Everything, it seems, is interesting to Bill Bryson. The marvel is that he can make it all interesting to us - three billion year old fossilized organisms off the western coast; a giant lobster on the side of a highway; empty, forbidding spaces...

"It's just like when you hear a great story in a bar," he explained, "an anecdote that you want to rush right home and relate to other people. You want to spread the word."

Eighty percent of Australia's plants and animals exist nowhere else in the world. A 19th century naturalist caught two rare pig-footed bandicoots - in time, he grew hungry and ate them, and no one has seen a pig-footed bandicoot since. Among the first round of convicts Great Britain exiled to Australia was a man who had been jailed for stealing twelve cucumber plants.

In a Sunburned Country introduces Australia, a giant, mostly barren continent in the Indian Ocean populated by eighteen million people, or, as Bryson points out, less people than are born each year in China. Like the rest of his writing, the new book is informative, funny, and almost impossible to put down.
 

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson List Price $14.95 Your Price: $7.50 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson List Price $14.95 Your Price: $5.50 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson List Price $15.95 Your Price: $10.95 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away by Bill Bryson List Price $14.95 Your Price: $6.95 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words by Bill Bryson List Price $21 Your Price: $6.95 (Used - Hardcover) More about this book/ check for other copies The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America by Bill Bryson List Price $14.00 Your Price: $6.95 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson List Price $14.00 Your Price: $8.95 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies

Dave: I've been devouring your books for the last month or so, but I saved In a Sunburned Country for last. I just finished a couple days ago.

Bill Bryson: I have a particular affection for it. In a really strange way I feel as if I've become an evangelist for Australia. Just in the sense that I went there and everything I discovered was new to me. It's just like when you hear a great story in a bar, an anecdote that you want to rush right home and relate to other people. You want to spread the word.

I wound up feeling like that about Australia. Stories about Burke and Wills ["the antipodean equivalents of Lewis and Clark," Bryson calls them in In a Sunburned Country, "which is perhaps a little curious since their expedition accomplished almost nothing, cost a fortune, and ended in tragedy"], that kind of thing. I just thought, God, I've never heard of any of this.

Learning about the country became almost an obsession, except it was a really pleasant one. Writing this book was a pleasure. I set off without any certainty that I was going to have enough information and stories - stuff to fill a book. Pretty quickly I realized there was so much more to Australia than I'd expected and there wouldn't be a problem at all.

Dave: The format of A Walk in the Woods was largely determined by the Appalachian Trail, obviously, though once you started the hike you got away from your initial plan a bit. And you originally wrote the pieces that eventually became I'm a Stranger Here Myself for a weekly column in a British newspaper, so that shaped the style and structure of the book. But you went to Australia without any particular agenda?

Bryson: The first time I went there was in 1992. I went to a literary festival in Melbourne. After that I was sent there on book tours and I went once or twice on magazine assignments. Little by little I was getting more experience with the country. I realized pretty early on that I really liked this place.

By the time I came to write the book, I knew there would be quite a bit to it, but once I started really looking into it and gathering material, I was just astounded how much extra stuff there was. Things like the Batavia business, the shipwreck on the West Australia coast - here I was driving up the west coast, and I had nothing in particular to write about. I'd already talked a lot about wide open spaces and what it's like to be in the middle of nowhere. I had nothing really to fill out that chapter. Then I stopped in this little maritime museum in a little rinky-dink town on the west coast, and found a whole story of slaughter, an incredible tale. It was like that everywhere I went. The material just seemed to be there, provided for me. It felt very abundant. There was always plenty to choose from.

Dave: I think your fans might argue that you simply see stories where others might not. Your style lends itself to that kind of casual observation, finding amazing anecdotes and histories in everyday events and regular people. Reading the book, it feels like you could have written a couple hundred more pages.

Bryson: I really could have. There was plenty more to go on if I wanted to talk in more detail about the history of exploration in Australia, for instance, or how the Aborigines got there. I was throwing stuff out and cutting back. At one point, I was tempted to just run on more, and really it was because I was on such a tight deadline that I had to restrict myself. The publisher was adamant that I produce the manuscript by the first week in January or they couldn't guarantee that the book would be published in time for the Olympics.

