Keep Australia On Your Left: A True Story of an Attempt to Circumnavigate Australia by Kayak [Hardcover]

Eric Stiller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 16, 2000

"You mad bastards. You mad bloody bastards."

The challenge? Paddle a kayak around Australia. As Eric Stiller and Tony Brown would discover, the attempt would be a fascinating, frustrating, maddening, and at times hilarious crawl around what many consider the most beautiful but treacherous coastline in the world. Swamped by high waves and rain, hampered by faulty technology, blown off course, baked by a broiling sun or chilled by sub-zero temperatures, battling loneliness and exhaustion--and sometimes each other--it would be the most demanding emotional and physical challenge either had ever attempted. In short, it was the adventure of a lifetime! Keep Australia on Your Left is a story of friendship forged--and sustained--under demanding circumstances. It is also the personal portrait of Eric Stiller's journey around a continent...and into himself..

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It sounds like a pilot for a new Fox network live broadcast: a self-searching Manhattan kayak salesman teams up with a rowdy Australian male model to circumnavigate Australia by kayak. Thankfully, though, chest beating and contrived conflict are absent in Eric Stiller's true account of his attempt to kayak the 10,000 miles around Australia with Aussie Tony Brown. What we get instead is a look at the tedium, death-defying stamina, and hilarious blunderings of two men with little experience to prepare them for their chosen expedition. "The Australian coastline is a nightmare of tightly coiled inlets and rocky coves and sheer rock cliff faces and bays as huge and forbidding as Saharan deserts," Stiller muses while he kicks off his training with Brown by paddling around Manhattan. Raised in a family that sells Klepper kayaks, the German-made folding expedition kayaks known for their resilience in violent conditions, Stiller is an expert on the technical details of the equipment. He is not, he admits, accustomed to spending more than three months in a 17-foot-long kayak with anyone, much less Brown, a natural athlete filled with joie de vivre whose navigational strategy is simply, "Just keep Australia on your left, mate."

The curious pair encounters an impressive variety of harrowing sea conditions. The first month is a daily battle against capsizing during beach landings amid Australia's legendary skyscraper-high waves. Marathon paddling sessions through maddening back-eddies rip open their hands and scrape their torsos. The inhospitable Tasman Sea is rife with deadly creatures, including crocodiles, sharks, and sea wasps, a toxic jellyfish with tentacles several meters long. At one point the two must cross the Gulf of Carpenteria, the most arduous leg of the trip, requiring seven days on the water with no land in sight. For all their travails, however, there is relief in the form of friendly hosts (nearly everyone they meet is happy to have a smelly kayak team at the dinner table), striking scenery, wild nights in isolated cities, and the personal reckoning that comes with an effort of this magnitude. --Lolly Merrell

From Publishers Weekly

Idea meets action in this remarkable, though overlong, story of an attempt to paddle around Australia in a two-man kayak. Although ostensibly incompatible teammates, professional New York fitness trainer Stiller and his Australian companion, fashion model Tony Brown, seize the challenge of moving from dream to reality and discover the vertiginous abyss that often separates the two. In their grueling expedition around what many consider one of the most beautiful and treacherous coastlines on the planet, Stiller and Brown are blasted by 12-foot waves, pelted and waterlogged by heavy rain, roasted by the glaring and ubiquitous sun, assailed by sharks, blown off course and benumbed by dank, frigid temperatures. Loneliness, exhaustion, frustration and bickering are finally compounded by the ultimate realization that no amount of rigorous training could have prepared them for this endeavor. Stiller and Brown undergo the most demanding emotional and physical experience of their lives. More than 20 years of kayaking experience shine through in Stiller's myriad detailed, technical descriptions of the physical and mental priming needed for the journey and of the unpredictable imbroglios that arise when maneuvering a two-man kayak on rough seas. However, at times Stiller's hyped descriptions of pinnacle moments and near-calamitous situations fall short of their intended impact. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Forge; First Edition edition (July 16, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312874588
• ISBN-13: 978-0312874582
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #812,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a depressing account of a great achievement, April 19, 2005

By 

Laptantidel Latuda (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Keep Australia On Your Left: A True Story of an Attempt to Circumnavigate Australia by Kayak (Paperback)

I got this one for my birthday and started reading it with great enthusiasm. Few people have attempted to circumnavigate Australia in a kayak and except of Paul Caffyn no one succeeded so far. Therefore, Eric Stiller (the author) and Tony Brown (his paddle partner) are in good company with their failed attempt to complete the circumnavigation. This book is Eric's account of five months of paddling over 3500 miles from Sydney along Oz's east and north coasts to Darwin.

