Firstly, when he refers to Prime Minister Harold Holt’s fateful 1967 dip in the ocean at Cheviot Beach as “the swim that needs no towel”.

And secondly, for his admiration of the country’s sporting pedigree.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to make you realise how good you’ve got it, even if that outsider happens to be an American.

Bryson gives a typically amusing account of listening to cricket on the radio, openly admitting how knowing nothing about the game only serves to enhance the enjoyment.

Summarising what he was hearing, he writes: “The upshot was that Australia was giving England a good thumping, but then Australia pretty generally does. In fact, Australia pretty generally beats most people at most things.

“Truly never has there been a more sporting nation.”

Bryson goes on to demonstrate something that he finds truly impressive as an outsider but which Australian sports fans have a tendency to take for granted.

“At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, to take just one random but illustrative example, Australia, the 52nd largest nation in the world, brought home more medals than all but four other countries, all of them much larger (the countries, of course, not the medals)” Bryson writes.

“Measured by population, its performance was streets ahead of anyone else. Australians won 3.78 medals per million of population, a rate more than two and a half times better than the next best performer, Germany, and almost five times the rate of the US. Moreover, Australia’s medal-winning tally was distributed across a range of sports (14) matched only by one other nation, the US. Hardly a sport exists at which the Australians do not excel.

“It is a wonder in such a vigorous and active society that there is anyone left to form an audience.”

Loathed though I am to tell an American he is right, least of all one who can get away with using the word “moreover”, Bryson is right.

On the rare occasions when Australian sport fans deem their compatriots to have underperformed on the global stage, a reality check may be in order.

Australia has just qualified for its fourth consecutive soccer World Cup, booking a spot in Russia while powerhouses like The Netherlands, Chile and three-time winner Italy are limited to watching on their plasma big screens.

Of the eight rugby World Cups, Australia has won two and made four other semi-finals.

Of the 13 hockey World Cups, Australia has won three (including the last two) and made seven other semi-finals.

Australia has won 11 rugby league World Cups and finished runner-up in every other final bar one.

Australia has won five of the 11 cricket World Cups (including four of the last five) and lost two of the other finals. Between them, England, South Africa and New Zealand have won none.

Admittedly, netball isn’t exactly a global sport but of its 14 World Cup tournaments, Australia has won 11 and finished runner-up in the other three.

When it comes to basketball, it’s more a story of quantity than quality.

Get this stat: Australia has the most appearances in an Olympic men’s basketball tournament (14) and the second-most at a world cup (11), without winning a medal.

However, nothing affords Australian journalists the opportunity to use the punch-above-weight cliche quite like an examination of Olympic medal tables.

Since the national embarrassment of failure to win a gold medal in 1976 prompted the establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport, the country has cemented its position on the global sporting stage.

Finishing in the top 10 at every Games since 1992, Australia’s impact peaked, unsurprisingly, on home soil in 2000 when it finished joint third on overall medals won and behind nations with the dubious toxicology of China and Russia while table-topping USA is hardly unblemished in that department.

Equally impressive was finishing fourth again in 2004 and although the position has slipped to sixth, eighth and 10th since then, Australia still routinely finishes above well-populated sports-mad European nations with healthy economies like Italy, Spain and France and occasionally even Germany and GB.

These would be impressive statistics for any country, let alone the one now listed as having the 54th largest population (below Madagascar) and credited with 0.326 per cent of the planet’s human talent pool.

Incidentally, the only other aspect of Australian society that provokes as much admiration in Bryson as sporting prowess is the phenomenally lethal potential of its endemic wildlife.

When warned about the dangers of a jellyfish, the terrified author recalled how he learned more about it “from browsing through a fat book titled, if I recall, Things That Will Kill You Horridly in Australia: Volume 19”.