A substitute for another book: after the first two chapters – a Kindle sample – of The Fatal Shore, I was engrossed and wanted to read more, regardless of the odd reservation. But I'd have had to pay for it, and I'm curtailing my book-buying habits after years of overindulgence. Bill Brysons, as any Brit knows, are freely and easily available anywhere: libraries, other people's bookshelves, park benches, lost property offices in the middle of nowhere… So it was with this I continued reading about Australia instead. This was first time I'd read more than a few pages of Bryson at a time, and whilst, yes, Down Under could have lost at least 50 pages without being any the worse, and some of the jokes are pretty bad, plenty aren't. There's something reliably amusing and companionable and consumable-in-bulk about his writing, can quite understand how he's the sort of thing people like to read when they have a cold. Diverting, yet not so amazing you'd worry about missing something. Also, damn clever to have an ice-cream cover design on this edition: the book becomes instantly moreish. The snobbery about Bryson must be a result of his bestselling over-exposure – it's easy to feel bored of him when you've barely read him. Although I started reading the Books pages of the papers so young that he still seems slightly new fangled, in the way of all things for which you can remember a Time Before. Maybe it was my year to get round to reading him – found a copy of At Home lying around a while ago, but passed on it because it's not exactly short.

The ordinariness of Bryson's approach is refreshing after a couple of other popular travelogues I've read in the last six weeks – The Year of Living Danishly and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible – which concentrated on people the authors got to know via meedja connections, many of them well-off. Okay, Bryson's first Aussie journey is an expenses-paid first class junket for the Mail but after that he stumbles between ordinary hotels, ordinary hire cars, and shambolic yet ultimately rewarding long walks I found entirely relatable: all of this so that I could see a house I had no actual interest in seeing and then walk on to a place that I was now too tired to explore. But I hardly minded at all. And do you know why? I had seen a monotreme. Life could throw nothing at me that would diminish the thrill of that. (His descriptions of animals aren't always the most enthralling, but this echidna... a small furry hemisphere, rather like the brush portion of a floor polisher. Bless.)

As hundreds of thousands have no doubt said before, it's the mixture of typically British cynicism with American enthusiasm that make his appeal. (Meanwhile, the self-deprecation doesn't isn't so much the popular tic of a secretly confident British comedian, more honest self-awareness.) A skim of reviews of other Bryson titles on GR shows snobbery and peevishness to be readers' least-likes about him – but here, he simply really, really likes Australia, so unless you want to pick out a small handful of sideswipes at tacky locales, it's frankly difficult to find those here. For goodness sakes, about an area where he says all the anecdotes make locals look like pricks, he also says, In a word, Queensland has a reputation for being a place apart. I couldn’t wait to get there. Now that's open mindedness and enthusiasm.

His content is less elite-focused than the Danish and Russian books I mentioned: not just in his activities, but in the amount of time he spends around ordinary people, and because he has something, albeit not masses, to say about problems like poverty and racism (albeit as they were 15+ years ago). When I was younger, my impression of Australia, as for most British people my age, was from TV soaps (to me, it looked bland; to some it was a place they wanted to, and did, emigrate to) – but part of the more negative view I've picked up in recent years online is that it's a more racist, discriminatory and closed-minded society than Britain. I don't know quite how thick Bryson lays it on in implying that – at time of writing 15+ years ago - he couldn't find any white Australian with a good or insightful word to say about Aboriginal people, apart from a law centre solicitor who represents them - lovely guy, probably the nicest person in the book. He also explains the intergenerational dislocation of children being taken from their families through much of the twentieth century, and how this as well as the older history relates to current levels of violence, alcoholism and poverty. And I hope things are a bit better than this now, from Alice Springs: ‘But if you’re not giving the kids the lessons because the parents can’t help them, then those kids, when they become parents, won’t have the core skills either, will they?’ Unfortunately Bryson doesn't interview any Aboriginal people himself, and as he didn't notice any in public life despite looking, he gives the impression they're uniformly impoverished - but at least he's thinking about more than just other white middle class professionals on his journey, and his insights were sharper than might be expected from this new interview (sounds like he didn't see what those British regions were like between then and now, in particular how public services improved and then declined: the surfaces remain whilst the substance often has not. Saying everywhere looks richer now is too much attention to surface not story: like when you see a Greek person voxpopped on the news wearing some designer t-shirt...which they actually got several years ago, not yesterday, and it's not like anyone's going to pay them decent money if they sell it.)

