Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

Save $5.00 at Amazon.com!

A kangaroo and its child nestled comfortably in the mother’s pouch stare irresistibly from the jacket of Bill Bryson’s travel narrative of Australia, In a Sunburned Country. The kangaroos have a quizzical look on their faces – you are not sure if they are inviting you to check out the outback or just letting you know with confidence that they are quintessentially Australian; that the outback, and the allure of its seemingly eternal vastness is their territory. Bryson shamelessly exploits the well-worn association everyone not from Australia has of Australia: kangaroos and little else. This exploitation of cliché is unusual for Bryson, the shamelessness, however, is not.

Boisterous and contagious, Bryson’s writing is a constant affectionate tease aimed at prodding the reader as much as the society and place that he is describing. Bryson loves Australia and he wants you to share his enthusiasm for it. Wherever Bryson is: gaping at a giant stuffed lobster on the roadside in the middle of the Australian outback, cursing himself as he tries to snorkel unsuccessfully in the Great Barrier Reef, or admiring Sydney’s harbor he writes with a love and a ruthlessness that only a sibling or best friend would dare to use.

Bryson’s thesis is that Australians, Aussies as they affectionately call themselves, are a gregarious, tolerant, if hedonistic bunch. Like all peoples of the world they are occasionally awkward and flawed. But Bryson loves them for their vivacity and for the expansiveness of their personalities as well as the expansiveness of their country. He is extremely perceptive and critical in his social commentary, but as he mocks he is also sympathetic, in thought and in tone.

Bryson’s writing is conversational, relaxed and easygoing. He can be immature and somewhat silly. Although some may find his writing style too colloquial and too loosely structured, these characteristics are often exactly what makes him appealing and fun. This is an author who makes you laugh out loud. He writes with delight:

I am thus able to report that that following are all real places: Wea Waa, Poowons, Borrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoomoonah, Waaia, Mulumbimby, Ewylamartup, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.

Alongside this cheekiness, Bryson relates thoughtful and fascinating anecdotes and commentary about Australian social history, politics, flora and fauna, and architecture. Capturing the spirit of openness and warmth that characterizes Australia, Bryson relates the story of a Hungarian immigrant told in a television documentary about the immigrant experience in Australia in the 1950s. On his first day in the country a Hungarian immigrant speaking broken English reports to the local police station and explains that he had been told to register his address. The sergeant stares at him, and comes around the desk. “The Hungarian recalled that for one bewildered moment he thought the policeman might be about to strike him, but instead the sergeant thrust out a meaty hand and said warmly, ‘ Welcome to Australia, son.’ The Hungarian recalled the incident with wonder even now, and when he finished there were tears in his eyes.”

Although he loves Australia Bryson also views its history and politics with a critical eye. Using statistics, personal observation and interviews with Australian social workers, he describes the racism and poverty that Aborigines face.  At the end of the twentieth century an Aboriginal Australian was still 18 times more likely to die of an infectious disease than a white Australian, and 17 times more likely to be hospitalized as a result of violence. Although Bryson celebrates the immigration experience of thousands of Greeks, Italians, Hungarians, and other Europeans he also outlines and criticizes the racist Australian immigration policy that was used to refuse entry to Australia of thousands of non-Europeans.

Bryson is often at his best when he makes comparisons between Australia, Britain, and the United States, for he has lived in both the UK and USA for over twenty years. A visit to the Australian federal capital, Canberra, prompts Bryson to praise Australian urban development. He contrasts its sustainability and progressive nature with the generally environmentally harmful American form of urban development.

Imagine some sweet little American community – Aspen, Colorado, say – absorbing 320,000 additional residents in forty years. Think of the infrastructure that would be required to support the needs for car-based convenience of 320,000 more of us – the shopping malls and parking lots, the right-lane roads stretching off into a forest of bright signs and elevated billboards, the vast graded acres of housing…

Bryson also makes perceptive observations of Western society generally. Looking at a picture of Australians in the 1950s at a famous beach resort in Queensland he comments on the existential angst that has entered not only Australian, but Western culture generally.

There was something so marvelously innocent, so irretrievably lost, about the world back then. You could see it in the easy, confident gait and sun-drenched smiles of the vacationers in every photograph. These people were happy. I don’t mean they were happy. They were happy… I wouldn’t suggest for an instant that Australians are unhappy now – anything but, in fact – but they don’t have that happiness in their faces anymore. I don’t think anybody does.”

Bryson can also be caustic and dead on, as in his social commentary on petty suburban life and the emerging Australian yuppie culture. It is his ability to integrate images and ideas about Australia with biting characterizations of Western culture generally that makes his writing accessible and relevant.

Bryson does a particularly good job at explaining Australian culture and attitudes. Reflecting on why he fell in love with Australia on his first visits there, he writes:

Australia was such a beguiling fusion of the two. (Britain and the United States) It had a casualness and vivacity – a lack of reserve, a comfortableness with strangers – that felt distinctly American, but hung on a British framework. In their optimism and informality, Australians could pass at a glance for Americans, but they drove on the left, drank tea, played cricket, adorned their public places with statues of Queen Victoria, dressed their children in the sort of school uniforms that only a Britannic people would wear without conspicuous regret.

It is this hybrid quality that makes Australia so interesting. Bryson notes that Americans traveling through Australia easily fall prey to the illusion that they never left home. This a country with Kmarts, suburban homes, and American skyscapes of office buildings and steel and glass towers. But Australia is different and Bryson does an excellent job of explaining both subtle and obvious differences.

In a Sunburned Country has a fluid structure. Bryson’s travels around Australia begin in the outback, continue to the cities, through tropical forest areas, and conclude, again, in the outback. The chapters resemble vignettes and the reader never really knows where exactly Bryson is heading next and what to expect. If you don’t mind his free spirit, if the idea of driving about from place to place with only a mild amount of direction is appealing, then Bryson’s book is especially fun: there is a fundamental randomness to his travels. 

Bryson closes the book with a bit of a plea: that the reader should take interest in Australia, visit, read about it – or just acknowledge its existence here and there.

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 a round 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 yours.

It seems like an unnecessary request to make at the end of a book that exposes Australia’s fundamentally intriguing character. Neither British nor American, characterized by warmth, optimism and tolerance in rare combination, Australia and Australians often define themselves in relation to the vastness of the Australian sky and the outback. This is a country that touches the infinite. That is at once strange and familiar, quaint and cosmopolitan, and always, defined by its distance from everything else.