His ignorance is bliss
Michael Davie
DOWN UNDER by Bill Bryson Doubleday, f16.99, pp. 319 GRANTA 70, AUSTRALIA Granta £9.99 pp. 352 Before Bill Bryson went to Australia, he heard this story. An Englishman flying to Australia was 'tonged' a hot towel by the stewardess that proved to be cold. He told her so — not in the least complaining, but thinking she might want to heat the rest of her pile. The stewardess smiled at him sweetly: 'Well, why don't you sit on it a bit? That should warm it up.' This tale convinced Bryson that he was going to like the place. He did: he loved it. He particularly approved of the inhabitants' `effortlessly dry, direct way of viewing the world'. His publishers describe him, proba- bly to his embarrassment, since part of his Comic repertoire is self-effacement, as 'the world's best-loved travel writer'; but on the evidence of this book he does not fit this category at all, failing entirely to meet the P. G. Wodehouse definition of a travel writ- er as someone who 'goes to some blasted Jungle or other and imagines that everybody will be interested in it'. He is really a jour- nalist, like his father and mother before him; and he comes from Des Moines, Iowa, which perhaps explains why he finds every- where else, even Canberra, interesting. It takes a practised journalist to extract 19 readable pages out of one weekend in Canberra, including one page about asking half a dozen adolescents in backward-facing baseball caps if they could tell him a decent place to eat — a half-witted moment, as he admits (he constantly deprecates himself in a way he certainly didn't learn in north Yorkshire, where, we are told, he lived for many years). Being an American works to his advantage. His starting point, that he knew absolutely nothing about the country before his first visit in 1992, is a claim that would seem phoney in a Briton. This igno- rance allows him to state simple facts about geography and population and to be rude, for instance, about the much-admired histo- rian Manning Clark, the vulgarity of Alice Springs, the bushranger hero Ned Kelly Ca thug'), insolent hotel staffs in Darwin, or the architecture of rich suburban Perth in a manner that might well, in a Briton, seem patronising. Unlike the writers who bored P. G. Wodehouse, he goes for the obvious, not the exotic: the state capitals, Great Barrier Reef, Ayers Rock, Manly, Gold Coast, the rain forests of northern Queensland. His book has a nice obvious title, too, and a nice obvious cover illustrated by a kanga- roo, a koala, Ayers Rock and the Sydney Opera House. His literary method is equal- ly straightforward. He arrives somewhere in a rented car and tells us what he saw, whom he encountered, what he thought, and often what he ate. His way of recount- ing these experiences, however humdrum, is rarely less than beguiling, and often per- ceptive and funny. His Australians sound like real Australians. Some may think he overdoes the exaggeration. Canberra is very spread out. 'My one tip for you if you ever go to Canberra is don't leave your hotel without a good map, a compass, sev- eral days' provisions, and a mobile phone with the number of a rescue service.'
He advances no general theme, unless it is that the Australians are an extraordinar- ily self-critical people, a conclusion with which some might quarrel. He cannot be faulted, though, on his curiosity, especially about the strange world of Australian biol- ogy, with special reference to the deadliest creature on earth, the box jellyfish, nor on his journalistic instincts. He finds the unadvertised shed that houses the little aircraft that crashed in the desert during the search for Kingsford Smith, the Aus- tralian pioneer aviator who disappeared in 1928; he drives into the middle of the `murderous outback' to look for the gum tree on which the heroic explorer, John McDuall Stuart, carved his initial in 1882; he identifies the site in Western Australia of the first sojourn by Europeans on Aus- tralian soil in 1629, survivors of the wreck on the Dutch vessel Batavia; he inspects the Great Worms of Gippsland; and he seeks out the little visited Mayall Creek, scene of the massacre of at least 28 Abo- riginal men, women and children in 1838 for which seven whites were hanged — to loud public protests.
This is an agreeable, well-meaning book, an undemanding introduction to the coun- try, though it is short on sport and culture, and should have been supplied with an index.
A rather different, insiders' view of the `wide brown land' is available in the 352- page summer issue of Granta magazine: a high-class anthology of new Australian writing and old photographs which should help to persuade those preparing to tune or pour into Sydney for the Olympics this September that there is more to Australia than a national desire to prove itself the most successful sporting nation on earth, Many of the 16 contributors enjoy solid, serious reputations outside Australia: for instance, Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Peter Conrad, Robyn Davidson, Kate Grenville, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray and Tim Winton. David Moore's photographs, introduced by Malouf, make up a brilliant short history of the past 50 years; some of them portray a vanished world. If the issue has a theme, it might be said to be the backward look, described thus in a short story by Winton: `. .the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.'
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