Paddling almost half the way around Australia in a Klepper foldable boat in five months is a great adventure. It must have been quite an amazing journey along one of the worlds most beatiful shorelines. However, there is hardly any of this aspect in the book. Instead you'll get bored of Eric's dwelling in endless complaints about his sore butt, the always higher-than-expected swell, and his ever ongoing struggles with Tony. The only thing more disappointing than Eric's whining about all the evil surrounding him is the stretch of lousy b/w pictures (on all of which the water is as flat as a mirror, so there must have been a couple of good days at least).

The title refers to Tony's rejection of Eric's request to buy charts for the trip. Instead, he recommends, to simply "keep Oz on the left". I would not want to go on a week-long trip with a guy as naive as that. Tony's naive attitude and Erics subordination to Tony's moods borders on stupidity more often than not. Day after day the two get up too late to make their distance in daylight, they have to make a dangerous landing at some beach they can hardly see in the dark, they find some food and exhaustedly fall asleep, which makes them get up too late the next morning and so on. They once take off in a storm out of a "cabin-fever" mood and almost die that day, triggering a coast guard search. A long list of misjudgements and rants of self-pity later, the duo almost get themselves killed in the gulf of carpentaria and, to the big relief of the reader, give up their journey shortly thereafter.

Eric does not seem to really enjoy any of this whole trip - everything always seems to be worse than expected. He doesn't seem to live the journey, he seems to long for it to end before it even started. The book reads as if all this was pushed onto him, and this way it ends up to be a depressing account of quite a tremendous achievement. Unfortunately, Eric does not seem to understand anything of what has happened. Instead of writing a pity-party of a book like this, he should fall down on his knees and thank his god for the fact, that he pulled his sorry butt out of this alive.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great tale, July 18, 2001

By 

Rohan Gibbs (Charlotte, NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Keep Australia On Your Left: A True Story of an Attempt to Circumnavigate Australia by Kayak (Hardcover)

As an Australian I loved the way the author described the characters in this book. They all seemed to be giving, friendly folk who saw this "Epic" trip as a cool thing to do but nothing to get too excited about. It made me a little homesick. Eric Stiller writes with a style that slowly hooks you and then gently pulls you along for a wild ride without getting too worked up. He almost gets too emotional and then he'll break away just in time, especially with regards to a girlfriend back in the states. While some will say Eric was a bit of a whinger, and to some degree he was, I noted with interest that it was Eric who did the majority of planning before and during the trip and that Tony while having a she'll be right mate atttitude also came accoss as a guy who was used to having the mundane things done for him by someone else and that he was there for the adventure. I really enjoyed this book and I have never been in a kayak before. Highly recommended to those like myself who enjoy all travel narratives.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You Thought Backpacking in Europe w/ Your Roommate was Tough, May 23, 2001

By 

Kyle Okimoto (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Keep Australia On Your Left: A True Story of an Attempt to Circumnavigate Australia by Kayak (Hardcover)

Keep Australia on Your Left is a very interesting book on a number of accounts. People who travel with friends in foreign lands know the inevitable strains that traveling in unfamilar territory places on a relationship. Couple that with the harrowing experiences that Eric and Tony encounter daily in their kayak, Southern Cross, and you've got an adventure that is not only taxing on the body, but also the psyche.

To me, a non-kayaker, the fact that the trip was made in a kayak is irrelevant. It is interesting because it is about traveling in a foreign land, travelers finding themselves in dangerous circumstances, and the strain of travelers extracting an irreparable toll on the travelers' relationship.

Unlike a couple of my fellow reviewers, I do not know Eric Stiller. But based solely on what I have read, I have to say that the one major issue that I have with the book is that I don't exactly like Eric! I commend him for his honest feelings throughout the book, but I found him to be extremely self-involved, quite unrepentant, and for lack of a better phrase, "smarter than thou." And I question how much he has learned or has changed as a result of his experiences. I feel for Tony's having had to endure this for the duration on the trip under life-threatening circumstances.

That said, I enjoyed the book and commend both of them for making it as far as they did.