Barry Humphries, in his Dame Edna Everage guise, used to have a set piece in his/her live shows. It consisted of slides showing a series of headlines and cuttings from newspapers flashed up on a screen on stage. All were of the "Giant echidna savages town" variety, and I believe (with the exception of that one) they were all genuine, reporting the fatalities and injuries caused to the populace by Australia's myriad dangerous wildlife. Funnel-web spiders, sharks, box jellyfish, snakes of various descriptions, but all deadly, all the scares and stories of anguish, were flashed up, to the mounting mirth of the audience. So ridiculous, they just couldn't be for real!
But in fact they were, as has been recounted so often in so many books and films both before and after Dame Edna's compilation. So it is a bit of a pity that Bill Bryson emphasises this tired old theme in his latest volume of wide-eyed tourist experience. As usual his blend of self-deprecation and hyperbole is very amusing, but initially a lot of the material has the ring of familiarity from a hundred guide books, volumes of history, magazine articles, BBC travel shows, and books by other people without perhaps the wit of Mr B.
As ever, Bryson is at his best when being funny about himself, or the foibles of others. His description of how he fell asleep when being driven around Sydney by a kindly guide, with guide's wife and family, could make you laugh out loud. Likewise his story of the elderly couple he meets, initially at a fogbound lookout point in New South Wales, and subsequently at other spots, is beautifully observed. But sometimes there is a whiff of the character in television's Fast Show with the multi-coloured check shirt and the red curls, who never stops wisecracking and spoofing, to the point of inviting homicide. When Bryson strains so hard the suspicion is that he is padding furiously and compensating for some rather thin material.
Is there no other introductory comment to make about Australia except that it is huge, people are cheerfully laconic, and most people outside it never know who the prime minister is? Or look at it this way: would there be nothing to say about Ireland except that it rains a lot, people often display an inverted logic, and there are a lot of pubs? Bryson is not alone in his lack of originality: if I see one more TV documentary which shows the Barrier Reef, Ayers Rock and a cappuccino bar in Melbourne as the Australian experience in toto I will boomerang half way across the rooftops of Dublin in frustration.
It doesn't have to be this way. Geoffrey Moorhouse wrote a fine book about Sydney which was published last year. W.G Sebald writes amazingly original books about his travels. Bryson shows flashes of this, as in his section about the delights of reading local papers in strange countries: "I can think of nothing more exciting - certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee - than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about . . . There is something about all this that feels privileged, almost illicit, like going through a stranger's drawers. Where else can you get this much pleasure for a trifling handful of coins?" He describes fondly a libel trial which was taking up much newsprint during his visit, over a book containing scurrilous and ultimately groundless allegations about sexual misconduct of leading citizens. Bryson shares his delight in the happy coincidence that the two main characters in this saga were government ministers named Abbott and Costello.
Abandoning a few quibbles, there is a lot to enjoy in Down Under, for both those who are familiar with Australia and those who know only it is south of Hong Kong. Bryson, after his comic observations on his homeland, the US, and his adopted home, Britain, as well as several other quasi-travel books, is a practised hand at this sort of thing. He won me over at the point where he gave his opinion of Australia's current prime minister. What Bryson has perceived well is the personal charisma of John Winston Howard. A career politician of formidable dullness, he is summed up thus by Bryson: "Imagine a very committed funeral home director - someone whose burning ambition from the age of 11 was to be a funeral home director, whose proudest achievement in adulthood was to be elected president of the Queanbeyan and District Funeral Home Directors Association - then halve his personality and halve it again, and you have pretty well got John Howard." Sure it would make you weep with gratitude for Bertie.
Bryson is, however, fascinated by an earlier Australian prime minister - at least in the manner of his passing. December 17th, 1967, might not mean much, unless your marriage was begun or ended on that day, or you found out there was no Santa. It is burnt into the brain of anyone old enough to remember the news flash: Harold Holt, genial, white-haired and prime minister for the past two years, had disappeared while swimming at wildly dangerous Cheviot Beach in Victoria.
One prime minister who drowns while surfing (and Bryson throws practical light on the vexed question of why Holt's body was never found) makes up a lot for a prime minister who can put an audience to sleep on sight. And Bryson revels in that wonderful tribute to the vanished surfie PM: the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool in suburban Melbourne.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist