In a Sunburned Country

by Bill Bryson

For 60 million years since the formation of the Great Dividing Range, the low but deeply fetching mountains that run down its eastern flank, Australia has been all but silent geologically.

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

It’s not even possible to say quite where the outback is. To Australians anything vaguely rural is “the bush.” At some indeterminate point “the bush” becomes “the outback.”

Several of the earliest explorers were so convinced that they would encounter mighty river systems, or even an inland sea, that they took boats with them.

The incompetence of the early explorers was a matter of abiding fascination for the Aborigines, who often came to watch.

By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were weighty with capital offenses; you could be hanged for any of two hundred acts, including, notably, “impersonating an Egyptian.”

until as late as the 1960s Australia’s convict beginnings were not deemed worthy of scholarly attention,

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

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.

Other suggested names were Myola, Wheatwoolgold, Emu, Eucalypta, Sydmeladperbrisho (the first syllables of the state capitals), Opossum, Gladstone, Thirstyville, Kookaburra, Cromwell, and the ringingly inane Victoria Defendera Defender. In the end, “Canberra” won more or less by default.

the Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture on earth,

Since 1901 Australia has had just twenty-four prime ministers,

Adelaide is the driest city in the driest state in the driest continent, but you would never guess it from wandering through its parks.

The first occupants of Australia could not have walked there because at no point in human times has Australia not been an island.

No Aboriginal language, for instance, had any words for “yesterday” or “tomorrow”—extraordinary omissions in any culture.

Of the five hundred or so sites on the planet that qualify for World Heritage status (that is, a site of global historical or biological significance), only thirteen satisfy all four of UNESCO’s criteria for listing, and of these special thirteen places, four—almost a third—are to be found in Australia.

Nobody can agree really on where the Barrier Reef begins and ends, though everyone agrees it’s awfully big. Even by the shortest measure, it is equivalent in length to the west coast of the United States.

It is almost not possible to exaggerate the punishing nature of Australia’s interior.

the Simpson Desert, probably the toughest ranching country in the world. So unyielding is the land that ranches have to be vast to support a single operation; the largest of them, at a place called Anna Creek, is bigger than Belgium.

“You Yanks have a lot to answer for, you know.” I started to protest, in a sputtering sort of way, but what could I say? He was right. We do.

Aborigines are Australia’s greatest social failing.

Overall, the life expectancy of the average indigenous Australian is twenty years—twenty years—less than that of the average white Australian.

Until the 1960s in most Australian states, Aboriginal parents did not have legal custody of their own children. The state did.

It is a fact little noted outside Australia—and I think worth at least a mention here—that no other nation lost more men as a proportion of population in World War I than Australia.

Australia is the least wooded continent (Antarctica excluded, of course) and yet it is also the world’s largest exporter of wood chips.