go to australia

I’ve got a bunch of travel books left from my trip I’d be happy to share.

Oh and, I’d go back again tomorrow if I could. Two-plus weeks just isn’t enough.

Yesterday I finished reading Bill Bryson’s book In A Sunburned Country, his Australian travel book. For the record I read the paperback version with the Sydney Olypics articles tacked onto the end.

I really dislike Bryson generally, because I tend to see him as small-minded, self-centered, backward, and snobbish. He often takes cheap shots by way of getting to a joke, and he seems to be saddled with a grade-school sense of humor. All of these elements were in evidence in Sunburned.

However, this book has some elements that have been missing from every other book about Australia I have bought and/or read while preparing for this trip; it is the story of one person travelling around Australia, going to places I’m likely to want to go. And Bryson, whatever his shortcomings, tends to use many and varied sources, some of them first-rate and some of them quirky. And that is almost enough to make me forget the stuff I listed in the paragraph above.

So, somewhat unwillingly, I recommend In A Sunburned Country to anyone thinking about going to Australia. It’s a neat little book. Even the addition of the mostly execrable newspaper articles in the appendix doesn’t spoil that.

This morning I finished reading Australia: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Robert Ross.

Unlike Travelers’ Tales Australia, this is a collection of fiction, all centered around various aspects of Australian life. It takes a more literary tack toward explaining Australia, and is more an introduction to Australian fiction than to Australia itself.

I would not recommend this book to someone looking for an introduction to Australia itself. I got a feel for the emptiness of the land and the difficulty of living there, some of the difficulties of the Aborigines, and some of the difficulties of the working poor, but the thing that I would expect to describe good writing, namely, a sense of what the soul of the people is like, is almost completely missing. I was really disappointed in this book.

I finished reading Travelers Tales Australia this morning. I leave two weeks from tomorrow.

How prepared am I? Not very.

I’m three stories away from finishing Travelers Tales Australia. It’s uneven but interesting; and it definitely makes the point that the Outback can be a very dangerous place.

I dropped Culture Shock: Australia about two-fifths of the way through. This is my third Culture Shock book, and only the Korea edition turned out to be readable. The others have focused too much on arts and politics.

I picked up a copy of Songlines last week. It’s probably going to be the best-written of the bunch, but it can probably wait; I don’t actually need to have read it to appreciate Australia.

Two weeks and two days.