In a Sunburned Country

by Bill Bryson

Australia is the world’s sixth largest country and its largest island. It is the only island that is also a continent, and the only continent that is also a country. It was the first continent conquered from the sea, and the last. It is the only nation that began as a prison.

Eighty per cent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else.

Australia is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents.

Life cannot offer many places finer to stand at eight thirty on a summery weekday morning than Circular Quay in Sydney.

Almost all Australian highways are still just two lanes wide, and what a difference that makes. You’re not cut off from the wider world, as you are on a motorway, but part of it, intimately connected. All the million details of the landscape are there beside you, up close, not blurred into some distant, tediously epic backdrop. It changes your whole outlook. There’s no point in hurrying when all it’s going to do is put you in the feathery wake of that old chicken truck half a mile ahead. Might as well hold back and enjoy the scenery.

I am thus able to report that the following are all real places: Wee Waa, Poowong, Burrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoomoonah, Waaia, Mullumbimby, Ewlyamartup, Jiggalong and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.

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