In a Sunburned Country

by Bill Bryson

Today central White Cliffs consists of a pub, a launderette, an opal shop, and a grocery/café/petrol station. The permanent population is about eighty. They exist in a listless world of heat and dust. If you were looking for people with the tolerance and fortitude to colonize Mars this would be the place to come.

In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle.

Thirty-six years later the Dutchman Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon.

They knew there was something there – possibly a biggish island like New Guinea, possibly a mass of smaller islands like the East Indies – and they called this amorphous entity New Holland, but none equated it with the long-sought southern continent.

Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia’s wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.

By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’.

Exhausted by the stresses, Phillip was called home after four years, and retired to Bath. Apart from founding Sydney, he had one other notable achievement. In 1814, he managed to die by falling from a wheelchair and out of an upstairs window.

In 1956, while passing through customs at Sydney Airport, he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus, by one of life’s small ironies, he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.

The friendliness of Australians – all of it quite sincere and spontaneous, as far as I could ever tell – never ceases to amaze or gratify.

I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other.

A man arriving for the Grand Final in Melbourne is surprised to find the seat beside his empty. Tickets for the Grand Final are sold out weeks in advance and empty seats unknown. So he says to the man on the other side of the seat: ‘Excuse me, do you know why there is no one in this seat?’ ‘It was my wife’s,’ answers the second man, a touch wistfully, ‘but I’m afraid she died.’ ‘Oh, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.’ ‘Yes, she never missed a match.’ ‘But couldn’t you have given the ticket to a friend or relative?’ ‘Oh no. They’re all at the funeral.’

LOL

All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory.

My favourite animal disappearance story, however, harks back to a somewhat earlier age. It concerns a nineteenth-century naturalist named Gerard Krefft, who in 1857 caught two very rare pig-footed bandicoots. Unfortunately for science and for the bandicoots, Krefft soon afterwards grew hungry and ate them. They were, as far as anyone can tell, the last of the species. Certainly none has been seen since. Krefft, incidentally, was later appointed head of the Australian Museum in Sydney, but was invited to seek alternative employment when it was discovered that he was supplementing his salary by selling pornographic postcards. I am sure there must be a moral in there somewhere.

‘But if you’re not giving the kids the lessons because the parents can’t help them, then those kids, when they become parents, won’t have the core skills either, will they?’

The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only person who could see both groups at once.

Just to ease you into a sense of perspective here, Australia is the least wooded continent (Antarctica excluded, of course) and yet it is also the world’s largest exporter of woodchips.

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.