Uluru

encountering living rocks and strange animals and plants along the way, while hearing about people meeting dreadful ends thanks to the most venomous animals on the planet (or for lack of / due to too much water).

Bryson also incorporates political and economical information such as the racism against the Aborigines that is called "prejudice" there (I was very interested to learn about the seizure of children that went on for decades as well as the on-going problems regarding education that apparently also lead to barely any Aborigines working in restaurants, museums or shops to this day) and tells the readers about almost comical contradictions such as Australia being the country with the fewest trees but the biggest exporter of wooden pallets ... in short: we get to know an impossible place.

Alas, he missed out on Bungle Bungle and Kakadu National Park amongst other things but on a whole, I'd say he and therefore we got to see a lot nevertheless. For details of where he was and what he/we encountered along the way, please see my numerous status updates. What is more, I like how he went from freaked out tourist to enamoured enthusiast who is likely to go back there again. Not bad as a crash course about this unique and volatile country/continent and its inhabitants.

This adventure has been proudly presented by Jeff, my non-fic buddy-reader.

I love Australia, even though I have never been there. It has amazing wilderness and is the setting of beautiful movies; it exports talented actors, actresses and directors; it has that Great Barrier Reef thingy, which is apparently so wonderful that is is a Natural Wonder of the World; and it is home to the stunning Sydney Opera House. And oh yeah, Aussies gave us UGGs. So we have a lot to thank them for.

Bill Bryson also loved Australia, so much so that he spent months touring its cities and the Outback. Bryson employed his usual humor in this travelogue, and numerous sections had me laughing out loud, sometimes embarrassingly so. But he would also wax rhapsodic about how amazing the land was:

There was no place in the world like it. There still isn't. Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else. More than this, it exists in an abundance that seems incompatible with the harshness of the environment. Australia is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile, and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents. (Only Antarctica is more hostile to life.) This is a place so inert that even the soil is, technically speaking, a fossil. And yet it teems with life in numbers unaccounted. For insects alone, scientists haven't the faintest idea whether the total number of species is 100,000 or more than twice that. As many as a third of those species remain entirely unknown to science. For spiders, the proportion rises to 80 percent ... This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found. Trust me, this is an interesting place.

Bryson gets into his fair share of scrapes during his Australian journey, and at one point he and his traveling companion are in danger of running out of both fuel and water while in the Outback. Luckily, no serious harm was done.

Another close encounter was with a bluebottle jellyfish. Bryson and his guide, Deirdre, were boogie boarding at Freshwater Beach near Manly, when Deirdre suddenly grabbed Bryson's arm and stopped him from advancing toward the "bluey," as Deirdre called it. At the time, Bryson didn't know what she meant by "bluey."

"Is it dangerous?" I asked.

Now, before we hear Deirdre's response to me as I stood there, vulnerable and abraded, shivering, nearly naked and half drowned, let me just quote from her subsequent article in the Herald's weekend magazine: While the photographer shoots, Bryson and his boogie board are dragged 40 meters down the beach in a rip. The shore rip runs south to north, unlike the rip further out which runs north to south. Bryson doesn't know this. He didn't read the warning sign on the beach.* Nor does he know about the bluebottle being blown in his direction — now less than a meter away — a swollen stinger that could give him 20 minutes of agony and, if he's unlucky, an unsightly allergic reaction to carry on his torso for his life.

"Dangerous? No," Deirdre replied now as we stood gawping at the bluebottle. "But don't brush against it."

"Why not?"

"Might be a bit uncomfortable."

I looked at her with an expression of interest bordering on admiration. Long bus journeys are uncomfortable. Slatted wooden benches are uncomfortable. Lulls in conversations are uncomfortable. The sting of a Portuguese man-of-war — even Iowans know this — is agony. It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

*Footnote: The statement is inarguable. However, the author would like the record to show that he did not have his glasses on; he trusted his hosts; he was scanning a large area of ocean for sharks; and he was endeavoring throughout not to excrete a large house brick into his pants.

HAHAHA! Bryson is a hoot, you guys. There is so much more great stuff in this book, and I could type out pages of other funny stories, but I shall leave you to discover it for yourself. Like all of his travelogues, he shares interesting historical details about the places he visits, and he's good at making fun of himself and his bumbling ways. I enjoyed this so much and I laughed so hard and so often that this has become one of my favorite Bryson books. If you like audiobooks, I highly recommend listening to Bryson narrate this. It's marvelous.

My rating: 4.5 stars rounded up to 5

Australia is easily the most unique place on Earth. 80% of the nature that inhabits it is only found there. It's also possible that the Aboriginals that inhabited the land before European settlers are the oldest group of people in history. This and many more facts can be found here wrapped up in a story about crazy misadventures in a strange and foreign land of immeasurable beauty. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

L'Australia è un paese stranissimo. E' vastissima, ma poca parte di essa è abitata. E' un paese in larga parte ancora inesplorato, una vera manna santa per esploratori e naturalisti, peccato che larga parte del territorio sia desertico e che rimanere bloccati lì non è certo una passeggiata!
Animali e piante che da altre parti dovrebbero essere estinti e che invece sono presenti in Australia, ma scherzi del destino li fanno incrociare poche volte con chi realmente potrebbe studiarli.
Di animali, l'Australia, è veramente piena in primis di squali e coccodrilli. Passeggiare sul litorale e venire trascinati improvvisamente al largo senza lasciare traccia, in Australia succede. Come può succedere di venire abbandonati sulla barriera corallina!
Per non parlare dei mille animali velenosissimi che si possono incrociare durante il cammino: meduse che è meglio non toccare se non si vuole morire di una lenta e dolorosa agonia, e ragni, ragni giganti o ragni piccolissimi e che se ti mordono puoi a malapena dire "mi ha morso qualc..." e sei già al creatore.
Un posto interessante e bizzarro, semisconosciuto al mondo eppure molto ricco di storia e di curiosità come Bill Bryson ha raccontato in questo libro.