In a Sunburned Country

Bill Bryson arrived in Australia knowing almost nothing about it — and he is honest, even celebratory, about this ignorance from the opening pages. In a Sunburned Country (published as Down Under in Britain and Australia) is his account of two visits to Australia in 1999 and 2000, conducted without a specific itinerary, following curiosity rather than a plan, and emerging with what has become the standard popular introduction to a country that most of the world significantly underestimates.

The natural history material is the book’s most substantial achievement and the section that most distinguishes it from Bryson’s other travel books. Australia is the most geologically ancient continent on earth, with rock formations three and a half billion years old. It is also the most biologically isolated — the island continent has been separated from the rest of the world’s landmasses for so long that its evolution has proceeded along an entirely independent track. The result is that approximately 80% of Australian plants and animals exist nowhere else on earth, and a disproportionate number of them are spectacularly dangerous. Bryson catalogues them with undisguised relish: the box jellyfish, whose toxin kills in minutes; the stone fish, perfectly camouflaged and venomous through contact; the various species of shark; the funnel-web spider, which can deliver a fatal dose through a wetsuit; the inland taipan, whose venom is the most toxic of any land snake on earth. The paradox that Bryson returns to repeatedly is that Australia has more lethal wildlife concentrated in more places than anywhere else, and yet almost no one is actually killed by any of it.

The human history sections are less celebrated but equally valuable. Bryson’s account of the treatment of Aboriginal Australians — the policies of removal and “assimilation” that persisted into the 1970s, the systematic destruction of culture and language, the health outcomes that still represent one of the most severe injustices in the developed world — is direct and unequivocal without being preachy. His account of the explorers who opened the interior — Burke and Wills, their catastrophic failure, the survival of their companion John King — is one of the better short accounts of Australian exploration available.

The comedy is Bryson’s most consistent of any book: the particular quality of Australian civic life (the drinking culture, the forthright friendliness, the matter-of-fact relationship with extreme conditions), the city of Canberra, the tourist apparatus around Uluru, the unreliability of outback petrol stations. In a Sunburned Country has the quality of making you want to buy a plane ticket. That this desire survives a careful reading of the natural history sections is itself a considerable achievement.

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The Premise of Cheerful Ignorance

The conceit that opens In a Sunburned Country — published as Down Under in Britain and Australia — is that Bryson knows almost nothing about the place, and he treats this as a gift rather than an embarrassment. The premise works better here than in any of his other travel books because Australia genuinely rewards discovery: it is a continent most of the world underestimates, large and strange and ancient out of all proportion to its place in the global imagination. Bryson’s two visits, in 1999 and 2000, are conducted without much of an itinerary, following curiosity rather than a plan, and the looseness suits a country whose interior resists tidy summary.

The Most Dangerous Place That Rarely Kills Anyone

The natural-history material is the book’s great achievement and the section that most distinguishes it from his other work. Australia is the most geologically ancient continent and the most biologically isolated, with the consequence that the great majority of its species exist nowhere else — and a startling number of them are lethal. Bryson catalogues the box jellyfish, the funnel-web spider, the inland taipan and the rest with undisguised relish, circling repeatedly back to the paradox that the most dangerous fauna on earth kill almost no one. He is equally direct, and considerably less comic, on the human history: the treatment of Aboriginal Australians, whose continuous culture is among the oldest on earth, is rendered without preachiness and without flinching.

The Book That Sells the Plane Ticket

What holds it together is that the comedy is Bryson’s most consistent and least forced. The drinking culture, the matter-of-fact friendliness, the city of Canberra, the unreliable outback petrol stations — all of it is observed with affection. The book has the rare quality of making the reader want to go immediately, and that this impulse survives a careful reading of the chapters on venomous wildlife is itself a measure of how well it works.

The History Beneath the Landscape

For all the comedy and the catalogue of venomous wildlife, the book’s most valuable sections are its quietest. Bryson’s account of the explorers who opened the interior — the doomed Burke and Wills expedition, the improbable survival of their companion John King — is among the better short narratives of Australian exploration in print, and his treatment of the country’s history of racial exclusion is unflinching. The policies of removal and forced assimilation directed at Aboriginal Australians, which persisted into the 1970s, and the health and life-expectancy gaps that remain among the developed world’s gravest injustices, are laid out plainly and without the defensive evasions the subject often attracts. Bryson’s candour here matters because it keeps the book honest: the same continent that delights him is also the site of one of the modern era’s longest-running moral failures, and he refuses to let the wonder of the landscape obscure it. That balance — genuine delight held alongside genuine reckoning — is part of why the book has outlasted the genre’s usual shelf life.