Debate was underway in the US about fallout from nuclear testing in Nevada, and Shute's publishers had brought forward the book's release, sensing its topicality. Into this eerily somnolent world was On the Beach released.
Everyone else, including civil-defence officials, emulated the mayor, who "rolled over and went back to sleep". Only one man, reported Harper's, roused and evacuated his family. I felt so alone, so unprotected by the adults, who seemed to be unaware of the danger." But it was in the US that the book had its greatest impact, rousing readers from an uneasy stupor and becoming one of the Cold War's most powerful cultural artefacts.Įarly on 22 July 1957, a false alarm of nuclear attack sounded in Schenectady, New York.
Helen Caldicott, then a 19-year-old medical student, was radicalised into a lifetime of anti-nuclear activism: "Shute's story haunted me. Nor could any novel make such provocative creative use of our distance from the rest of the world: as the last habitable continent, Australia is suddenly the most important place on Earth, at the very moment of its greatest impotence and ignorance, awaiting dooming winds from an incomprehensible war in the northern hemisphere.Īustralians were shocked to see themselves so cast. But no novel could be more explicitly Australian than On the Beach, set in his new home town of Melbourne. Shute was the first genuinely popular mainstream novelist to envision apocalypse, and one of only a handful to see the horrific mission through by leaving no survivors - just a silent irradiated planet, adrift in space. On the Beach, the story of humankind's thermonuclear extinction, sold more than 4 million copies. Yet 50 years ago this month, Shute published arguably Australia's most important novel - important in the sense of confronting a mass international audience with the defining issue of the age. "For he had more literature in his little finger than I have in my whole body." Nevil Shute Norway dispensed with his surname for his writing, fearful that "hard-bitten professional engineers might consider such a man not a serious person". "If Fred had lived we might have had some real books one day, not the sort of stuff that I turn out," said Nevil. His brother, Fred: now there was a writer. How the end of the world came to Melbourne
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