G'Day, World

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 16, 2000 | by Rex Roberts

Australia is the only island that is a continent and the only continent that is a country -- and that's the least odd thing about living Down Under.

Having glimpsed the glories of Sydney during the highlight reels of the summer Olympics, Americans surely are eager to learn more about Australia and its unusual charms -- a development undoubtedly anticipated by the farsighted Bill Bryson, author of an amusing new travelogue, In a Sunburned Country (Broadway Books, $25, 307pp). All those video postcards aside, Bryson makes a far more beguiling travel companion than NBC sports commentators, and he has the added advantage of having toured the whole country, if anyone can be said to tour a country so vast and undeveloped that 2,000 miles of its northern coastline remains unspoiled by paved highway.

Bryson rejoices in such superlatives. Australia, he points out, "is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile, and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents" Yet the country teems with life, much of it as fantastic as the landscape. "Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian" writes Bryson. "Five of its creatures -- the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish -- are the most lethal of their type in the world."

Consider these biological curiosities that Bryson considers characteristic of Australia's amazingly diverse but unheralded menagerie: Nothomyrmecia macrops, the proto-ant, "a living relic from a time when ants were evolving from wasps" thought to have been extinct for 100 million years; Megascolides australis, the world's largest earthworms, growing up to 12 feet in length and 6 inches in width; and the lumpy, unassuming stromatolites, "replicas of the very first organic structures ever to appear on earth" dating back 3.5 billion years.

Australians themselves are unusual specimens -- how could they be otherwise when the country's founders, so to speak, were scalawags exiled from England in 1787. "Never before had so many people been moved such a great distance at such expense," writes Bryson, again reminding us of Australia's superlative nature, "and all to be incarcerated."

Even today, Australians are different, by almost any definition. During a visit to the Great Barrier Reef, Bryson found himself in the middle of an epidemic of dengue fever, with 485 cases reported in Port Douglas -- a development that hardly merited a mention in the local paper. These are tough people inured to cyclones, forest fires, droughts and floods on grand scales, and their history is full of explorers crossing deserts as wide as Europe, enduring unthinkable hardships, often for little reward. People still are eaten alive by crocodiles in Australia -- about 150 in the last century -- and the country's prime minister was swept away by a rip tide one sunny day when he decided on an impromptu swim at a beach not far from Melbourne.

Bryson, a jocular, good-natured fellow, records his progress around and across this colossal island with gentle humor. He likes Australians, and for good reason: They are an open, welcoming people, fortunate to live in a country with one of the world's strongest economies and some of its most spectacular scenery, whether it be balmy beach, tropical forest, ancient desert or urban cityscape. Bryson's sincere joy in simple pleasures -- walking through the wealthy suburbs of Perth or bouncing along dusty roads into the bush -- is infectious, full of hail-and-well-met bonhomie and endearing self-deprecation. Here he is mingling in an outback pub in Daly Waters, a tiny town literally in the middle of nowhere:

"We drank huge amounts of beer -- huge amounts. We ate steaks the size of catcher's mitts (they may actually have been catcher's mitts) and washed them down with more beer. We made many friends. We circulated as if at a cocktail party. I talked to ranchers and sheep shearers, to nannies and cooks. I met fellow travelers from around the world and talked for some time to the proprietor, one Bruce Caterer, who told me the complicated story of how he had come to own a pub in this lonely and far-flung spot, of which confidence I have not the tiniest recollection and certainly nothing approximating a note."

Here he is learning to boogie-board at Manly, a beach close to Sydney, with the help of locals Deirde and Glenn:

"There followed a half hour in which the two of them watched first with guarded amusement, then a kind of astonishment, and finally something not unlike pity, as I repeatedly vanished beneath the waves and was scraped over an area of ocean floor roughly the size of Polk County, Iowa.... Before long, people on the beach were on their feet and placing bets. It was commonly agreed that it was not physically possible to do what I was doing."

And here he is at Kalbarri, a fishing village on the northwest coast, where he watches a shipwreck towed to safety: "Kalbarri has a year-round population of fifteen hundred, and I would guess that two-thirds of the town was there. As the boat came through the sandbars and its safety seemed assured at last, people from all sides of the harbor clapped warmly, as if welcoming home the winner of a regatta, and called encouragement. I thought that was wonderful -- that a whole town turn out to watch a stricken local fishing boat brought in. If I handed out fivers, I'm sure I couldn't find a thousand people to watch me limp into port after a night of peril."