I don't think the Olympics are necessarily what is going to make or break this book, but I did feel that if the book came out next year, after the Olympics had come and gone, Australia would seem like last year's story. You have to be ahead of that, rather than behind it.

Dave: A lot of it really resonated for me because I'd just been to New Zealand for the first time. I was there in April.

Bryson: What did you think of it?

Dave: I loved it. And one habit we share, apparently, is reading local newspapers when traveling. I got addicted to the local papers when I was in New Zealand. I read them every day, practically cover to cover.

One story in particular, my favorite, was about a parrot who was being evicted from a local pub by the city's health inspectors because they decided the cigarette smoke would be very bad for its health. And the locals were up in arms about it. They said, "The parrot is neurotic when he's not here! He's going to be miserable!"

Are newspapers a major source of material for you, or are they more a source of entertainment?

Bryson: Both, really. I learn a lot from newspapers, but mostly I was reading for the pleasure of it. There's just a feeling when you open a newspaper - this happens often in foreign countries - when you realize these are great stories, but you know they're never going to make it anywhere overseas. You're so glad to be there when it's happening.

I find myself mostly flipping through the political stuff when I first arrive in a country, but I was in Australia for sustained enough periods that I was becoming engrossed in everything, as if I was trying to track the whole nation. I don't know to what extent that was really useful for material, but it made me feel as if I was slowly coming to grips with this very large and unwieldy country.

Dave: Australia is so far away. You talk at the end of the book, upon leaving, about the sadness of knowing that this whole nation will go on existing and you won't get to be a part of it. There really is a sense that it's another world.

Bryson: To an outsider, Australia and New Zealand are very similar. The experience you had would have been much the same in Australia except for one important factor, and that's that Australia's landscape is almost extraterrestrial.

New Zealand, most of the time, is recognizable as a part of the planet, whereas you go into the Australian outback and it looks like Mars. You have this immensity, this emptiness. You're driving, for instance, and you stop the car to get out, and first of all, the heat hits you - you're not ready for that - and the scale of everything around you, the silence, and the color of the earth, the barrenness of it - it does really feel as if somehow you've been transported to another planet where you are able, miraculously, to breathe their thin atmosphere.

Dave: After the gold rush in the 1850's, the British gave up trying to use Australia as a penal colony. Too many people wanted to go to Australia, suddenly. But it seemed strange to me, with all that emptiness and desolation - as if because a tiny portion of the land mass was now appealing they should just write off the whole project. Did they just not want to make the effort to bring the prisoners into the outback?

Read an excerpt from In a Sunburned Country

Bryson: Australia had been a preposterously undesirable place where nobody wanted to go - no one wanted to be posted there, convicts didn't want to be sent there - and suddenly the whole world was trying to get there. Word started to come back of these fabulous gold finds, and there was the same greed factor as in California. All this happened very quickly. Convicts were escaping and vanishing into the mass of people in the gold fields. Before that, there was no real reason to flee; there was nothing to flee to. So in terms of the logistics, the prisons became unsustainable.

Dave: Among the strange, almost unbelievable stories you relate are those of the British prisoners exiled to the other side of the world. One man was sent there for stealing twelve cucumber plants. Other stories are outrageously coincidental and funny, like when Captain Cook landed in Sydney and the French explorers, who were on a two-year expedition, sailed into the Botany Bay a few hours behind Cook only to discover that the land had been claimed, so they graciously turned their boats around, sank somewhere at sea, and were never heard from again. Another explorer had previously sailed between Australia and New Guinea without realizing he was passing an enormous undiscovered continent. There's so much colorful, strange history.

Bryson: That's my point exactly. There was so much. You wouldn't think that a country of just 18 million people - a very small population base with which to generate history and anecdote and incident - and a relatively short history, a couple hundred years, would be so amazingly productive. But if an Australian story wasn't amazing in some way, I didn't need it for the book because there are so many that are amazing. So much of the history is bound up with amazing coincidences like La Pérouse and his ships arriving right after Cook gets there.

Dave: Contemporary stories, too. I think it's right at the beginning that you mention Harold Holt, the prime minister who went for a swim offshore and disappeared forever. Later in the book you discover that the memorial Australians dedicated to him was a municipal swimming pool!