Bryson hasn't entirely changed the impression of Australia I had when growing up: there are a lot of Crocodile Dundee type rural blokes; stuck in suburbs he says I sought in vain for a corner of Australia not covered by bungalows - and the country doesn't sound culturally compelling as somewhere to stay longer than a tourist, although the museums are top-notch. But I'm a whole lot keener on the outdoors, rural areas and places of low population density than I was as a teenager, and he has plenty to say about those, so the appeal becomes obvious there.
But when I say low population density, I meant I like the idea of the other houses being a few miles away – not a few hundred, which is a pretty typical distance between settlements in the Outback other than petrol stations and motels. I bet Tesco (or equivalent) doesn't deliver to those.
He makes the interesting discovery that Brisbane is not three or four hours north of Sydney, as I had long and casually supposed, but the better part of a couple of days’ drive. (I'd have assumed similar – and it's as daft as thinking Inverness is near London.) The lack of roads between big cities outside the south eastern coasts is bewildering to an American or Brit: Not an inch of paved road exists along the nearly 2,000 miles of indented coastline from Darwin to Cairns. Although at the time of writing 86% of Australians lived in cities, the proportions of Bryson's book try to get closer to the physical proportions of the place, with several long overland journeys through the baking outback – where he regales readers with the extreme privations of ill-prepared early white explorers who frequently perished, or who resorted to the likes of eating a whole raw wallaby, bones and fur included, in order to survive.

The Australian government's internet censorship policies, which for a time sounded the most draconian in the West, always seemed bizarrely out of kilter with the ruggedly outspoken the country otherwise had - and not just in fictional films. Bryson talks about the amusingly robust tenor of debate in the national parliament, and in particular from former PM Paul Keating: Among the epithets that have taken flight from his tongue during the course of public debate, and are to be found gracing the pages of whatever is the Australian equivalent of Hansard, have been scumbags, pieces of criminal garbage, sleazebags, stupid foul-mouthed grubs, piss-ants, mangy maggots, perfumed gigolos, gutless spivs, boxheads, immoral cheats, and stunned mullets.
But it turns out censorship of controversial material from the rest of the world has quite a history:
In the 1950s, Australia was probably the least confident nation in the English-speaking world. It was so far from everywhere that the authorities didn’t seem to know quite what was acceptable, so essentially they played it safe and allowed nothing....It wasn’t just suntan lotion ads that were censored, but movies, plays, magazines and books in numbers unbelievable. One thing you won’t find much in Australian second-hand bookshops are 1950s or earlier editions of lots of books – The Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Peyton Place, Another Country, Brave New World and hundreds and hundreds of others. The reason for this is simple: they were banned. Altogether, at its peak, 5,000 titles were forbidden to be imported into the country.

On the subject of cultural exports rather than imports, I was delighted to have given up watching Neighbours & Home & Away in the mid-90s - a whole extra hour of life, 5 days a week! And had long since given up on the idea that there might be anything interesting to say about those shows. But perhaps someone was having a laugh after all in naming one of Erinsborough's main employers: Harold Bell Lasseter, in the 1920s claimed to have stumbled on a gold reef some ten miles long in the outback. Lasseter managed to persuade several sceptical businessmen and even some large corporations (General Motors, for one) to underwrite an expedition, which set off from Alice Springs in 1930... never found the gold. People are searching for it yet.

There's a lot in Down Under about dangerous animals – crocs, snakes, spiders (I understand from The Guardian that some Aussies find this a tired cliché among foreigners). The guy can't seem to walk a mile without walking into a cobweb. Which is fine when it's English webs made by those wispy beasts that are more like live dustbunnies than actual arachnids, but I'd rather not look at pics of Australian spiders, never mind get a real one on my clothes. He's continually alarmed by the idea of proximate danger (saying at least twice that no-one knows why the fauna, and occasional flora, is 'so extravagantly toxic') and bemused by the locals' attitude to it, living and working around it – it struck me that it's similar to significant allergies: there are these things in the environment that are dangerous and you have to live knowing that, it's just that he wasn't used to the idea at all.

