Review: Down Under

Down Under by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An enjoyable and informative read. Admittedly, I had known very little about Australia before I started reading this book so the book served as a good introduction and hence my 4-stars rating rather than 3. In comparison with "Notes From a Small Island" that I read some years back, I think it's much better. Possibly because of my prior ignorance. Despite my initial predisposition, there were some interesting historical events from many perspectives; Burke and Wills disastrous yet celebrated expeditions in the desert, celebrated bushrangers like Ned Kelly, the outrageous atrocities committed against the natives and how it had never been a concern for a long time, the Stolen Generations, the Gold Rush, Lambing Flat riots and White Australia Policy, the unappreciated tales of the aviator Kingsford Smith, Whitlam's Labor government of 1972 and how it was dissolved. I'll let my favorite highlights speak for themselves. They range between facts and jokes, and I hope they can tell you something you didn't know or raise an eyebrow (in case you're not that knowledgeable about this part of the world), or at least put a smile on your face:

- Eighty per cent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else. 

- Of the sites that qualify for World Heritage status, only thirteen satisfy all four of UNESCO’s criteria for listing, and of these thirteen special places, four – almost a third – are to be found in Australia. 

- The country has less than 1 per cent of the world’s population but more than 20 per cent of its slot machines. 

- In the early days a commercial flight from London involved, in addition to nerves of steel, forty-two refuelling stops, up to five changes of aircraft and a train journey through Italy because Mussolini wouldn’t allow flights through Italian air space. It took twelve days. 

- No other nation lost more men as a proportion of population in the First World War than Australia ... The casualty rate for its soldiers was 65 per cent. And all were volunteers.’ 

- The Simpson Desert, an area bigger than some European countries, was named in 19321 after a manufacturer of washing machines. 

- Until 1949 there was no such thing as Australian citizenship. People born in Australia were not in any technical sense Australians at all but Britons – as British as if they were from Cornwall or Scotland. 

- The historian Alan Moorehead once wrote: ‘Australians of my generation grew up in a world apart. Until we went abroad we had never seen a beautiful building, hardly ever heard a foreign language spoken, or been to a well-acted play, or eaten a reasonably sophisticated meal, or listened to a good orchestra.’ 

- One thing you won’t find much in Australian second-hand bookshops are 1950s or earlier editions of lots of books – The Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Peyton Place, Another Country, Brave New World and hundreds and hundreds of others. The reason for this is simple: they were banned. Altogether, at its peak, 5,000 titles were forbidden to be imported into the country.

- I should just note that in an Australian context ‘hotel’ can signify many things: a hotel, a pub, a hotel and pub – that stand on nearly every corner.(Something I personally found strange on my first few days in Australia)

- You do rather come away with two interlinked impressions – that Australians love to argue for argument’s sake and that basically they would rather just leave everything as it is. 

- During national referendums the citizens of the Northern Territory are also required to vote, but the votes don’t actually count towards anything. (I still need to check if that's still the case) 

- Had La Pérouse [the commander of a French expedition journey that reached Australia] been just a little faster, he could have claimed Australia for France and saved the country 200 years of English cooking. 

- In 1859 ... Thomas Austin... made a big mistake. He imported twenty-four wild rabbits from England and released them into the bush for sport. Within a couple of years they had entirely overrun Austin’s property and were spreading into neighbouring districts. Fifty million years of isolation had left Australia without a single predator or parasite able even to recognize rabbits, much less dine off them, and so they proliferated amazingly. 

On Convict Transportation: 

By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’. In such circumstances, transportation was quite a merciful alternative. When they couldn’t fool their masters the prisoners could often fool their fellows. For years there existed an illicit commerce in which newly arrived convicts were sold maps showing them how to walk to China. 

On Sydney: 

- As late as 1953, there were just 800 hotel rooms in Syndey, barely enough for one medium-sized convention, and not a thing to do in the evenings; even the bars closed at 6 p.m. 

- In 1923, when the city burghers decided to throw a bridge across the harbour, they determined to build not just any bridge, but the longest single-arch span ever constructed... It took longer to construct than expected – almost ten years. Just before it was completed, in 1932, the Bayonne Bridge in New York quietly opened and was found to be 25 inches – 0.121 per cent – longer. 

- Lachlan Macquarie, a Scotsman who was governor of the colony in the first part of the nineteenth century, and whose principal achievements were the building of the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains, the popularizing of Australia as a name (before him the whole country was indifferently referred to as either New South Wales or Botany Bay) and the world’s first nearly successful attempt to name every object on a continent after himself. 

On Sydney Opera House: 

- The whole project had been intended to last no more than six years and construction in the end dragged on for almost a decade and a half. The final cost came in at a weighty $ 102 million, fourteen times the original estimate. 

On Canberra: 

- ‘I reckon if you were going to rank things for how much pleasure they give – you know? – Canberra would come somewhere below breaking your arm.’ 

- Lake Burley Griffin contains an engineering wonder (the wonder being why they bothered) called the Captain Cook Memorial Jet. 

On Cricket: - It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect... It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players (more if they are moderately restless). It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you can dress in white from head to toe and be as clean at the end of the day as you were at the beginning. 

- I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other. 

On Aborigines: 

- As recently as the early 1960s, as John Pilger notes, Queensland schools were using a textbook that likened Aborigines to ‘feral jungle creatures’. - In 1805, the acting judge-advocate for New South Wales... declared that Aborigines had not the discipline or mental capacity for courtroom proceedings; rather than plague the courts with their grievances, settlers were instructed to track down the offending natives and ‘inflict such punishment as they may merit’. 

On Alice Springs: 

- In 1954, when Alan Moorehead passed through, Alice’s only regular connection to the outside world was a weekly train from Adelaide. - Its arrival on Saturday evening was the biggest event in the life of the town. It brought mail, newspapers, new pictures for the cinema, long-awaited spare parts and whatever else couldn’t be acquired locally. Nearly the whole town turned out to see who got off and what was unloaded. 

On White Cliffs 

- ‘So when did you get electricity in White Cliffs?’ He thought for an instant. ‘Nineteen ninety-three.’ I thought I had misheard him. ‘When?’ ‘Just about five years ago. We have telly now, too,’ he added suddenly and enthusiastically. ‘Got that two years ago.’

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