Editors Reads Verdict
Bryson's best travel book and perhaps the best popular introduction to Australia in English. The natural history material is extraordinary and the comic voice is at its most consistent. A book that makes you want to go immediately.
What We Loved
- The natural history digressions — on Australian wildlife, geology, and ecology — are genuinely excellent and not available in this form anywhere else
- The comic voice is at its most consistent and least forced of any Bryson book
- Bryson's candid ignorance about Australia works better as a premise here than anywhere else — the country rewards discovery
- The portrait of Australian society — its history, its relationship to Britain, its civic culture — is accurate and affectionate
Minor Drawbacks
- Bryson skips Western Australia almost entirely — the book is weighted toward the east coast and the centre
- The structural looseness that characterises all Bryson's travel writing is present here too
- Some of the natural history has been updated by subsequent research
Key Takeaways
- → Australia contains the world's most lethal animals in the largest number — and almost no one is killed by them
- → The Outback is not one landscape but many: red desert, ancient rock formations, salt flats, dry river systems
- → Aboriginal culture is the oldest continuous culture on earth — at least 50,000 years, possibly 65,000
- → Australia's history of xenophobia and racial exclusion is as important to understanding the country as its landscapes
- → The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on earth and has lost more than half its coral since Bryson's visit
| Author | Bill Bryson |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Broadway Books |
| Pages | 307 |
| Published | May 23, 2000 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Travel, Humour, Non-Fiction |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Anyone planning to visit Australia, anyone curious about one of the world's most extraordinary natural environments, and anyone who enjoys Bryson's brand of comic travel writing at its most fully realised. |
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.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "In a Sunburned Country" about?
Bill Bryson travels across Australia — a country he cheerfully admits he knows almost nothing about — and discovers that it is simultaneously one of the most beautiful, most deadly, most overlooked, and most underrated countries on earth.
Who should read "In a Sunburned Country"?
Anyone planning to visit Australia, anyone curious about one of the world's most extraordinary natural environments, and anyone who enjoys Bryson's brand of comic travel writing at its most fully realised.
What are the key takeaways from "In a Sunburned Country"?
Australia contains the world's most lethal animals in the largest number — and almost no one is killed by them The Outback is not one landscape but many: red desert, ancient rock formations, salt flats, dry river systems Aboriginal culture is the oldest continuous culture on earth — at least 50,000 years, possibly 65,000 Australia's history of xenophobia and racial exclusion is as important to understanding the country as its landscapes The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on earth and has lost more than half its coral since Bryson's visit
Is "In a Sunburned Country" worth reading?
Bryson's best travel book and perhaps the best popular introduction to Australia in English. The natural history material is extraordinary and the comic voice is at its most consistent. A book that makes you want to go immediately.
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