Book Review: Down Under

Time to read

I was on a flight from Houston to Washington via Dallas a while back. We seemed to sit forever on the tarmac in Dallas, in fact just over 1.5 hours from leaving gate to taking off. It was amazingly silly. We were 18th in the takeoff queue and the airport required the planes to keep turning their engines off after moving each time. The captain (who was clearly fed up) warned us that if he had to stop and restart the engines one more time, we’d have had to return to the terminal for more fuel. And we hadn’t even left Houston.

What was worse was that when we got near Washington, there was a storm ahead, and the captain then explained to us that normally he’d fly around it but we didn’t have enough fuel to do that. So he was left with a choice of a bumpy ride through the storm, or we weren’t going to Washington that night. Not a great choice. He decided to push on to Washington because he thought it shouldn’t be too bad. But I really hate the fact that he was left with that decision.

However, the good thing was that during all those delays, I finished reading Bill Bryson Down Under: Travels from a sunburned country .

Content

I’m a real fan of Bryson’s writing and this book is no exception. It provides a wonderful and very funny summary of his trips throughout a good chunk of Australia.

I saw an interview with Bryson a while back, and he came across as a pretty boring person, at least in the interview. I was left wondering how a person’s writing could be so very different to their personality in an interview.

This book is quite amazing. There were so many places where I just burst out laughing. He has a way of providing insights that is sorely lacking in most authors.

As an example, Burke and Wills are really famous explorers here in Australia. Bryson found that odd, given they went out into the outback and died. Yes, they achieved quite a bit, but in the end, you’d think a good explorer would live to come back and tell the tale. It’s not exactly difficult to go out into the deserts here and die.

Another dry piece of humor (humour) was when he was in a small NSW country town. They only had a single radio station, and it was the ABC (Australian Broacasting Company). When he was there, they were broadcasting the test cricket between Australia and England. If you’ve never heard test cricket on the radio, it’s hard to describe just how dry that would have been - long periods of silence between each ball being bowled. I could totally feel his pain. It would have been excruciating.

Australians will learn so much about their own country from reading this book. Bryson has an uncanny ability to find obscure and interesting things about the country.

I tend to agree with one reviewer who said:
I read this book for the first time after first moving to Australia in the mid 80’s. Now many years on a second read and it’s still brilliant. To fully appreciate it I now think you need to have lived there, but it’s not essential. Other reviewers from other countries said reading it made them want to jump on the next flight to Australia.

The extra chapter at the end about his time growing up in the USA in the 1950s was a bonus.

I still think Bryson is one of the world’s best travel writers, at least if you’d like a laugh.