Down Under (48 page)

Ritvo, Harriet,
The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Rolls, Eric,
They All Ran Wild: The Animals and Plants That Plague Australia.
Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1969.

Sampson, Anthony,
Empires of the Sky.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985.

Seal, Graham,
The Lingo: Listening to Australian English.
Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999.

Sheehan, Paul,
Among the Barbarians.
Sydney: Random House Australia, 1998.

Spearritt, Peter,
Sydney’s Century: A History.
Sydney: University
of New South Wales Press, 2000.

Terrill, Ross,
The Australians.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Vizard, Steve,
Two Weeks in Lilliput: Bear-Baiting and Backbiting at the Constitutional Convention.
Sydney: Penguin Books, 1998.

Ward, Russell,
The History of Australia: The Twentieth Century.
New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

White, Mary E.,
Australia’s Prehistoric Plants.
Sydney: Methuen, 1984.

——,
The Greening of Gondwana: The 400 Million Year Story of Australia’s Plants.
Sydney: Reed Australia, 1994.

*1
The statement is inarguable. However, the author would like the record to show that he did not have his glasses on; he trusted his hosts; he was scanning a large area of ocean for sharks; and he was endeavouring throughout not to excrete a large housebrick into his pants.

*2
Unless otherwise indicated, all dollar signs refer to Australian dollars. As of early 2000, $1 was worth roughly 40 British pence (or £1 sterling to $2.50 Australian).

*3
According to the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey; but 1929 according to
National Geographic
magazine. There’s hardly a fact about Australia that isn’t significantly contradicted somewhere in print by somebody.

*4
For the record, Captain Watkin Tench, who was there, recorded the numbers as 751 convicts and 211 marines landed, with 25 fatalities en route. Hughes in
The Fatal Shore
puts the number of convicts landed as 696 and the total number of fatalities as 48; he doesn’t specify the number of marines. A
National Geographic
article I read put the number of prisoners at 775; a Penguin
Concise History
made it 529. I could go on and on.

*5
This was not a good period for Australian pride vis-à-vis America. Just over two weeks after the bridge opened and was found to be tragically short of superlative, Phar Lap, the greatest racehorse in Australian history, died in mysterious circumstances in California. There are still Australians who say we poisoned it. Australians are hugely proud of this horse, and will not thank you for pointing out that actually it was bred in New Zealand.

*6
Whoever named the lake evidently didn’t realize that Burley was Walter’s middle name, not part of his surname.

*7
Respectively a singlet, a slang term for breasts (I saw it on the cover of a magazine and actually made a sales assistant blush in asking, but how else to learn?) and a type of rotary clothesline of which the Australians are mysteriously but touchingly proud.

*8
Weeks later, in London, I checked the Keegan book, and it was full of references to the Australian army. The conclusion to draw from this, I guess, is that Australians so expect to be overlooked that they sometimes overlook not being overlooked, so to speak.

*9
In fact like most other people in America. The leading food writer of the age, Duncan Hines, author of the hugely successful
Adventures in Eating
,was himself a cautious eater and declared with pride that he never ate food with French names if he could possibly help it. Hines’s other proud boast was that he did not venture out of America until he was seventy years old, when he made a trip to Europe. He disliked much of what he found there, especially the food.

Also by

The Lost Continent

Mother Tongue

Troublesome Words

Neither Here Nor There

Made in America

Notes from a Small Island

A Walk in the Woods

Notes from a Big Country

African Diary

A Short History of Nearly Everything

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Shakespeare (Eminent Lives Series)

Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors

Bill Bryson’s opening lines were:
‘I come from Des Moines. Someone had to’.

This is what followed:

The Lost Continent

A road trip around the puzzle that is small-town America introduces the world to the adjective ‘Brysonesque’.

Neither Here Nor There

Europe never seemed funny until Bill Bryson looked at it.

Made in America

A compelling ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture gets beneath the skin of the country.

Notes from a Small Island

A eulogy to Bryson’s beloved Britain captures the very essence of the original ‘green and pleasant land’.

A Walk in the Woods

Bryson’s punishing (by his standards) hike across the celebrated Appalachian Trail, the longest footpath in the world.

Notes from a Big Country

Bryson brings his inimitable wit to bear on that strangest of phenomena – the American way of life.

Down Under

An extraordinary journey to the heart of another big country – Australia.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Travels through time and space to explain the world, the universe and everything.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Quintessential Bryson – a funny, moving and perceptive journey through his childhood.

S
PRINGFIELD
, I
LL
. (AP) – The State Senate of Illinois yesterday disbanded its Committee on Efficiency and Economy ‘for reasons of efficiency and economy’.

