Getting to Know Australia

Although I love travel, I have never had an interest in visiting Australia.  After reading a 2000 travelogue book by best-selling travel writer Bill Bryson, I am even less inclined to make the trip.  You may feel differently.

Let me say from the outset that my aversion to Australia has nothing to do with its people.  I am a fan of Keith Urban, Nicole Kidman, Chris and Liam Hemsworth, Cate Blanchett, and Hugh Jackman.  I enjoyed seeing and hearing the Ten Tenors at The Smith Centre for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas, and the members of Thunder From Down Under look delicious, although I have never seen more of them than is shown on a billboard.  I have, however, had occasion to spend time over a period of weeks with a man from the Gold Coast of Australia, whose company I quite enjoyed.  Although he is a lawyer, I found him to be truthful and trustworthy, which leads me to the unavoidable conclusion that his countrymen are even more so.  The land itself, however, is altogether different.

“Down Under” is the British title of the book that was published in the USA and Canada as “In a Sunburned Country,” taken from the famous Australian poem, “My Country”.

I began reading the book late at night, as a precursor to sleep, but it was not long before I was laughing hysterically. Bryson and I share the same sense of humor, although he has an inimitable way of expressing it. He writes, “I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention.” He goes on in his self-mocking style to describe his body movements and the sounds he makes.  In my opinion that passage alone makes the book worth reading, especially if you identify with it as I do.

Bryson lists some interesting facts about Australia:

• The world’s sixth largest country and its largest island.
• The only island that is also a continent, and the only continent that is also a country.
• An Australian book of maps identifies the following, real places: Wee Waa, Poowong, Burrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoo-moonah, Waaia, Mullumbimby, Ewlyamartup, Jiggalong, “and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.”
• You lose an entire day when you fly to Australia from North America, then arrive home before you left!
• Location of many of the oldest objects ever found on earth – the most ancient rocks and fossils, animal tracks, riverbeds.
• Home of Aboriginals who have no clearly evident racial or linguistic kinship to their neighbors in the region.  “It appears they invented and mastered ocean-going craft in advance of anyone else, in order to undertake an exodus, then forgot or abandoned nearly all that they had learned, and scarcely ever bothered with the open sea again.”
• “The driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile, and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents.  So inert that even the soil is, technically speaking, a fossil.”  (Only Antarctica is more hostile to life). 
• “Its seasons are back to front, its constellations upside down, its creatures evolving as if they had misread the manual.  The most characteristic of them didn’t run or lope or canter, but bounced across the landscape, like dropped balls.  The continent teems with unlike life.”
  • A fish that can climb trees
  • A fox that flies (actually a very large bat)
  • Crustaceans so large than a grown man can climb inside their shells

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

• The first continent conquered from the sea, and the last.
• The only nation that began as a prison.
• Population of just 18,000 in 2000 (now 25,500)
• Home of the largest living thing on earth, the Great Barrier Reef

• Home of the largest monolith, Ayers Rock (now known by its Aboriginal name, Uluru)

• Home of more things that will kill you than are found anywhere else:
  • All ten of the world’s most poisonous snakes
  • Five creatures that are the most lethal of their type in the world
    • The funnel web spider
    • Box jellyfish
    • Blue-ringed octopus
    • Paralysis tick
    • Stonefish
  • Fluffy caterpillars that can “lay you out with a toxic nip”
  • Aggressive stinging seashells

Bryson goes on to describe, “the state of abject wretchedness that comes with a prolonged encounter with the Australian fly. … It isn’t simply their persistence, but the things they go for.  An Australian fly will try to suck the moisture off your eyeball.  He will, if not constantly turned back, go into parts of your ears that a Q-tip can only dream about.  He will happily die for the glory of taking a tiny dump on your tongue.  Get thirty or forty of them dancing around you in the same way and madness will shortly follow.”  (See for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2FO4GmQM3E)

A friend of mine related similar experiences with The Australian Magpie. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47dmip4eJtA&fbclid=IwAR1lqMDSc8N7GWDqnUuyk9ymkw0-VvKZm2nIBjHfPzH6V-4WwLbuOrtmfGY)

Bryson writes, “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.  It’s a tough place.”

Case in point: On December 17, 1967 fifty-nine year old Harold Holt, who had then been Prime Minister of Australia for not quite two years, swam a couple of hundred feet straight out from the beach near Portsea, the outermost suburb of Melbourne, and almost instantly vanished, “without fuss or commotion or even a languorous wave.”  His body was never found.  If you die out there it doesn’t take long to become part of the food chain.  A memorial to him was built in Melbourne where he was, ironically, the eponymous inspiration for the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre.   

If your instinct for survival has not yet been triggered you may still be keen on exploring Australia, in which case you will want to read my next post. If, on the other hand, you have reason to be excited about the prospect of visiting Australia, be it anecdotal or fact-based, please select “Contact Me” from the menu and let us know!