The obscureness of Australia, another of the author's hobbyhorses throughout this book, hasn't entirely stood the test of time and the internet: it is nearly impossible to track Australian politics from abroad because so little news of the country's affairs leaks out to the wider world. Some American GR reviewers of this book still refer to Australia as a place people don't know much about, but it's not so for today's Guardian reader, who, several times a week, clicks stories assumed from their non-specific headlines to be UK news and finds they're about Oz. And as a Guardian reader, not wanting to be dismissive of other places - except perhaps the USA - reads them and acquires an accidental education.

Tracked down an old comment of mine, from January this year, when in response to someone else noticing they were overlooking Aus & NZ books, I said “I'm quite happy with my bias against Australian books (... though aboriginal authors interest me a little)." I've realised in the last few years that it's better for my head if I speak as I feel at the time rather than constantly second-guessing and caveatting myself like I used to, not feeling able to truly think or feel other than provisionally. But whilst it's really too early to say, that comment may be one of those occasions like when, in 2012, I said to a friend that I doubted I'd ever read a book over 400 pages again. It's by no means been a 180 degree turn, but over the past 3 years that was (past tense as am writing at a point when it looks as if difficult reading might get more … difficult again) perhaps a 45 degree one. Possibly it's time for one of those Tim Wintons that always used to look so boring on blogs.

Following closely on the heels of my recent reading of A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, this Aussie travelogue by the popular and gifted writer Bill Bryson did not disappoint. Matter of fact I found the book superior to that first one I read. Less bad jokes, but still enough off-color to disgust me from time to time. But this particular memoir was jam-packed with useful information regarding the geography and history of Australia. Completely fascinating and dangerous. Much to get hung about. Educational and instructive. Well-written and adventurous. A truly great read.

Five stars of course it's a Bill Bryson. The slow reading has nothing to do with the book, but all to do with how rarely I get to listen to it in the car, I don't drive much on my own nowadays.
We're going to Western Australia in September, so I was particuarly interested to hear what he had to say about the area, and I was pleased to find he liked the Valley of the Giants in the Pemberton area, where we're staying a couple of days. I also got a tip for another botanical sensation, the stromatolites of shark bay, we could have gone that far up, but sadly a cyclone has wrecked the boardwalk, so its impossible to see them till 2023. Now I'm sad I can't see them, before I read this book I was happily ignorant!

Edit 2024-12-13
After being to Australia, I can add that the Valley of the Giants was indeed very enjoyable. Also we saw stromatolites quite easily near Cervantes at Lake Thetis.

Having travelled briefly through parts of Queensland and New South Wales several years ago, I'd been waiting to catch up with Bryson's book ever since. I now wish I'd read it before I travelled or even during the trip itself. It's full interesting information and ideas for places to visit and gave me loads of laughs. A really good read whether you're planning a trip or just looking to enjoy BB's hilariously entertaining anecdotes.

I've read a few of his books in the past and I do find him to be an interesting companion, as I've travelled with him. His books on visits to the UK in particular are great fun (even if he pokes fun at some places quite close to my heart). I'm not sure how accurate some of his adventures are - they seem a bit tuned for laughs to me - but that's ok, it's what you pick up a book like this for I think.

I'd recommend this book to anyone thinking about a trip to Oz or readers who just enjoy tales of travel and amusing things that can happen when you're in the hands of a natural raconteur.

Laugh out loud funny, of course, but also full of fascinating history, politics, and geography. Also, frankly, of course. It's what I expect from Bill Bryson: to laugh my behind off, even as I learn about a place that has played host to one of the world's greatest curmudgeons. This is the first time I've listened to one of his books, and I have to say, I enjoyed his mild, faintly British voice.

