Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country

Product Information

Bill Bryson stepping down as Chancellor". Durham University. 20 September 2010 . Retrieved 4 July 2011. Bill Bryson Wins Prestigious Golden Eagle Award". owpg.org.uk. Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild. 26 August 2011. Archived from the original on 9 August 2016 . Retrieved 21 July 2016.

His trademark commentary on each place he visits is delightful.Particularly enjoyed his humorous description of Canberra,the capital,where I lived.

Honors and Awards Received by Bill Bryson

But even allowing for all this, our neglect of Australian affairs is curious. As you might expect, this is particularly noticeable when you are resident in America. Just before I set off on this trip I went to my local library in New Hampshire and looked up Australia in the New York Times Index to see how much it had engaged attention in my own country in recent years. I began with the 1997 volume for no other reason than that it was open on the table. In that year, across the full range of possible interests - politics, sport, travel, the coming Olympics in Sydney, food and wine, the arts, obituaries and so on - the New York Times ran 20 articles that were predominantly on or about Australian affairs. There are heaps of information about the geology, the animal life, the plants and insects, the history, the statistics, the folklore, etc., etc. AND the many dangers: taipan snakes, funnel web spiders, box-jellyfish, crocs, sharks, and rip currents - they're all out to get you. The inhospitable deserts, the beautiful beaches, the huge distances; Bill Bryson gives you a feeling of what it's all like, and he's SPOT ON.

The country is so huge and varied that comprehending all the disparate elements as representative of one cohesive nation is very difficult. Bill Bryson - Honorary Degree". University of Leicester. 24 June 2009. Archived from the original on 10 November 2021 – via YouTube. Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Lowa. His father was William Bryson and his mother, Agnes Mary was of Irish origin or descent. He also has a sister named Mary Jane Elizabeth and an elder brother named Michael. In 2006 Bryson was blessed to publish another book called The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. This book emphasized greatly on a humorous-account of his childhood years when he was in Des Moines. Perhaps due to his journalistic training, Bryson has a fascination for all things deadly. Just as in A Short History of Nearly Everything, where he includes several ways that humanity might actually be made extinct, so here Bryson lets his taste for the macabre run rampant with Australia’s impressive collection of dangerous critters. Plentiful and poisonous snakes, spiders, and jellyfish; big and hungry sharks and crocodiles; and even some malicious species of plants—it seems that Australia is not a welcoming environment. Australia’s weather is not any better, as Bryson makes clear with his many stories of the explorers who attempted to brave Australia’s hot and empty innards—many of them, as Bryson gleefully points out, woefully and hilariously unprepared. That is of course the thing about Australia- that there is such a lot to find in it, but such a lot of it to find it in."A final comment...I had an ENORMOUS issue with the disrespect Bill Bryson showed to the Aboriginal nation. He portrated them as brainless victms moving about on the peripheral of white society. A large portion of the aboriginal people are proud and very aware if who they are and their history. Bryson buys into the aboriginal issue half heartedly basing his opinions on a few points given him by second or third hand. This author had his first visit to Britain in the year 1973 and this was during his tour in Europe. He decided to stay there after landing a job in a psychiatric/mental hospital that is now called the defunct Holloway-Sanatorium in the Virginia Water, Surrey. It is in the same hospital that Bryson met with a nurse named Cynthia Billen. He decided to marry her and then they later transferred to the United States in 1975 so that Bryson would continue and complete his University degree. No one knows, incidentally, why Australia’s spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.” Bill Bryson Seeing Further – The Story of Science and the Royal Society". The Royal Society. 28 January 2010 . Retrieved 5 December 2022.

Here are his closing words... what he wants us to take from the book if nothing else.... No sarcasm this time. In 2005, Bryson was appointed chancellor of Durham University, [23] succeeding the late Sir Peter Ustinov. [31] He had praised Durham as "a perfect little city" in Notes from a Small Island. I love Australia, even though I have never been there. It has amazing wilderness and is the setting of beautiful movies; it exports talented actors, actresses and directors; it has that Great Barrier Reef thingy, which is apparently so wonderful that is is a Natural Wonder of the World; and it is home to the stunning Sydney Opera House. And oh yeah, Aussies gave us UGGs. So we have a lot to thank them for. Bill Bryson receives honorary doctorate". King's College London. 14 November 2012. Bill Bryson OBE: the UK's highest-selling author of non-fiction, acclaimed as a science communicator, historian and man of letters.Bryson, Bill (3 July 2014). "Interview: Bill Bryson". nursinginpractice.com. Interviewed by Jenny Chou. Cogora Ltd. With the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Bill Bryson Prize for Science Communication was established in 2005. [32] The competition engages students from around the world in explaining science to non-experts. As part of its 350th anniversary celebrations in 2010 the Royal Society commissioned Bryson to edit a collection of essays by scientists and science writers about the history of science and the Royal Society over the previous three and a half centuries entitled Seeing Further. [33] [34] All in all The Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson intersperses everything you need to know about Australia. Along with bizarre facts and hilarious accounts with natives/fellow travellers. This book is equally appealing for someone planning to visit Australia as it is for those who have already been there (survived that). The rest of the world kind of forgets about Australia most of the time, except for New Year's Eve or whenever there's reason to show fireworks over the Sydney Opera House.