Various Vignettes From Bill Bryson's "In A Sunburned Country"

Fun book!:

On my first visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. No trace of the poor man was ever seen again. This seemed doubly astounding to me - first that Australia could just lose a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me.

Strangely enough, I remembered when this happened, in my childhood, when I was ten years old. Those were the days when the local kids and ourselves were busily setting up territories, kingdoms, and protectorates, securing minerals and gems for trade and purchase in play-money currency, and even setting up hamlets made from lumber and assorted bricks in our respective back yards. The kids next door called their domain Great Britain; I called mine Winchester; and there were satellite domains as well, like the Desert (a strip of, well, desert).

Harold Holt's abrupt disappearance (with the usual speculation about shark attacks, riptides and the like) was so shocking I instantly dubbed a portion of a plot of land, adjacent to my own Winchester, as 'Holt', commemorating this terrible event.

Then, strange stuff just seems to happen:

In January [of 1997], according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.

It happens that at 11:03 p.m. local time on May 28, 1993, seismograph needles all over the Pacific region twitched and scribbled in response to a very large-scale disturbance near a place called Banjawarn Station in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia. Some long-distance truckers and prospectors, virtually the only people out in that lonely expanse, reported seeing a sudden flash in the sky and hearing or feeling the boom of a mighty but far-off explosion. One reported that a can of beer had danced off the table in his tent.

The problem was that there was no obvious explanation. The seismograph traces didn't fit the profile for an earthquake or mining explosion, and anyway the blast was 170 times more powerful than the most powerful mining explosion ever recorded in Western Australia. The shock was consistent with a large meteorite strike, but the impact would have blown a crater hundreds of feet in circumference, and no such crater could be found. The upshot is that scientists puzzled over the incident for a day or two, then filed it away as an unexplained curiosity — the sort of thing that presumably happens from time to time.

Then in 1995 Aum Shinrikyo gained sudden notoriety when it released extravagant quantities of the nerve gas sarin into the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve people. In the investigations that followed, it emerged that Aum's substantial holdings included a 500,000-acre desert property in Western Australia very near the site of the mystery event. There, authorities found a laboratory of unusual sophistication and focus, and evidence that cult members had been mining uranium. It separately emerged that Aum had recruited into its ranks two nuclear engineers from the former Soviet Union. The group's avowed aim was the destruction of the world, and it appears that the event in the desert may have been a dry run for blowing up Tokyo.

You take my point, of course. This is a country that loses a prime minister and that is so vast and empty that a band of amateur enthusiasts could conceivably set off the world's first nongovernmental atomic bomb on its mainland and almost four years would pass before anyone noticed.*

Clearly this is a place worth getting to know.

* Interestingly, no Australian newspapers seem to have picked up on this story and the New York Times never returned to it, so what happened in the desert remains a
mystery. Aum Shinrikyo sold its desert property in August 1994, fifteen months after the mysterious blast but seven months before it gained notoriety with its sarin
attack in the Tokyo subway system. If any investigating authority took the obvious step of measuring the area around Banjawarn Station for increased levels of radiation, it has not been reported.

Disturbing! But not as disturbing as some of the animals, like famous poisonous snakes, like the taipan:

At least the taipan is five feet long and thick as a man's wrist, which gives you a reasonable chance of spotting it. What I found far more appalling was the existence of lethal small snakes, like the little desert death adder. Just eight inches long, it lies lightly buried in soft sand so that you have no hope of seeing it before setting your weary butt on its head. Even more worrying was the Point Darwin sea snake, which is not much larger than an earthworm but packs venom enough if not to kill you at least to make you very late for dinner.

But all of these are as nothing compared with the delicate and diaphanous box jellyfish, the most poisonous creature on earth. We will hear more of the unspeakable horrors of this little bag of lethality when we get to the tropics, but let me offer here just one small story. In 1992 a young man in Cairns, ignoring all the warning signs, went swimming in the Pacific waters at a place called Holloways Beach. He swam and dove, taunting his friends on the beach for their prudent cowardice, and then began to scream with an inhuman sound. It is said that there is no pain to compare with it. The young man staggered from the water, covered in livid whiplike stripes wherever the jellyfish's tentacles had brushed across him, and collapsed in quivering shock. Soon afterward, emergency crews arrived, inflated him with morphine, and took him away for treatment. And here's the thing. Even unconscious and sedated, he was still screaming.

But then, there are the tantalizing mysteries still to be solved:

The difficulties are well illustrated, I think, by the uncertain fate of the oolacunta, or desert rat kangaroo. Nearly everything that is known about this interesting creature is owed to two men. The first was a nineteenth-century naturalist named John Gould, who studied and described the animal in 1843. It had, according to Gould, the shape and manner of a kangaroo but was only about the size of a rabbit. What particularly distinguished it was that it could move at very high speeds for unusually long distances. Since that one initial report, however the oolacunta had not been seen. Enter Hedley Herbert Finlayson.

Finlayson was a chemist by profession, but devoted much of his life to searching for rare native animals. In 1931 he led an expedition that traveled by horseback deep into the interior, to the perpetual furnace that is Sturt's Stony Desert. Upon arriving, Finlayson was surprised to discover that the little desert rat kangaroo, far from being on the verge of extinction or possibly gone altogether, was both visible and clearly thriving. The animal's speed and endurance were just as Gould had reported. Once when Finlayson and his colleagues gave chase on horseback a desert rat kangaroo ran twelve miles without pause through the searing heat of day, exhausting three horses in the process. Ounce for ounce, the little oolacunta may well have been the greatest runner (or bouncer, actually) the animal kingdom has ever produced. Returning to society, Finlayson reported his exciting find and naturalists and zoologists everywhere dutifully amended their texts to account for the desert rat kangaroo's rediscovery. Over the next three years, Finlayson made further expeditions, but in 1935 when he returned once more he was nonplussed, as you may imagine, to discover that the little desert rat kangaroo had quietly vanished - as utterly as it had after Gould's single sighting in 1843. It hasn't been seen since.