–
Des Moines Tribune
, 6 February 1955

I
N THE LATE 1950S
, the Royal Canadian Air Force produced a booklet on isometrics, a form of exercise that enjoyed a short but devoted vogue with my father. The idea of isometrics was that you used any unyielding object, like a tree or wall, and pressed against it with all your might from various positions to tone and strengthen different groups of muscles. Since everybody already has access to trees and walls, you didn’t need to invest in a lot of costly equipment, which I expect was what attracted my dad.

What made it unfortunate in my father’s case was that he would do his isometrics on aeroplanes. At some point in every flight, he would stroll back to the galley area or the space by the emergency exit and, taking up the posture of someone trying to budge a very heavy piece of machinery, he would begin to push with his back or shoulder against the outer wall of the plane, pausing occasionally to take deep breaths before returning with quiet, determined grunts to the task.

Since it looked uncannily, if unfathomably, as if he were trying to force a hole in the side of the plane, this naturally drew attention. Businessmen in nearby seats would stare over the tops of their glasses. A stewardess
would pop her head out of the galley and likewise stare, but with a certain hard caution, as if remembering some aspect of her training that she had not previously been called upon to implement.

Seeing that he had observers, my father would straighten up, smile genially and begin to outline the engaging principles behind isometrics. Then he would give a demonstration to an audience that swiftly consisted of no one. He seemed curiously incapable of feeling embarrassment in such situations, but that was all right because I felt enough for both of us – indeed, enough for us and all the other passengers, the airline and its employees, and the whole of whatever state we were flying over.

Two things made these undertakings tolerable. The first was that back on solid ground my dad wasn’t half as foolish most of the time. The second was that the purpose of these trips was always to go to a big city like Detroit or St Louis, stay in a large hotel and attend ballgames, and that excused a great deal – well, everything, in fact. My dad was a sportswriter for the
Des Moines Register
, which in those days was one of the country’s best papers, and often took me along on trips through the Midwest. Sometimes these were car trips to smaller places like Sioux City or Burlington, but at least once a summer we boarded a silvery plane – a huge event in those days – and lumbered through the summery skies, up among the fleecy clouds, to a proper metropolis to
watch Major League baseball, the pinnacle of the sport.

Like everything else in those days, baseball was part of a simpler world, and I was allowed to go with him into the changing rooms and dugout and on to the field before games. I have had my hair tousled by Stan Musial. I have handed Willie Mays a ball that had skittered past him as he played catch. I have lent my binoculars to Harvey Kuenn (or possibly it was Billy Hoeft) so that he could scope some busty blonde in the upper deck. Once on a hot July afternoon I sat in a nearly airless clubhouse under the left field grandstand at Wrigley Field in Chicago beside Ernie Banks, the Cubs’ great shortstop, as he autographed boxes of new white baseballs (which are, incidentally, the most pleasurably aromatic things on earth, and worth spending time around anyway). Unbidden, I took it upon myself to sit beside him and pass him each new ball. This slowed the process considerably, but he gave a little smile each time and said thank you as if I had done him quite a favour. He was the nicest human being I have ever met. It was like being friends with God.

I can’t imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity. When the war ended the United States had $26 billion worth of factories that hadn’t existed before the war, $140 billion in savings and war bonds just waiting to be spent, no bomb damage and practically no competition. All that American
companies had to do was stop making tanks and battleships and start making Buicks and Frigidaires – and boy did they. By 1951, when I came sliding down the chute, almost 90 per cent of American families had refrigerators, and nearly three quarters had washing machines, telephones, vacuum cleaners and gas or electric stoves – things that most of the rest of the world could still only fantasize about. Americans owned 80 per cent of the world’s electrical goods, controlled two-thirds of the world’s productive capacity, produced over 40 per cent of its electricity, 60 per cent of its oil and 66 per cent of its steel. The 5 per cent of people on Earth who were Americans had more wealth than the other 95 per cent combined.

I don’t know of anything that better conveys the happy bounty of the age than a photograph (reproduced in this volume as the endpapers at the front and back of the book) that ran in
Life
magazine two weeks before my birth. It shows the Czekalinski family of Cleveland, Ohio – Steve, Stephanie and two sons, Stephen and Henry – surrounded by the two and a half tons of food that a typical blue-collar family ate in a year. Among the items they were shown with were 450 pounds of flour,
72
pounds of shortening, 56 pounds of butter, 31 chickens, 300 pounds of beef, 25 pounds of carp, 144 pounds of ham, 39 pounds of coffee, 690 pounds of potatoes, 698 quarts of milk, 131 dozen eggs, 180 loaves of bread, and 8½ gallons of ice cream, all purchased on a budget of $25
a week. (Mr Czekalinski made $1.96 an hour as a shipping clerk in a Du Pont factory.) In 1951, the average American ate 50 per cent more than the average European.