Every year (more or less), I take a trip up to New Brunswick, Canada, on a family vacation. To get there from New York means about 10 hours in the car; and once you’re there, it is an hour and a half round trip to get groceries—not counting time in the store—and this is a trip that must be made about every other day, since the only fridge we have is small, weak, alarmingly old, and runs on propane. The point is, we have to spend a goodly number of hours in the car.
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Thus, I have gotten into the habit of downloading a few audiobooks for the trip; and this year, Bill Bryson was my man. I’d listened to his recording of A Short History of Nearly Everything before (it is an abridged recording, unfortunately), so I knew that he had a lovely voice. If you haven’t heard him speak, I’d recommend searching him on YouTube; he has a delightful transatlantic accent—owing to his long stay in England, combined with his American roots—and this gives his dorky, awkward persona a sort of extra layer of fragile charm. He sounds like a delicate man, not one for thrills or even serious exertion, but very clever and sharp, rather like someone it would be nice to have a drink with.
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I hit play on my phone and we began to drive. It was an excellent start to a vacation. Bryson’s prose is bubbling and lively; and it’s endearing to hear the poor author have to pronounce some of his extravagant word choices. Besides his usual writing prowess, I must say that in this book he chose his subject very well. Bryson begins by emphasizing—and he really knows how to emphasize a point—how little Australia is discussed in the media. And I realized, with a bit of an embarrassed shock, that he’s right: I knew only a handful of facts about Australia, some of which I wasn’t even too sure about. For example, I didn’t even know the name of Australia’s capital; and, really, that’s a bit shameful for someone who normally considers himself a relatively cultured person. (It’s Canberra, by the way.)
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As Bryson does, he begins his bumbling travels, managing to make even simple tasks like finding a hotel or falling asleep in a car seem Homeric. And as usual, Bryson weaves frequent and lengthy digressions into the narrative of his journey, delving into Australia’s economy, history, biology, sports, politics, local legends—you name it, Bryson will likely give you a neat anecdote about it.
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Perhaps due to his journalistic training, Bryson has a fascination for all things deadly. Just as in A Short History of Nearly Everything, where he includes several ways that humanity might actually be made extinct, so here Bryson lets his taste for the macabre run rampant with Australia’s impressive collection of dangerous critters. Plentiful and poisonous snakes, spiders, and jellyfish; big and hungry sharks and crocodiles; and even some malicious species of plants—it seems that Australia is not a welcoming environment. Australia’s weather is not any better, as Bryson makes clear with his many stories of the explorers who attempted to brave Australia’s hot and empty innards—many of them, as Bryson gleefully points out, woefully and hilariously unprepared.
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Another journalistic habit of his is his fascination with gaps. He spends page after page hammering home the extent to which Australia is huge, vast, empty, and to a large extent unexplored. With the instinct of a trained reporter, Bryson focuses in wherever there is something unexplained, unknown, unclear, or even just poorly understood. When Bryson is lucky, this leads him to some neglected piece of history, such as the impressive career of aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith. But often Bryson runs up against a dead end, such as the disappearance of Australian Prime Minster, Harold Holt, who took a swim while in office, never to be seen again. Considering that this poor fellow likely drowned and was then eaten by some large aquatic animal, this makes Bryson doubly curious, for it involves both death and mystery.
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Well, I must say that I had a great time with Bryson, and I’m sad our shared trip has come to an end. One of us has to go back to work. I had a few good laughs, and, perhaps more importantly, now I know more about Australia than ever before—which I suppose isn’t saying much, but it’s something. But still I must admit that I’m left with one dreadful unanswered question. I need to know: is it good or bad to drink your own urine when you’re stranded in a hot environment with no water? Bryson mentions somewhere that it’s not a good idea (although many have done it), because urine has a high sodium content; so it’s counterproductive, and will only speed up dehydration. But there are plenty of stories of people successfully drinking their own urine to survive. My suspicion is that, if you’re relatively well-hydrated to begin with so your urine is watery, it wouldn’t be too bad; but if you kept repeating the process, you would get diminishing returns, owing to higher and higher levels of waste products. Can anyone help me answer this question?

An awesome look at Australia. Having traveled the Tropical Forests and sandy reefs of Queensland, the verdant hills of NSW and Victoria, the Opal Mines of South Australia and the unrelenting outback of the Northern Territory I felt like Bryson was taking me to points somehow familiar, but in no way common. Moreover, Bryson takes ownership of his subjects before setting pen to paper. There's nothing "Wikipedia" about his writing. Its far more personal and ultimately so much more informative. The wilds of the bush blend in Bryson's narration with the wilds of the Australian character. If you've been, Bryson takes you back, if you want to go, just wait till you finish this book. You'll likely be on the phone to Quantas before you reach page 100. Travel writing at its finest.

This was a bit disappointing considering it being a rendition of a travelogue -- my favorite genre -- of my most favorite continent ever. Bryson, generally extremely adept at mixing humorous personal narrative with informative and insightful commentary on the subject of his travels, just didn't seem to appreciate Australia enough. Or perhaps Bryson's white, overweight, middle-aged stature was just not up for the job. More damaging was his superficial treatment of race relations concerning Australia's original Maori people. It sort of left a sour note. This volume is also not as laugh-out-loud funny as some of Bryson's earlier work.

