Down Under by Bill Bryson Page A

‘but I know they were after me.’ He looks as if he has been living rough. Smudges of dirt rim his face and one of his trouser legs is torn at the knee. ‘They always go for me,’ he says, earnest now, and puzzled. ‘It’s as if there’s some kind of conspiracy to get me. I can be just walking down the street, you know, minding my own business, and suddenly from out of nowhere they just come for me. It’s very unsettling.’ He shakes his head. ‘Is your gate unlocked?’
    You haven’t been listening to any of this because your hand has been moving almost imperceptibly towards the drawer containing the steak knives. As the question dawns on you, you find yourself giving a small, tight, almost involuntary nod.
    ‘I’ll just let myself out then. Sorry to have disturbed you.’At the gate he pauses. ‘Take it from me,’ he says, ‘you don’t ever want to go back in those woods alone. Something terrible could happen to you back there. I love your delphiniums by the way.’ He smiles in a way that freezes your marrow, and says: ‘Well, bye then.’
    And he is gone.
    Six weeks later you put the house on the market.

I
    When Australians get hold of a name that suits them they tend to stick with it in a big way. We can blame this unfortunate custom on Lachlan Macquarie, a Scotsman who was governor of the colony in the first part of the nineteenth century, and whose principal achievements were the building of the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains, the popularizing of Australia as a name (before him the whole country was indifferently referred to as either New South Wales or Botany Bay) and the world’s first nearly successful attempt to name every object on a continent after himself.
    You really cannot move in Australia without bumping into some reminder of his tenure. Run your eye over the map and you will find a Macquarie Harbour, Macquarie Island, Macquarie Marsh, Macquarie River, Macquarie Fields, Macquarie Pass, Macquarie Plains, Lake Macquarie, PortMacquarie, Mrs Macquarie’s Chair (a lookout point over Sydney Harbour), Macquarie’s Point and a Macquarie town. I always imagine him sitting at his desk, poring over maps and charts with a magnifying glass, and calling out from time to time to his first assistant: ‘Hae we no’ got a Macquarie Swamp yet, laddie? And look here at this wee copse. It has nae name. What shall we call it , do ye think?’
    And that’s just some of the Macquaries, by the way. Macquarie is also the name of a bank, a university, the national dictionary, a shopping centre, and one of Sydney’s principal streets. That’s not to mention the forty-seven other Roads, Avenues, Groves and Terraces in Sydney that, according to Jan Morris, are named for the man or his family. Nor have we touched on the Lachlan River, Lachlan Valley or any of the other first-name variations that sprang to his tireless mind.
    You wouldn’t suppose there would be much left after all that, but one of Macquarie’s successors as governor, Ralph Darling, managed to get his name all over the place too. In Sydney you will find a Darling Harbour, Darling Drive, Darling Island, Darling Point, Darlinghurst, and Darlington. Elsewhere Darling’s modest achievements are remembered in the Darling Downs and Darling Ranges, a slew of additional Darlingtons, and the important Darling River. What isn’t called Darling or Macquarie is generally called Hunter or Murray. It’s awfully confusing.
    Even when the names aren’t exactly the same, they are often very similar. There is a Cape York Peninsula in the far north and a Yorke Peninsula in the far south. Two of the leading explorers of the nineteenth century were called Sturt and Stuart and their names are all over the place, too, so that you have constantly to stop and think, generally atbusy intersections where an instant decision is required, ‘Now did I want the Sturt Highway or the Stuart Highway?’ Since both highways start at Adelaide and finish at