Roy Lotz's Reviews > In a Sunburned Country

Every year (more or less), I take a trip up to New Brunswick, Canada, on a family vacation. To get there from New York means about 10 hours in the car; and once you’re there, it is an hour and a half round trip to get groceries—not counting time in the store—and this is a trip that must be made about every other day, since the only fridge we have is small, weak, alarmingly old, and runs on propane. The point is, we have to spend a goodly number of hours in the car.

Thus, I have gotten into the habit of downloading a few audiobooks for the trip; and this year, Bill Bryson was my man. I’d listened to his recording of A Short History of Nearly Everything before (it is an abridged recording, unfortunately), so I knew that he had a lovely voice. If you haven’t heard him speak, I’d recommend searching him on YouTube; he has a delightful transatlantic accent—owing to his long stay in England, combined with his American roots—and this gives his dorky, awkward persona a sort of extra layer of fragile charm. He sounds like a delicate man, not one for thrills or even serious exertion, but very clever and sharp, rather like someone it would be nice to have a drink with.

I hit play on my phone and we began to drive. It was an excellent start to a vacation. Bryson’s prose is bubbling and lively; and it’s endearing to hear the poor author have to pronounce some of his extravagant word choices. Besides his usual writing prowess, I must say that in this book he chose his subject very well. Bryson begins by emphasizing—and he really knows how to emphasize a point—how little Australia is discussed in the media. And I realized, with a bit of an embarrassed shock, that he’s right: I knew only a handful of facts about Australia, some of which I wasn’t even too sure about. For example, I didn’t even know the name of Australia’s capital; and, really, that’s a bit shameful for someone who normally considers himself a relatively cultured person. (It’s Canberra, by the way.)

As Bryson does, he begins his bumbling travels, managing to make even simple tasks like finding a hotel or falling asleep in a car seem Homeric. And as usual, Bryson weaves frequent and lengthy digressions into the narrative of his journey, delving into Australia’s economy, history, biology, sports, politics, local legends—you name it, Bryson will likely give you a neat anecdote about it.

Perhaps due to his journalistic training, Bryson has a fascination for all things deadly. Just as in A Short History of Nearly Everything, where he includes several ways that humanity might actually be made extinct, so here Bryson lets his taste for the macabre run rampant with Australia’s impressive collection of dangerous critters. Plentiful and poisonous snakes, spiders, and jellyfish; big and hungry sharks and crocodiles; and even some malicious species of plants—it seems that Australia is not a welcoming environment. Australia’s weather is not any better, as Bryson makes clear with his many stories of the explorers who attempted to brave Australia’s hot and empty innards—many of them, as Bryson gleefully points out, woefully and hilariously unprepared.

Another journalistic habit of his is his fascination with gaps. He spends page after page hammering home the extent to which Australia is huge, vast, empty, and to a large extent unexplored. With the instinct of a trained reporter, Bryson focuses in wherever there is something unexplained, unknown, unclear, or even just poorly understood. When Bryson is lucky, this leads him to some neglected piece of history, such as the impressive career of aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith. But often Bryson runs up against a dead end, such as the disappearance of Australian Prime Minster, Harold Holt, who took a swim while in office, never to be seen again. Considering that this poor fellow likely drowned and was then eaten by some large aquatic animal, this makes Bryson doubly curious, for it involves both death and mystery.

Well, I must say that I had a great time with Bryson, and I’m sad our shared trip has come to an end. One of us has to go back to work. I had a few good laughs, and, perhaps more importantly, now I know more about Australia than ever before—which I suppose isn’t saying much, but it’s something. But still I must admit that I’m left with one dreadful unanswered question. I need to know: is it good or bad to drink your own urine when you’re stranded in a hot environment with no water? Bryson mentions somewhere that it’s not a good idea (although many have done it), because urine has a high sodium content; so it’s counterproductive, and will only speed up dehydration. But there are plenty of stories of people successfully drinking their own urine to survive. My suspicion is that, if you’re relatively well-hydrated to begin with so your urine is watery, it wouldn’t be too bad; but if you kept repeating the process, you would get diminishing returns, owing to higher and higher levels of waste products. Can anyone help me answer this question?