‘The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner...’
As I’ve spent the last few years consuming everything that best-selling travel writer Bill Bryson has written, I’m now left with the books of his that I am perhaps less interested in. Australia is a country that I am unlikely to ever visit. Firstly because of the prohibitive cost and secondly because of my crippling fear of spiders. The thought of one being faced with some of the grotesque beasts that live down there is too much to bear. As ever, however, Bryson takes a subject that I seemingly had little interest in and makes it something fascinating and compelling…
At the tail end of the ’90s. Bryson embarks on a sometimes arduous but always fascinating odyssey across Australia. He takes in all of the big towns and cities and also ventures to the outback on numerous occasions. On the way, he encounters Ulura (otherwise known as Ayers Rock), thousands of miles of punishing highways and lots of beer. He really does make it sound wonderful. In all of Bryson’s travel writing, he often goes off on tangents about local history or some other interesting factoid and it is these diversions that make his writing so captivating. When reading Bryson I really feel like I’m learning something – like the fact that all of Australia’s millions of rabbits are descended from 24 of the creatures that were brought over to the country by one hapless Englishman named Thomas Austin. I’ve already repeated this to at least four people and they all loved it. And by loved it I mean they didn’t actively yawn or start to nod off.
As with all of Bryson’s work, Down Under is engaging, informative and frequently hilarious. While he isn’t quite as grumpy here as he is in his previous works, this is still an engaging and compelling introduction to a far flung land. Lovely stuff.