Chapters 4-6 Summary and Analysis

Early European explorers occasionally passed by and set foot on Australia, thinking it another large island in the Indies, perhaps the size of New Guinea. Among its early names was New Holland, but it was never equated with the fabled southern continent until the late eighteenth century. Lieutenant James Cook and the HMS Endeavor followed the shoreline of Australia for eighteen hundred miles in 1770. On his subsequent voyage, he took botanist Joseph Banks, who collected over thirty thousand specimens of plants and small animals from the new continent. On January 26. 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip arrived in Australia with a colony of mostly petty criminals, anchoring in the harbor now known as Circular Quay.

Bryson's next trip to Australia finds him standing at Circular Quay in Sydney. He reflects on the modern city that has developed at the sight of the...