‘Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World
And that lions no longer need keepers?
TS Eliot – “Choruses from the Rock”
Around twenty years ago, I got on a crowded city bound train at Footscray Station. Standing close by me were a group of private school kids – I am not so familiar with all the uniforms as to know what school they were, but as they were co-ed, I assume they were all Violet Crumbles (ie Wesley College) – reading aloud notes on an English text they were studying. It was either Orwell or Huxley, as the one doing the reading struggled so badly to pronounce the word ‘totalitarian’ that I could not but correct him.
And I reflected on what a good time it was to be a teenager in a country like Australia. The recent atrocity of 9/11 was not enough to shake my optimism – after all when I was a teenager, in the 1980s, during the Cold War, we lived under the shadow of the possibility of nuclear war, of what I frequently call ‘ultimate violence’. It coloured our daily lives greatly with a preoccupation that at any moment we could get wiped out if a sudden nuclear war broke out.
Popular culture was laden with the references, and not just dreadful poems in the various high school magazines we published. There was ‘War Games’, the film where a teenage hacker almost triggers Armageddon. ‘The Day After’, which starred Steve Gutenberg around the time he was making a name for himself with the deplorable Police Academy franchise, was a deeply pessimistic film which I saw on my 15th birthday, and which apparently alarmed Ronald Reagan sufficiently as to subtly change his views on the possible use of nuclear weapons. Sting made a song ‘The Russians’ about the possibility of such a war.
So the end of the Cold War, where I remember going to a German Reunification party at a uni friend’s home, brought a great sigh of relief that has lasted me for over three decades.
It was around 1984 at age 15 that I read ‘On The Beach’, Nevil Shute’s late 1950s novel warning about the dangers of nuclear war.
Shute’s novel also served as my introduction to the poetry of TS Eliot, with its quote at the start of the book from The Hollow Men:
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
‘On The Beach’ is probably Nevil Shute’s greatest novel, much as it is hard to endure a story which ends with everyone eventually dead. It definitely is his most important, as he wrote to warn the world about the very likely outcome of nuclear war, particularly if Cobalt bombs were to be used.
Cobalt bombs have been mentioned in popular culture since then. One of the original Planet of the Apes films ends with the detonation of a giant Cobalt bomb which wipes out all life.
Sombrely, the Cobalt bomb is a doomsday weapon, something which will create a highly radioactive cobalt isotope with a 5 year half life, which can wipe out all human life across a large area, and then leave that area inhabitable for mere decades.
With the Russians talking about developing a nuclear powered stealth torpedo which can carry a 100 megaton cobalt bomb which will create radioactive tsunamis, I think that my sigh of relief from the end of the Cold War has finally ceased.
Which is probably why it is a prescient time for ‘On The Beach’ to be adapted as a stage play.
Regrettably, it is being performed by the Sydney Theatre Company in Sydney. Presumably, the adaptation sets the story in Sydney, whereas the novel, the 1959 movie, and the 2000 miniseries (the latter was awful), were all set in Melbourne.
Ava Gardner, who starred as Moira in the original movie, was quoted (probably inaccurately) as saying that Melbourne was the right place to make a movie about the end of the world.
The scenes of empty lifeless Melbourne streets at the end of the movie are particularly haunting.
And whilst I welcome the adaptation, as I do any stage or screen revival of the works of Nevil Shute, I do wish that it was set in Melbourne as its author intended.
Lost For Words! 