Bryson: I love that!

Dave: Who are these people? That's so bizarre.

Bryson: I can't fit that one into any sort of pattern. Australians have a rich sense of humor and they're very much appreciative of irony, so it's extremely unlikely that something so lacking in irony like that would ever happen. It was totally out of character - unless they did it on purpose.

Dave: You're originally from Iowa, and so much of Australia seems reminiscent of the Midwest. The Big Lobster on the side of the highway, for instance. On one hand, things seem very familiar. On the other hand, you find a former deputy prime minister hocking his autobiography from a card table in a city market, and you just have to shake your head.

Bryson: That's what I find so mesmerizing about it. It's a contrast between the wildly exotic, things you can't see anywhere else - nowhere else in the world are you going to see kangaroos in a natural state, or even just animals hopping across the landscape; everything you look at reminds you that you're in an exotic place, the way the sun shines, that particular intensity - and at the same time all the infrastructure is familiar and well-known. It's not remotely taxing to be there. You know how to read the menu and order. You know how to read the road signs. Communication is at no stage a difficulty. All the comforts you have at home are easily duplicated. It's like going to another planet without giving up the comfortable bed.

Dave: Perth, in particular, seems fascinating to me, a major city on an isolated continent which itself is completely isolated from the rest of the country. What is Perth like compared to the rest of Australia?

Bryson: Very much less different than you would imagine. When you're there, there's no sense of it being really remote. If you didn't know that it was such an isolated place, it would never occur to you. You could be 150 miles from Adelaide or Melbourne. It's only when you get to talking to the people you realize that, for instance, when they have a long weekend, there's nowhere for them to go. They have a very nice, congenial city, but there's really nowhere else to go. They can drive out into the desert, but you'd only get so far before you'd have to turn around and go home because you have to be at work on Tuesday.

One thing I didn't write about in the book - I really didn't think about it until later - you really appreciate Perth's isolation when you fly into it. You spend hours and hours crossing these endless deserts, or hours crossing an empty ocean if you're coming from the other direction, but if you cross the mainland particularly, it's just emptiness, Death Valley forever. Then suddenly there's the city clustered at the edge of the sea, almost as if the desert is nudging it off the continent. It's such a bizarre thing. It's all red and barren for thousands of miles, then suddenly there are golf courses and a city.

Dave: You write about the Aborigines, their ancient history and the irreconcilable differences in their worldview. It's not hard to imagine why integrating them into white Australian culture would be near impossible, and yet in many ways the Australians' failings in that regard have been so blatant that it's hard to understand. Until the sixties, most Aborigines parents didn't even have legal custody of their children; in many cases, their children were simply taken away and moved to foster homes.

Today, Australia seems like a thriving, multicultural place - you note that one of every three residents of Sydney was born in another country - but only about thirty years ago, thousands of books were banned and because of the White Australia policy it was next to impossible for anyone of non-European descent to settle there.

Bryson: It wasn't really until the seventies that immigrants started coming in large numbers. Certainly in the sixties it would have been more difficult for a Vietnamese to immigrate, for instance, than a Belgian or Irish or Italian.

Dave: How did that change occur? Why did it take so long?

Bryson: In a sense, it's like asking, "Why didn't America have a successful civil rights movement until the sixties?" Sometimes history doesn't move so fast. There isn't really a plausible or satisfactory answer.

What is amazing is that there was this remarkable transformation. Australia went from being a pink-skinned, sunburned, Britannic nation in the 1940s to, in a generation or so, one of the most ethnically diverse nations anywhere. And they did it all very successfully. There's been hardly any downside to this change in immigration policy. Most of it has gone very smoothly. The people have been assimilated, and everyone realizes that it's made the country a richer and more interesting place. Most people are really proud of that.

Still, you have this great, fundamental paradox: why doesn't this extend to the Aborigines, the indigenous people? Australians are not a racist people. They really do have a sense of fair play. And Aborigines are not hated or treated with contempt. It's more a puzzle: how do we bring them into society? No one has come up with any approaches at all. The gains have been almost entirely marginal.