Like most Americans, I have never really given much thought to Australia. It's an island where the seasons are backwards, there's a famous opera house, my ex husband's ex girlfriend is expating it up there, and there are loads of gorgeous men running around shirtless, drinking Fosters and saying "No worries, mate" in a delicious Crocodile Dundee sort of accent. Nothing too exciting, right?

Wrong! Australia is fascinating, and Bill Bryson has done an excellent job of telling us why. This book touches on a little bit of everything; history, politics, people, geology, geography, biology ... It's all quite interesting. I, for one, had no idea that Australia teemed with such an amazing and unique class of flora and fauna. Or that so many of them can kill you in their own special way.

I also had no earthly idea that Australia is so enormous. It is truly, truly massive. Stunningly so.

After reading this book, I really want to travel to Australia at some point. It's now on my top five list of places to vacation. And I never would have known about it if Bill Bryson hadn't traveled through it so thoroughly and written about it so eloquently.

I really enjoyed the travel around Australia with Bill and his friends (when he had them with him). I followed him on my map of Australia and looked up places on Google Maps and the Internet to get a view of what he saw and where he was.

I enjoy Bill's style of writing and his history and facts, especially his accounts of where he stays and where he eats and what he drinks. He is not afraid to say what he thinks, even if some don't like it. I love his humor - even laughing at himself, most of the time.

I would love to go visit Australia, but I do not see it in my future. This book was my next best thing to going there.

Thanks for the ride-along, Bill.

Bill Bryson is one of my favorite authors. I love his wit and humor. Although I don’t think I’ll ever visit Australia, because this was written by him, I found it fascinating and oftentimes ever so funny. He has a real knack for intertwining all sorts of interesting facts about a place into his stories.



Some parts that I thought worth sharing:
“I had read in the paper that Australians are the biggest gamblers on the planet—one of the more arresting statistics I saw was that the country has less than 1 percent of the world’s population but more than 20 percent of its slot machines—and that between them they spend A$11 billion ($7.3 billion) a year, or A$2,000 per person, on various games of chance. But I had seen nothing to suggest such risky gusto until I stepped inside the World of Entertainment. It was vast and dazzling and immensely well appointed. The club movement in Australia is huge. In New South Wales alone, clubs employ 65,000 people, more than any other industry. This is huge business and it is nearly all based on a type of slot machine popularly called pokies.”

“I had gone no more than a dozen feet when I was joined by a fly—smaller and blacker than a housefly. It buzzed around in front of my face and tried to settle on my upper lip. I swatted it away, but it returned at once, always to the same spot. A moment later it was joined by another that wished to go up my nose. It also would not go away. Within a minute or so I had perhaps twenty of these active spots all around my head and I was swiftly sinking into the state of abject wretchedness that comes with a prolonged encounter with the Australian fly. Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguishes itself with its very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him. Somewhere on an exposed portion of your body is a spot, about the size of a shirt button, that the fly wants to lick and tickle and turn delirious circles upon. It isn’t simply their persistence, but the things they go for.”

“[Australia] is the home of the largest living thing on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, and of the largest monolith, Ayers Rock (or Uluru to use its now-official, more respectful Aboriginal name). It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures - the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish - are the most lethal of their type in the world. 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 irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. It's a tough place.”

I felt that this was the flattest Bryson I have yet read. It felt slightly more engaged when he dealt with the mysterious disappearance of former Prime Minister Harold Holt while swimming, but otherwise it read as though he and his publishers were simply determined to crank out another travelogue and Australia was one place they hadn't covered so far. In my memory it compares unfavourably with a three part National Geographic series I read about a man who cycled round Australia - but then their photographs are hard to beat.

Because he stresses so often how extrovert and friendly all Australians are, what stands out is how rarely he talks to anybody and if he does, how brief the conversations are, perhaps Bryson has a prophylactic personality.

Very middle of the road. An ok read but nothing special, apart from that his persona of a bumbling, ineffectual, Colonel Blimp in training, turns out actually to be his personality, his habit of winging it - evident in his other travel books too - confronted by the size of Australia means he spends a lot of time nowhere in particular or on the bare featureless Nullarbor plain, which I did learn  thanks Bill!  is one of those comedy Latin place names - no tree plain in plain English. In short Australia's a big place if you are going to visit spend some time with a map first rather than be disappointed later.