Forget Crocodile Dundee, Castlemaine XXXX and the 2000 Sydney Olympics - Bill Bryson is the man to put Australia on the map.
Bill Bryson has traversed the length and breadth of Australia to bring us his first major new book since the bestselling 'A Walk In The Woods'. Bryson is a household name, synonymous with laugh-out-loud humour, uncontrolled sniggering and spontaneous outbursts of chortling. 'Down Under' will reinforce his reputation as the best-loved travel writer and humorist of our day. No worries!
Bill Bryson had expectations of Australia as a kind of alternative southern California, a place of constant sunshine and cheerful vapidity of a beach lifestyle, but with a slightly British bent - a sort of 'Baywatch' with cricket. Of course, what greeted him was something rather different.
Australia is a country that exists on a vast scale. It 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 is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still it teems with life - a large proportion of it quite deadly.
In fact, Australia has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way that anywhere else. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback.
Ignoring such dangers - yet curiously obsessed by them - Bill Bryson journeyed to Australia and promptly fell in love with the country. And who can blame him? The people are cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted and unfailingly obliging; their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water; the food is excellent; the beer is cold and the sun nearly always shines. Life doesn't get much better than this.
