In a Sunburned Country: An Infuriatingly Famous Misrepresentation of the Land All Americans Want to Visit
I was interested in reading In a Sunburned Country from the start, not just because it is widely considered as one of the great Australian travel books, but because of some of the parallels I share with Bryson that (initially) gave me a sort of inclination to the fellow. Bryson is from New Hampshire, a characteristic which in itself will give a NH native a feeling of immediate fraternity, the type that any other person in the world might get from meeting someone who happened to live in their old hometown. He is an author, a traveler, a comedian, all of which I aspire to be, and he had written a book about Australia, which I already have a fairly strong magnetism to. In short, Bryson was poised to become one of my new favorite authors.
To put it in Australian, he bunged it proper.
On the very first page of any actual writing involved, Bryson acknowledges the native ballad from which the book draws its name, a poem named “My Country” by Dorothea Mackellar whose second stanza runs such: “I love a sunburnt country / a land of sweeping plains / of ragged mountain ranges / of droughts and flooding rains.” Bryson states that he has included this acknowledgement to forestall the tumult of letters from angry loyalists, telling him that the accurate name for his book should be In a Sunburnt Country. As he brazenly puts it: “I know it should, but it isn’t.” At first, I assumed that this was a literary device, one that he would return to later, long after I had forgotten the phrase in the first place, and tie in earlier anecdotes as to why he had chosen to take it upon himself to re-upholster a phrase held dear to Australian nationalism. And I probably would have forgotten it – or not even noticed it at all, had he refrained from pointing it out – if he had actually done so, but the further I read the further distant we seemed from him making any such concession, and the more Bryson’s title choice seemed to represent an American ethnocentrism that the Australians all rather expect from us at this point.
Don’t get me wrong – Bryson is an amazingly thorough researcher, a compelling writer, and has a pleasing comic wit with a British flavor that sneaks through in some of his exclamations (“not very sporting, what?”) He has a true talent for comparisons and parallels that make his experience more concrete for us at home, such as pointing out that the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef is longer than the west coast of the United States. Many of his historical anecdotes make for great factoids or storytelling. His book gives extensive insight into the history of Australian colonization – not total, but far better than, as he points out, the great big nothing that we Americans know about Australia other than that we’ve always wanted to go there. My main complaint with the book is this: Bryson wrote a 304 page book about Australia, most of which is about his experience, not including a 3-page bibliography with 66 cited books, most of which he (probably) read fully. And for all I can tell, he has spent no more than 3 months there, made 0 friends despite traveling alone, and had 0 notable adventures.
Most of his time is spent in cars, hotels, or bars. For 95% of his trip, if he isn’t describing driving through featureless landscape, he is drinking alone, reading, or taking leisurely strolls through the city or parks. To his credit, Bryson is a good enough writer to entertain the reader while this is happening, but when you finish the chapter and try to recall what happened, you begin to realize that most of it is just puff. He does not make a single friend, which I can say with positivity, since this would have been a singular enough event to merit almost an entire chapter, given his multi-page dedications to passing conversations with Aussie strangers. His only interaction with an Australian “native” is his extended visit to a recent British ex-pat. An entire chapter is dedicated to Canberra, an episode that I can sum up in one sentence: “Canberra is boring and there are a lot of parks.” At one point, he drives to Surfer’s Paradise, walks around town, filling the break between lunch and dinner, then returns to his car and drives south, and fills half a chapter with his perceptions of Surfer’s Paradise. He doesn’t even try surfing. A more egregious example with the same conclusion – Bryson makes the pilgrimage to the Great Barrier Reef, arguably the most notable natural wonder worldwide, an experience that is highly worthy of great elocution, even without the added excitement of Cyclone Rosa, the largest “wet” in 30 years which was at the time turning the shoreline into a dynamic warzone of waves – the makings of a great adventure story. Bryson gets in the water, sputters, gets afraid, gets out, spends a paragraph describing the reef from the viewing deck of the ship, “precisely like being at a public aquarium”, and wraps up the whole experience with the phrase, “Well, it was wonderful.” Where he excels in armchair research, he fails miserably at on-the-ground experience. His travel stint in Australia is almost completely without incident, and yet he obstinately has written a book about it. It would be cheapening the word “experience” to describe his travel as such; more accurately, it was an “observation.” In his attempt to describe Australia, he has completely left Australians themselves out of the equation. His spiced-up title is, in a sense, an appropriate allegory for the book: not properly indicative of Australia itself, but rather of Bryson’s perception of the country, built almost entirely from a visit roughly equivalent in duration to a college study abroad, and substantially less exciting.
I suppose I should be grateful, really, since he didn’t write the book that I hope to - that niche still remains open. Although Bryson cleverly described Australia, he didn’t tap into what it is like to be in Australia, and if I wanted to have a tourist’s exploration of Australia without actually diving in and experiencing it, I’d save my $1,900 plane ticket and curl up at home with In a Sunburned Country. To sum it up: I recently talked with a bartender, who told me that through some sister’s cousin’s boss’s girlfriend’s connection, he had met and talked with Bryson for a while. (Bryson is, after all, a Hanover native, some 40 minutes from my home.) This bartender mentioned to Bryson that he had recently finished hiking part of the Appalachian Trail, referring to Bryson’s first book, A Walk in the Woods, a novel describing life on the Trail that propelled him into international spotlight as an author. Interested, or perhaps just making conversation, Bryson asked my friend how much of the AT he had hiked. The bartender replied modestly, only around 700 miles or so (out of approximately 2,200 miles complete.) As Bryson nodded sagely, his wife looked at him sidelong and remarked candidly, “That’s a hell of a lot more than you did, Bill.”
