In a Sunburned Country

by Bill Bryson

Thomas Mitchell, who explored vast tracts of western New South Wales and northern Victoria in the 1830s, dragged two wooden skiffs over 3,000 miles of arid scrub without once getting them wet, but refused to the last to give up on them. ‘Although the boats and their carriage had been of late a great hindrance to us,’ he wrote with a touch of understatement after his third expedition, ‘I was very unwilling to abandon such useful appendages to an exploring party.’

‘Of the natural meadows which Mr Cook mentions near Botany Bay, we can give no account,’ wrote a puzzled member of the party. Cook’s descriptions had made it sound almost like an English country estate – a place where one might play a little croquet and enjoy a picnic on the lawn. Clearly he had seen it in a different season.

When they couldn’t fool their masters the prisoners could often fool their fellows. For years there existed an illicit commerce in which newly arrived convicts were sold maps showing them how to walk to China. Up to sixty at a time fled their captivity in the belief that that magically accommodating land lay just the other side of a vaguely distant river.

When the first settlers stepped from the wooded mountains they were startled to find herds of cows, numbering in the hundreds, grazing contentedly on the tall grasses – all offspring of the ones that had wandered off from Sydney Cove all those years before. The cows, it transpired, had gone around the mountains, through an open pass to the south. Why it had not occurred to a human being in twenty-five years to try to do likewise is a question that is rarely asked and has yet to be satisfactorily answered.

It was a shop that sold pet supplies and pornography. I am quite genuine. I stood back to stare at the sign, then peered through the window and finally stepped inside.

The gold rush transformed Australia’s destiny. Before it, people could scarcely be induced to settle there. Now a stampede rose from every quarter of the globe. In less than a decade, the country took in 600,000 new faces, more than doubling its population. The bulk of that growth was in Victoria, where the richest goldfields were. Melbourne became larger than Sydney and for a time was probably the richest city in the world per head of population.

the gold rush of the 1850s marked the end of Australia as a concentration camp and its beginning as a nation.

What is certain is that the Lambing Flat riot led to the adoption of what became known as the White Australia Policy, which essentially forbade the immigration of any non-European people until the 1970s. It would – and I really don’t mean a pun here – colour nearly every aspect of Australian life for over a century.

My one tip for you if you ever go to Canberra is don’t leave your hotel without a good map, a compass, several days’ provisions and a mobile phone with the number of a rescue service. I walked for two hours through green, pleasant, endlessly identical neighbourhoods, never entirely confident that I wasn’t just going round in a large circle.

In 1911, with the capital site chosen, a competition was held for a design for it, which was won by Walter Burley Griffin of Oak Park, Illinois, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. Griffin’s design was unquestionably the best, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a great deal.

is a fact little noted that the Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture on earth, and their art goes back to the very roots of it. Imagine if there were some people in France who could take you to the caves at Lascaux and explain in detail the significance of the paintings – why this bison is bolting from the herd, what these three wavy lines mean – because it is as fresh and sensible to them as if it were done yesterday.

Until the rabbits came, much of the countryside where I was driving now was characterized by lush groves of emu bush, a shrub that grew to a height of about seven feet and was in flower for most of the year. It was by all accounts a beauty and its leaves a boon to nibbling creatures. But rabbits fell on the emu bush like locusts, devouring every bit of it – leaves, flowers, bark, stems – until none was to be found. The rabbits ate so much of everything that sheep and other livestock were forced to extend both their range and their diet, punishing yet wider expanses. As

against the rabbits was a miracle virus from South America called myxomatosis. Harmless to humans and other animals, it was phenomenally devastating to rabbits, with a mortality rate of 99.9 per cent. Almost at once the countryside filled with twitching, stumbling, very sick rabbits, and then with tens of millions of little corpses. Although just one rabbit in a thousand survived, those few that did were naturally resistant to myxomatosis, and it was resistant genes that they passed on when they began to breed again. It took a while for things to get rolling, but today Australia’s rabbit numbers are back up to 300 million and climbing fast. At all events, the damage to the landscape, much of it irreversible,

They ached for English air and English vistas. So when they built their cities, they laid them out with rolling English-style parks arrayed with stands of oak, beech, chestnut and elm in a way that recalled the dreamily bucolic efforts of Humphry Repton or Capability Brown. Adelaide is the driest city in the driest state on the driest continent, but you would never guess it from wandering through its parks. Here it is forever Sussex.

One of the more cherishable peculiarities of Australians is that they like to build big things in the shape of other things. Give them a bale of chicken wire, some fibreglass and a couple of pots of paint and they will make you, say, an enormous pineapple or strawberry or, as here, a lobster. Then they put a café and a gift shop inside, erect a big sign beside the highway (for the benefit of people whose acuity evidently does not extend to spotting a fifty-foot-high piece of fruit standing beside an otherwise empty highway), then sit back and wait for the money to roll in.

