Down Under

I fell in love with Bill Bryson’s writing on the very first page of his most famous book, A Short History of Nearly Everything’. Here was a collection of essays on topics that, by his own admission, would bore the pants off most people, and yet never have obscure facts about bacteria , evolution and the history of science been more riveting, or more hilariously recounted. I’m happy to announce that with ‘Down Under’, a recounting of his travels through Australia, Bryson has kept our romance alive.

I’ve long been fascinated with Australia, home of kangaroos and wallabys, the famed Outback, the Sydney Opera House, Heath Ledger, Hugh Jackman and McLeod’s Daughters. And did anybody watch Coolangatta Gold when it aired , just once, on Doordarshan in the 90s? Or like singing along to Men At Work? But I digress. Suffice to say, this was a country that had much I found fascinating, yet about which I knew nothing beyond these iconic images.So the lure of this book.

With 'Down Under', prepare to enter a world of remote outposts like Woolloomooloo, Wollongong and Manjimup. Prepare also to spend long hours googling for images of Uluru, the Bungle Bungles and stromatolites, all examples of the natural wonders that the continent seems to burst at the gills with, and which I certainly had never heard of. This is a developed nation unlike any other – remote, with large tracts of land still uncharted, and abundant species of flora and fauna still unknown to science. A continent so sparsely populated that the Aum Shinrikyo may have set off a nuclear explosion that went four years without being noticed. And one where the chances of being killed by being mauled, stung or eaten by some lethal animal, insect or marine creature seem far greater than being hit by a bus. But prepare most of all, to read this book in isolation, because the hysterical laughter this book brings on may have you eyed strangely in (or even hauled out of) public places.

Bryson journeys through this harsh yet beautiful landscape with varying companions, exploring its corners and unearthing obscure facts. Along the way, he flirts with death by swimming with jellyfish, is chased across a park by dogs, variously befriends, shocks and offends the locals, contemplates drinking his own urine to survive in case he is stranded in the outback, and gets repeatedly drunk.

The book takes a sober turn when Bryson takes on the subject of the Aborigines, Australia’s invisible people. Never mind that evidence shows the Aborigines were technologically and organizationally advanced long before Australia had even been discovered by the Europeans, or that they have possibly the world’s longest living tradition in art. They were systematically butchered, driven off their lands and made the subject of extremely inhuman experiments supposedly meant to integrate them with the ‘main’ population. Here’s what Bryson writes;
“You don’t have to be a genius to work out that Aborigines are Australia’s greatest social failing. For virtually every indicator of prosperity and well-being – hospitalization rates, suicide rates, childhood mortality, imprisonment, unemployment, you name it – the figures for Aborigines range from twice as bad to upto twenty times worse than the general population.”

And elsewhere,
“ Over the past twenty years, successive governments have done quite a lot…….None of this has made any difference at all to the statistics. Some have actually got worse.”

What was really chilling for me here - replace ‘Australia’ with ‘India’ , replace the word ‘Aborigine’ with ‘Dalit’ or ‘Adivasis’ or the name for any of our other marginalized communities, and this passage would still largely hold true.

By the end of the book, Bryson still has a great deal left to see and no time to do this in.He ruefully admits that this great, far off continent will recede once more in his memory, a feeling most of us have probably felt at the end of a memorable trip. '..Once you leave Australia', Bryson says,' Australia ceases to be', a reference to its remoteness for most of us, and not just in terms of distance. Well,true, but atleast we have this book.


No I’m off to go google the Giant Worm of Gippsland.