Down Under by Bill Bryson Page B

places 3,994 kilometres apart, this can make a difference, believe me.
    I was thinking about all this – the confusion of place names and monuments to Lachlan Macquarie – the following morning because I spent much of it in the grip of the first while in pursuit of the second. I was in a rental car, you see, trying to find my way out of the endless, bewildering sprawl of Sydney. According to the local telephone directory, there are 784 suburbs and other named districts in the city, and I believe I passed through every one of them as I sought in vain for a corner of Australia not covered by bungalows. Some neighbourhoods I visited twice, at opposite ends of the morning. For a time I thought about just abandoning the car at the kerb in Parramatta – I rather liked the name and people were beginning to wave to me familiarly – but eventually I shot out of the city, like a spat bug, pleased to find myself on the correct heading for Lithgow, Bathurst and points beyond, and filled with that sense of giddy delight that comes with finding yourself at large in a new and unknown continent.
    My intention over the next couple of weeks was to wander through what I think of as Civilized Australia – the lower right-hand corner of the country, extending from Brisbane in the north to Adelaide in the south and west. This area covers perhaps 5 per cent of the nation’s land surface but contains 80 per cent of its people and nearly all its important cities (specifically Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide). In the whole of the vast continent this is pretty much the only part that isconventionally habitable. Because of its curving shape, it is sometimes called the Boomerang Coast, though in fact my interest was largely internal. I was headed in the first instance for Canberra, the nation’s interesting, parklike and curiously much scorned capital; thence I would cross 800 miles of lonely interior to distant Adelaide before finally fetching up, dusty but ever indomitable, in Melbourne, where I was to meet some old friends who would hose me down and take me off for a long-promised tour of the snake-infested, little-visited but gorgeously rewarding Victorian bush. There was much to see along the way. I was very excited.
    But first I had to make my way through the Blue Mountains, the scenic and long-impassable hills lying just to Sydney’s west. On approach the Blue Mountains don’t look terribly challenging; they rise to no great height and everywhere wear a softening cloak of green. But in fact they are rent with treacherous gorges and bouldered canyons, some with walls rising sheer hundreds of feet, and that lovely growth proves on closer inspection to be of an unusually tangled and obscuring nature. For the first quarter of a century of European occupation, the Blue Mountains stood as an impenetrable barrier to expansion. Expeditions tried repeatedly to find a way through but were always turned back. Even if progress could be gained through the lacerating undergrowth, it was nearly impossible to maintain one’s bearings amid the wandering gorges. Watkin Tench, a leader of one party, reported with understandable exasperation how he and his men struggled for hours to find a route to the top of one impossibly taxing defile, only to discover when they attained the summit that they were exactly opposite where they expected to be.
    Finally, in 1813, three men, Gregory Blaxland, William Charles Wentworth and William Lawson, broke through – exhausted, tattered and ‘ill with Bowel Complaints’, as Wentworth glumly noted, then and on any occasion that anyone would listen for the rest of his long life. It had taken them eighteen days, but as they stepped onto the airy heights of Mount York they were rewarded with a view of pastoral splendour never before seen by European eyes. Below them, for as far as the gaze could reach, stretched a sunny, golden Eden, a continent of grass – enough, it seemed, to support a population of