Down under

Bill Bryson

ISBN : 0552210269
Éditeur : Transworld

Note moyenne : 3.6/5 (sur 5 notes) Ajouter à mes livres

It is the driest, flattest, hottest, most infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents and still Australia teems with life- a large portion of it quite deadly. In fact, Australia has more things that can kill you in a very nasty way than anywher... > voir plus

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Livres 5.00/5
Par iarsenea, le 25 septembre 2010
Que dire de plus que j'ai adoré ? Comme d'habitude, j'ai appris une tonne de choses, j'ai souri, j'ai ri, et j'ai tourné chaque page dans une sorte de transe, ne pouvant plus attendre de découvrir ce qui se passerait après.
On sent tout l'amour, toute l'admiration, et aussi toute la crainte que l'Australie suscite en Bill Bryson. Il ne cesse d'en vanter ses qualités, tout comme sa dangerosité et sa grandeur. Mais ne vous attendez pas qu'à entendre du positif. Oh non ! Bryson déteste les longues heures de route ennuyeuses et Canberra, la capitale du pays.
En tout cas, ce qui est certain, c'est qu'après avoir lu son livre, vous voudrez vous ruer à l'aéroport pour partir à destination de l'Australie dans les plus brefs délais !

Lien : http://lecturesdisabelle.blogspot.com/2010/09/down-under-vf-nos-vois..
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Citations et extraits

Par iarsenea, le 09 septembre 2011

Largely for these reasons no one knows how many Aborigines were in Australia when Britons first settled it. The best estimates suggest that at the beginning of occupation the Aboriginal population was about 300,000, though possibly as high as a million. What is certain is that in the first century of settlement those numbers fell catastrophically. By the end of the nineteenth century the number of Aborigines was probably no more than 50,000 or 60,000. Most of this decline, it must be said, was inadvertant. Aborigines had almost no resistance to European diseases : smallpox, pleurisy, syphilis, even chickenpox and the milder forms of influenza often cut swathes through the native populations. But where Aborigines remained, they were sometimes treated in the most heartless and wanton manner.
In Taming the Great South Land, William J. Lines details examples of the most appalling cruelty by settlers towards the natives- of Aborigines butchered for dog food; of an Aboriginal woman forced to watch her husband killed, and then made to wear his decapitated head around her neck; of another chased up a tree and tormented from below with rifle shots.[...] What is perhaps most shocking is how casually much of this was done, and at levels of the society. In an 1839 history of Tasmania, written by a visitor named Melville, the author relates how he went out one day with a ' respectacle young gentleman ' to hunt kangaroos. As they rounded a bend, the young gentleman spied a form of crouched in hidind behind a fallen tree. Stepping over to investigate and ' finding it only to be a native ' , the appalled Melville wrote, the gentleman lifted the muzzle to the native's breast and ' shot him dead on the spot. '
Such behaviour was never virtually treated as a crime- indeed was sometimes officially countenanced. In 1805, the acting judge-advocate for New South Wales, the most senior judicial figure in the land, declared that Aborigines had not the discipline or mental capacity for courtroom proceedings; rather than plague the courts with their grievances, settlers were instructed to track down the offending natives and ' inflict such punishment as they may merit '- as open an invitation to genocide as can be found in English Law. Fifteen years later our old friend Lachlan Macquarie authorized soldiers to shoot any group of Aborigines greater than six in number, even if unarmed and entirely innocent of purpose, even if the number included women and children.
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Par iarsenea, le 09 septembre 2011

Although inland Australia has never been exactly verdant, much of the marginal land once experiences periods of relative lushness, sometimes lasting years, occasionally lasting decades, and it enjoyed a natural resiliency that let it spring back after droughts. Then in 1859 a man named Thomas Austin, a landowner in Winchelsea, Victoria, a little south of where I was now, made a big mistake. He imported twenty-four wild rabbits from England and released them into the bush for sport. It is hardly a novel observation that rabbits breed with a certain keenness. Within a couple of years they had entirely overrun Austin's property and were spreading into neighbouring districts. Fifty million years of isolation had left Australia without a single predator able even to recognize rabbits, much less dine off them, and so they proliferated amazingly.
[...]
The rabbits ate so much of everything that sheep and other livestock were forced to extend both their range and their diet, punishing yet wider expanses. As sheep yields fell, farmers perversely compensated by increasing stocking levels, adding to the general devastation.
The problem would have been acute enough, but in the 1890's, after forty unusually green years, Australia fell into a murderous, decade-long drought - the worst in its recorded history. [...]
The rabbits, meanwhile, hopped on. By the time science finally came up with a solution, almost a century had passed since Thomas Austin tipped his twenty-four bunnies out of the bag. The weapon deployed against the rabbits was a miracle virus from South America called myxomatosis. Harmless to humans and other animals, it was phenomenally devastating to rabbits, with a mortality rate of 99.9 per cent. Almost at once the countryside filled with twitching, stumbling, very sick rabbits and then with tens of millions of little corpses. Although just one rabbit in a thousand survived, those few that did were naturally resistant to myxomatosis, and it was resistant genes that they passed on when they began to breed again. It took a while for things to get rolling, but today Australia's rabbit numbers are back up to 300 million and climbing fast.
At all events, the damage of the landscape, much of it irreversible, had already been done. And all so some clown could have something to pot at from his veranda.
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Par iarsenea, le 09 septembre 2011

