Down Under (book)
book by Bill Bryson
Down Under is the British title of a 2000 travelogue book about Australia written by best-selling travel writer Bill Bryson. In the United States and Canada it was published titled In a Sunburned Country, a title taken from the famous Australian poem, "My Country". It was also published as part of Walk About, which included Down Under and another of Bryson's books, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, in one volume.
Summary
Bill Bryson describes his travels by railway and car throughout Australia, his conversations with people in all walks of life about the history, geography, unusual plants and animals of the country, and his wry impressions of the life, culture and amenities (or lack thereof) in each locality.
In a style similar to his book A Walk in the Woods, or William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, Bryson's research enabled him to include many stories about Australia's 19th-century explorers and settlers who suffered extreme deprivations, as well as details about its natural resources, culture, and economy. His writings are intertwined with recurring humorous themes.
Synopsis
The book consists of three parts:
1. Into the Outback
The first part of the book mainly describes the journey taken by Bryson aboard the Indian Pacific from Sydney to Perth. He is accompanied on this journey by a young English photographer named Trevor Ray Hart. The author describes his experiences on the train, the places the train passes through on its way to Perth such as the Blue Mountains and White Cliffs.
“Down Under (book)” enters the record as book by Bill Bryson. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Down, book and Bill can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Down Under (book)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Down, book and Bill provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5302883. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Down Under (book)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.