Down Under

US: Transworld Publishers Ltd, 2001. Paperback. Good. It was as if I had privately discovered life on another planet, or a parall el universe where life was at once recognizably similar but entirely differ ent. I can't tell you how exciting it was. Insofar as I had accumulated my expectations of Australia at all in the intervening years, I had thought of it as a kind of alternative southern California, a place of constant sunsh ine and the cheerful vapidity of a beach lifestyle, but with a slightly Bri tish bent - a sort of Baywatch with cricket...' Of course, what greeted Bil l Bryson was something rather different. Australia is a country that exists on a vast scale. It is the world's sixth largest country and its largest i sland. It is the only island that is also a continent and the only continen t that is also a country. It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desicca ted, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still it teems with life - a large proportion of it quite deadly. In fa ct, Australia has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way than an ywhere else.