'So it wasn't a good idea for Harold Holt to go swimming out there ?'
' Well, I wouldn't go swimming out there' he replied. ' You know, there's about a hundred shipwrecks just along there.' He indicated an absurdely modest stretch of shoreline in the vicinity of Cheviot and the Rip. ' I think you can take it as read that when you've got a stretch of sea that sinks a hundred ships, it's probably not the most placid environment for a dip, you know ? '
' Isn't it odd that they never found his body ? '
' No. ' That was said without hesitation.
' Really ? ' I don't understand the dynamics of the sea, but if driftwood and Coke cans are anything to go by, then I thought most buoyant objects ended up on a beach somewhere.
' Not to be too blunt about it, if you die out there, it doesn't take too long to become part of the food chain. '
' Ah. '
' The thing you've got to remember, ' he added with a sudden thoughful air, ' is that the only thing unusual about the Harold Holt drowning was that he was Prime Minister when it happened. If it hadn't been for that the whole thing would have been completely forgotten. Mind you, it's pretty well forgotten anyway. '
' So you don't get a lot of people coming here in a kind of pilgrimage ? '
' No, not at all. Most people barely remember it. A lot of people under thirty have never even heard of it. '
He broke off to issue tickets to some new arrivals and drifted away to look at the displays of seagrasses and life in rockpools. But as I was leaving he called to me with an afterthought. ' They built a memorial to him in Melbourne, ' he said. ' Know what it was ? '
I indicated that I had no idea.
He grinned very slightly. ' A municipal swimming pool. '
' Seriously ? '
His grin broadened, but the nod was sincere.
' This is a terrific country, ' I said.
' Yeah, ' he agreed happily. ' It is, you know '.
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Par iarsenea, le 15 septembre 2010

Perharps it was the oxygen deprivation, but I was rather lost in my own world when Deirdre grabbed my arm just before I was about to go under again and said in a husky tone: "Look out ! There's a bluey".
Glenn took on an immediate expression of alarm. " Where ?"
"What's a bluey ?" I asked, appalled to discover that there was some additional danger I hadn't been told about.
"A bluebottle, " she explained and pointed to a small jellyfish of the type (as I later learned from browsing through a fat book titled, if I recall, Things That Will Kill You Horridly in Australia: Volume 19) known elsewhere as a Portuguese man-of-war. I squinted at it as it drifted past. It looked unprepossessing, like a blue condom with strings attached.
"Is it dangerous?" I asked.
Now before we hear Deirdre's response to me as I stood there, vulnerable and abraded, shivering, nearly naked and half drowned, let me just quote from her subsequent article in the Herald:

«While photographers shoots, Bryson and boogie board are dragged 40 metres down the beach in a rip. The shore rip runs south to north, unlike the rip further out which runs from north to south. Bryson doesn't know this. He didn't read the warning sign on the beach. Nor does he know about the blubottle being blown in his direction- now less than a metre away- a swollen stinger that could give him 20 minutes of agony and, if he's unlucky, an unsightly allergy reaction to carry on his torso for life.

"Dangerous? No, " Deirdre replied now as we stood gawping at the bluebottle. " But don't brush against it."
"Why not ?"
"Might be a bit uncomfortable".
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Par iarsenea, le 15 septembre 2010

Australia is the world's sixth largest country and its largest island. It is the only island that is also a continent, and the only continent that is also a country. It was the first continent conquered from the sea, and the last. It is the only nation that began as a prison.
It is the home of the largest living thing on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, and of the most famous and striking monolith, Ayers Rock (or Uluru to use its now official, more respectful Aboriginal name). It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures- the funnel-web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick and stonefish- are the most lethal of their type in the world. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. Pick up an innocuous coneshell from a Queensland beach, as innocent tourists are all too wont to do, and you will discover that the little fellow inside is not just astoundingly swift and testy,but exceedingly venomous. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible current, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. It's a tough place.
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