“In the 1850s the Philosophical Institute of Victoria decided to promote an expedition to find a way through the ‘ghastly blank,’ as the interior was poetically known.” We had heard of one shopkeeper who, upon being asked by a smiling visitor from Sydney where the fish were biting, stared at the man incredulously for a long moment and replied, ‘In the fucking river, mate, where do you think?'” “Between the merciless sun and the isolation, outback people are not always the most gifted of communicators.

(Only Antartctica is more hostile to life.) This is a place so inert that even the soil is, technically speaking, a fossil.” Australia is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile, and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents. More than this, it exists in an abundance that seems incompatible with the harshness of the environment. Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else. “In short, there was no place in the world like it. It’s a bizarre but true contradiction central to the culture of Australia, and I found this to be an enjoyable and informative guide to the country the month I was there.

Bryson captures the laid-back easy living it’s surprisingly easy to slip into amid the unforgivingly severe environment.

Truly, Oz is a place of mind-bending facts at every turn. It is a wry recounting of a long visit to this “preposterously outsized country,” with a lot of fascinating geographical, political, ecological and historical details that those who haven’t visited may find difficult to believe. I’d heard good things about Bryson’s humorous travel writing for years and bought many of his books as gifts, but this was the first I read – while in Australia.

In a sunburned country by bill bryson