Travel author Bill Bryson unravels the mystery of the human body
Former journalist Bill Bryson is known the world over for his unique and laugh-out-loud funny travel books. But don’t ask him if he knows what Australia’s Prime Minister looks like because he’s the first to admit he can’t keep up with our political antics.
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In the opening line of his hilarious 2000 travelogue Down Under, Bill Bryson admits he can’t remember who the Australian prime minister of the day is.
Almost 20 years later, the American-born, British-residing travel writer can name Scott Morrison as the current inhabitant of The Lodge, but that’s where his knowledge of our 30th PM ends.
“I don’t know a thing about him,” he laughs.
“It’s really amazing, I wouldn’t recognise him if he came up and punched me in the face. It’s because you’ve got so many these days.”
Bryson, 67, believes his confusion is our own fault.
“It used to be I’d come to Australia and it would be John Howard — you could kind of count on that for years — I’d go away and come back four years later and it was still John Howard,” he tells The Sunday Telegraph’s Insider.
“There was something slightly reassuring about having that stability and now every time I pick up a newspaper you’ve got a new one.”
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The former journalist is known the world over for his unique and laugh-out-loud funny travel books. He has documented his travels around his home country in books such as The Lost Continent: Travels In Small Town America, Made In America and A Walk In The Woods (made into a 2015 movie starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte), and across his adopted country in Notes From A Small Island and its follow-up The Road To Little Dribbling: More Notes From A Small Island. Bryson also has Europe, Africa and Australia covered.
But after a string of best-selling travel books, he turned his attention to science. It’s a subject the author failed miserably at during his schooling in 1960s Des Moines, Iowa, a fact he puts down to the way he was taught.
“I always had these feelings that I was a failure with science because I was terrible in it at school and I think the entire reason for that was that science was taught in such a dull, unimaginative way in America in the 1960s,” he says.
“It was all about teachers writing equations on blackboards and that just lost me.”
Every time the teacher would turn around to continue writing in chalk, the young Bryson would tune out and he struggled with the heavy emphasis on maths.
He finished school and started writing, first as a business journalist and then branching out on his own to write his books. But the mysteries of science always stayed with him. As he gold older, he started looking for answers.
“I had this conviction that there must be some level at which even I could engage with science without having to do all these theories and mathematics,” he says.
“Science explains everything, how we got here and where we’re going.”
And so he set about writing A Short History Of Nearly Everything — an exploration of science from the Big Bang theory to mankind’s role in the increasing ferocity of natural disasters, and everything in between.
The book is written in laymen’s terms and was lauded for its accuracy. At the time it was published, one top scientist remarked that the book was “annoyingly free of mistakes”.
Talking to leader of the scientific community and rediscovering science was eye-opening for Bryson.
“The experience I had over and over again is ‘why didn’t anyone teach me this in school?’ ” he says.
“If I had known these things were this interesting I would have paid attention.”
Bryson is convinced science teachers have improved markedly since his time in school because two of his sons — he has four grown children — became fascinated by the subject. One studied medicine and the other forensic science.
Of the doctor he says: “He was just captivated by the human body and how it works in a way that I wouldn’t be, of the technical aspects of how cells work and how the human body functions — he was absolutely smitten with that.”
The son who studied forensics was “captivated by how science works out things like how long has passed since somebody died or what things killed them”, but decided against staying in the field, instead heading back to his father’s homeland and joining the ski patrol in Vail, Colorado.
“He absolutely loves it,” Bryson says.
And now curiosity has struck again, with the author turning his attention to the human body.
His new book The Body: A Guide For Occupants comes out in October.
“It’s based on this idea that I’ve spent all of my life living in this bag of bones and flesh that is my body and I didn’t really understand how it worked,” he says.
“What I found is that the human body is really quite an amazing construction.”
Before the book hits shelves, Bryson will be back in Australia doing a series of talks around the country on this very topic. Pairing up with comedian and presenter Julia Zemiro, he will take audiences through a little bit of everything — his travels, his books and what he’s learned about science and the body.
Despite his vast experience, getting up in front of a huge room of people still makes Bryson sweat a little.
“It’s a genuinely terrifying experience to come on to a stage and see a thousand people but you do discover that they’re on your side,” he says.
“They paid money not because they want to come and heckle you, they paid money because they’re hoping to have a nice time and they really want you to do well.”
* Bill Bryson — Observations On Life And The Human Body shows in Sydney on Friday, September 6 at the ICC in Darling Harbour. For tickets, phone 132 849 or go to ticketek.com.au
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