Yes, there are now some Aborigines who are in public life. There's a politician, a very successful guy named Aiden Ridgeway, a very charismatic man who may well be a prime minister of Australia some day. It's not that they're universally marginalized, but in terms of social policy the Aborigines are without question Australia's greatest failure. That's hardly a contentious assertion to make. Everyone agrees. The question is, What do you do about it? They've tried lots of things. Nothing has worked so far.

Dave: You've written a couple books about the English language and linguistics [Made in America and The Mother Tongue]. How did you come to write those?

Bryson: I never set out to be a travel writer. I got into it entirely by accident. The first book, The Lost Continent, was essentially a kind of memoir. I'd been living in England for a long time, and after my dad died I decided to come home and travel around America, to look at the country and see how it had changed, and how I had changed, in the years that I'd been living away.

Because I was freelancing, I was open to any suggestions or possibilities. I was interested writing books on all kinds of subjects. An American publisher had seen some articles I had written on English language. She asked if I'd be interested in doing a popular history of the English language. This was at the very time I was going freelance, so I jumped at the chance. A book contract! As it happened, I was very interested in it. I was pleased to get that assignment.

But for a while, I had these two parallel tracks: travel books, in the broadest sense, and books that were based on library research. The travel books took off, particularly in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. That isn't at all to say I won't be doing other kinds of books or that I don't want to. I really kind of feel as if I've done some of the travel stuff as much as I can. I'd like to rest it for a while and go off and do something else.

Dave: Last week, I saw a list of the top twenty-five selling travel books at another store, and five of your books were included. I was joking with some friends that you're The Beatles of travel writers.

Bryson: That's very gratifying. Particularly in America, it's a very strange genre because it's only in the last few years that it's started to come to life again. You used to get fluky books that would do very well, Paul Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar and the occasional Bruce Chatwin book or something like that that would sell very well, but, as a genre, it really hasn't existed in America the way it has in the rest of the world.

I do sense that's changing. My guess is that all us baby boomers are reaching a point in our lives...we've made our money, the kids are nearly out of the home, finished with college. You get to be fifty, what do you think of doing? Easing off and traveling. I think that may be part of where the growth is coming from.

Dave: Are you working on something now?

Bryson: No, I'm not. Usually at this juncture I would be, but I just finished this damn thing. I printed it out on December 31st. I was terrified that the Y2K bug was going to wipe the whole thing out.

I'd assured the publisher that I'd get them a manuscript by the first week of January because they wanted to get it out very quickly. Usually, you turn in a manuscript and you don't hear from anyone for months. It's only months and months later that anyone approaches you and starts talking about book tours and such, by which time you've completely forgotten about that project and started to move on to the next one. This time, I gave them the manuscript and they started editing it. I had to respond to that, then ten minutes later, it seemed, the proofs were in. Then the schedule for the book tour came along.

I haven't had a chance to think coherently about what I want to do next. I have a couple ideas, but nothing very concrete. In any case, I'm pretty much on the road until Thanksgiving.

Dave: The book has only been out for a week or so. Are you still finding that A Walk in the Woods is the book everyone wants to ask you about?

Bryson: Oh, yeah. The one thing I hear all the time is, "I read your book." I suppose that's inevitable. But these days, the market is so tough that if you manage to write one book that more than a handful of people read, you've had more good luck than anybody can ever hope to have. So I don't resent the fact that A Walk in the Woods has overshadowed all my other stuff. At the same time, it's like having five children and one of them is really pretty while the others are all very plain looking. Everyone's always talking about the pretty one. I like the others as well.

Bill Bryson visited Powell's on June 15, 2000. Before his appearance at The First Congregational Church, Bryson stopped by the Powells.com Annex. It turns out he has a son applying to graduate school where I went to college, so we talked about that. Also, about a law passed in Quebec in the late eighties forbidding the use of English on storefront signs - you could post French and Chinese, or French and Spanish, or French and Lebanese, but you couldn't post French and English (much less English alone). Bryson's book, Mother Tongue, the one about the evolution of the English language in America and around the world, is the one that convinced me he could probably write informatively and with humor about anything. I mean, who ever heard of a Linguistics study with laughs on every page?