‘Did you know,’ I said, ‘that an outboard motor engine sounds to a crocodile very like the territorial growl of another crocodile? That’s why crocodiles so often go for small boats apparently.’ They looked at me with amazement. It’s not often a foreigner gets to scare the crap out of Australian listeners, but I had just read the book after all.

I remember in one of her letters Catherine Veitch remarking to me on the surreal quality of sitting in an Adelaide classroom in the 1930s looking out on blazing waratah trees and flocks of kookaburras or whatever while learning the heights of Scottish mountains or the figures for barley production in East Anglia.

Britain alone couldn’t provide the necessary bodies, so people were welcomed from all over Europe, particularly Greece and Italy in the immediate post-war years, making the nation vastly more cosmopolitan. Suddenly Australia was full of people who liked wine and good coffee and olives and aubergines, and realized that spaghetti didn’t have to be a vivid orange and come from tins. The whole warp and rhythm of life changed.

In the fever to populate, some migrants were accepted with less reflection than might have been wished. At least ten thousand children, many as young as four, were dispatched from British orphanages between 1947 and 1967 by child welfare groups such as the Salvation Army, Barnardo’s and the Christian Brothers.

In his book Orphans of the Empire, Alan Gill notes how one little boy, seeing a sign announcing the mustering point for ‘the Barnardo’s party’, was thrilled because he presumed ‘party’ meant cake and ice cream. Another enquired, as the ship made its way up the Thames, whether they would be home in time for tea. Stories don’t get a great deal more poignant than that.

have seldom seen anything so wonderfully, so delightfully, so monumentally bad as Ned Kelly’s Last Stand. It was so bad it was worth every penny. Actually, it was so bad it was worth more than we paid.

The first occupants of Australia could not have walked there because at no point in human times has Australia not been an island. They could not have arisen independently because Australia has no apelike creatures from which humans could have descended. The first arrivals could only have come by sea, presumably from Timor in the Indonesian archipelago, and here is where the problems arise.

It is generally accepted that the Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture in the world. It

The creaking Endeavour was clearly the largest and most extraordinary structure that could ever have come before them, yet most of the natives merely glanced up and looked at it as if at a passing cloud and returned to their tasks. They seemed not to perceive the world in the way of other people. No Aboriginal language, for instance, had any words for ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’ – extraordinary omissions in any culture. They

told him about the cassowary, the flightless, man-sized bird that lives in the rainforests, with a razor claw on each foot with which it can slice you open in a deft and appallingly expansive manner; and the green tree snakes that dangle from branches and so blend into the foliage that you don’t see them until they are clamped on to a facial extremity. I mentioned also the small but fearsomely poisonous blue-ringed octopus, whose caress is instant death; and the elegant but irritable numb ray, which moves through the water like a flying carpet discharging 220 volts of electricity into anything that troubles its progress; and the loathsome, sluggish stonefish, so called because it is indistinguishable from a rock, but with the difference that it has twelve spikes on its back that are sharp enough to pierce the sole of a sneaker, injecting the hapless sufferer with a myotoxin bearing a molecular weight of 150,000.

When even camels can’t manage a desert, you know you’ve found a tough part of the world. For human and animal alike, nearly every breathing moment was a living hell.

A community that was once famous for being remote now attracts thousands of visitors who come to see how remote it no longer is.

There, in the middle of a memorable and imposing emptiness, stands an eminence of exceptional nobility and grandeur, 1,150 feet high, a mile and a half long, five and a half miles around, less red than photographs have led you to expect but in every other way more arresting than you could ever have supposed. I have discussed this since with many other people, nearly all of whom agreed that they approached Uluru with a kind of fatigue, and were left agog in a way they could not adequately explain. It’s not that Uluru is bigger than you had supposed or more perfectly formed or in any way different from the impression you had created in your mind, but the very opposite. It is exactly what you expected it to be. You know this rock. You know it in a way that has nothing to do with calendars and the covers of souvenir books. Your knowledge of this rock is grounded in something much more elemental.

The chronicles of Australian fauna are amazingly full of stories such as this – of animals that are there one moment and gone the next.

no other nation lost more men as a proportion of population in the First World War than Australia. Out of a national population of under five million, Australia suffered a staggering 210,000 casualties – 60,000 dead, 150,000 injured. The casualty rate for its soldiers was 65 per cent. As John Pilger has put it: ‘No army was as decimated as that which came from farthest away. And all were volunteers.’ Only a few days earlier, in one of the weekend papers I had read a review of a new history of the First World War by the British historian John Keegan. In passing, the reviewer had noted, with an all but palpable sigh, that Keegan’s 500 pages of densely observed text had failed to include a single mention of the Australian forces.

I drove in the gloomy frame of mind that overtakes me at the end of every big trip. In another day or two I would be back in New Hampshire and all these experiences would march off as in a Disney film to the dusty attic of my brain and try to find space for themselves amid all the ridiculous accumulated clutter of half a century’s disordered living.

Life in Australia would go on and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be. What a strange, sad thought that is.