Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country

Product Information

The author describes his experiences on the train, the places the train passes through on its way to Perth such as the Blue Mountains and White Cliffs. From my experience, people rarely recognise themselves in books, and of course, the author can always change the names.

Ignoring such dangers - and yet curiously obsessed by them - Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country. It was also published as part of Walk About, which included Down Under and another of Bryson's books, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, in one volume. The rest of this section is devoted to the author's account of what he considers to be Civilized Australia, with accounts of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, the Gold Coast, Surfers Paradise, and many countryside towns in between. Ignoring such dangers – and yet curiously obsessed by them – Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country.What I enjoy most is the feeling he gives the reader of moving in close to a subject, examining its quirkiest or most singular aspect, then panning out again to take a more distant or panoramic view. From there a flight to Perth on the south west side ANF up the western coast as far as the roads go. With an ego the size of Ayer's Rock, he seems to think God's Own Country needs the help of a patronising American.

Also, his insatiable thirst for detail finds him, as ever, ferreting out the who, the why and the where to enhance the reader's knowledge of the book's subject matter.The people are cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted and unfailingly obliging: their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water; the food is excellent; the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines.

I think my favourite episode in the whole book is when Bill and his increasingly tetchy companion drive around Darwin several times trying to find a hotel whose name is unaccountably different from the name it went by when he booked it. Another travel book, A Walk in the Woods, has become a major film starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson.There is no shortage of idiots - which is why Down Under will sell thousands more copies than Anglo-Australian Attitudes. Amazingly, Mark Sanderson, in the London Evening Standard, was even more vituperative than Lette: "Australia is big, far too sunny and mostly empty: no wonder Bill Bryson feels it is his kind of place. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. This is, after all, a man who sits through the capital's promotional tourist video, Canberra - It's Got It All!