In a Sunburned Country
by Bill Bryson

This book was given to me by an American friend; I mention this because the book is not available in the said title outside America,
My friend said it’s a very good travelogue about Australia and anyone new to Australia should read it, so he read it and handed over to me to read it. I looked up Bill Bryson online and found that he was an American, Frankly speaking, I was a bit let down when I learnt that the author “Bill Bryson” was an American, In fact the last time I had seen his travelogues in the library I did not pick them. After all Americans in general aren't really known for their knowledge and appreciation of world culture and history. Have a look here to see what I mean. I have tried hard to get rid of my set prejudices about America, as none of the Americans I have met personally are the snobbish; I am better, richer and hence better than you types. Every American I have met personally has been polite, friendly and fairly knowledgeable about external affairs, but the stereotype still remains. I guess it’s just that the country as a whole that displays that rude image but individually the people are just as just as likeable as anywhere else.

Anyway now coming back to the book , I started this book with a strongly biased viewpoint and Bryson was initially living up to my expectations, of Americans being snobby , self centered, and indifferent to the rest of the world, have a read through his first chapter here and you will see why. He starts the book saying how he again forgot who Australia's prime minister was and telling us how little Australia matters to America and hence to the rest of the world. Saying that the Australian Economy is about equivalent to Illinois and that China grows its population by about 1 Australia every year. He gives statistics explaining the abysmally small number of articles about Australia that appeared in the American media in the past few years. And By taking the number of articles in newspapers as a benchmark for importance, he says Australia is about as important to Americans as Bananas but not nearly as important as Ice-cream. And Imagine reading all this in the first 2 pages with the prejudices I have, it was just getting enough for me to put the book down.

Well , luckily for me I did not put this book down then because he tries to highlight this as an issue to put things in perspective, to highlight where "Australia" stands in American minds as a subject. He exhorts the reader that things shouldn't be this way because he finds Australia a lot more interesting than what is currently projected outside. The next few pages are devoted purely to tell us why Australia is so much more interesting than the media would have us think. He mentions so many interesting facts about Australia that I doubt even a lot of Australians wouldn't know of. Say for example facts about the Australian Wild life , Did you know that, of the 10 most poisonous snakes in the world all the ten are native to Australia, There are has more things in the Australian wilderness that can kill you than any other place on the earth. 80% of all the wildlife that exists in Australia is so unique to itself that its not to be found anywhere else on the planet. Australia is a place so arid, so flat , so hot and so deserted that there is no other place on the planet except Antartica that is perhaps more forbidding to life, in spite of this, it has perhaps the largest inhabitation of yet to be discovered species of insects, animals and wildlife anywhere in the world because it is so huge that there are just not enough scientists / biologists around to cover it all. He made such an interesting case for Australia that I had shed all my initial inhibitions and in the first few pages was glued to the book.

From there on the book follows his journey across Australia, by train, car and on foot. Bill can be incredibly funny when he wants to be and there are so many moments where you can literally laugh your heart out on the incidents he narrates. He goes on describing his stay in Sydney , Melbourne, various other road trips and train ride on the INDIAN PACIFIC RAIL ROAD (Called so because it reaches out from the Indian ocean all the way to the Pacific ocean) running across Australia connecting Sydney on the east coast to Perth on the west coast across over 4000 kilometers, second only in length to the Trans Siberian railway.

The book has a lot of history about Australian Exploration starting with James Cook(the first western sailor to land on Australia in recent history, for the record he was a Lieutenant not a Captain when he discovered Australia), and then going on about other explorers who dared to go into the arid inland, he gives us detailed accounts of their experiences and what they found and faced in the Australian “Outback”. He writes about various other Australian adventurers like Kingford Smith and people and incidents in contemporary Australian history.

He covers all the major Australian cities, starting from Sydney, Canberra (ACT), Melbourne, Perth, Alice Springs, Darwin and many other smaller towns and paints an interesting picture of each of them. He also does long road trips across the outback and the coastal roads in Australia.

Frankly speaking I haven't read a better travelogue than this ever. Mind you this is not a book with lists of places to / see / eat / buy stuff. This book is about seeing Australia through Bill Bryson's eyes. Reading it is like experiencing the country for yourself and doing a short course on Australia with hard facts and detailed glimpses into Australian History, Geography, Botany and even some current affairs.

Then he tells us about the stolen generation and goes to depths devoting many pages to the cause of the Aboriginals and the injustice that was done to them in the past, the book has indeed a very poignant description of the atrocities done upon the Aboriginals. Since this is a shameful part of Australian History like the White Australia policy that you don’t read or hear a lot about it, so this makes it even more interesting.

Towards the end there is an Appendix with about 10 articles that Bill wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald, while he was invited over to cover the Sydney Olympics in 2000. These few pages are like a bonus to an already very interesting book, and are good read by themselves.

The Book does not have any photos within its pages, only 2 pages of rough maps showing the route taken by the author. For me this is a big thing in itself as it’s the first travelogue book that I have read without even a single photo. It shows that the author doesn’t need the photos to lean on to help the reader visualize what he describes.

In all I have to agree with my friend who gave the book to me and said, "Any visitor to Australia MUST read this" and I AGREE!

Hats off to Bill Bryson.