Nevil Shute’s ‘On the Beach’ warned us of nuclear annihilation. It’s still a hot-button issue with a new play at the Sydney Theatre Company

ABC News The Conversation / By Alexander Howard, 23 Jul 23

“……………………………….. the nuclear threat is still very much at the top of our collective mind.

The Sydney Theatre Company is staging the very first stage adaptation of Shute’s novel “On the Beach”. And Oppenheimer, one of 2023’s two most-hyped films, tells the story of the man referred to as “the father of the atomic bomb”.

‘Australia’s most important novel’

Journalist Gideon Haigh calls On the Beach “arguably Australia’s most important novel — important in the sense of confronting a mass international audience with the defining issue of the age”.

British-born Shute emigrated in 1950 to Australia, where he lived outside Melbourne. As well as writing novels, he worked as an aeronautical engineer.

The title of On the Beach — which started life as a four-part story called The Last Days on Earth — ostensibly referred to a Royal Navy expression for reassignment. (Shute spent time in the Royal Naval Reserve during World War II.) However, as readers of Eliot’s poetry will know, the phrase also appears late in The Hollow Men:

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.

As in Eliot’s poem, the characters that cluster together in the pages of Shute’s novel, set in and around Melbourne between 1962 and 1963, tend on occasion to avoid speech…………………………

The reason why the guests at Peter’s party are so keen to avoid serious talk is both simple and depressing. They are trying very hard to forget that they are all going to be dead from radiation poisoning in a matter of months.

Shute brings the reader up to speed after the dinner party wraps up. A massive nuclear war has devastated the entire northern hemisphere, wiping out all forms of life there. And the radioactive fallout generated during the conflict is now creeping — slowly but surely — into the southern hemisphere.

Shute makes it clear there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about this. In tonally dispassionate prose, he reveals that vast swathes of Australia have already been rendered uninhabitable due to radiation poisoning. The only thing the characters who remain can do is wait.

…………………………………………………………………………… This is the way Shute’s novel of nuclear extinction ends: not with a bang but with a whimper. Released at the height of the Cold War, On the Beach struck a chord with millions of concerned readers.

………………………………………………………………………Shute’s didactic inclinations are evident towards the end of the novel. “Peter,” the character Mary asks, “why did this all this happen to us?” Even at this late stage, Mary, whose radiation-racked body is spasming uncontrollably, wants to know whether things might have panned out differently. Her husband’s reply is revealing:

“I don’t know … Some kinds of silliness you just can’t stop,” he said. “I mean, if a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there’s not much that you or I can do about it. The only possible hope would have been to educate them out of their silliness.”

………………………..While the science in the novel was somewhat flawed, Shute’s cautionary tale undoubtedly spoke to the collective zeitgeist.

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Shute’s vision of humanity’s self-inflicted destruction is eerily resonant in our time of climate emergency. The nuclear threat remains, too, in our perilous historical moment of democratic backsliding and failing nuclear states.

It seems increasingly likely the world as we know it is coming to an end — if it hasn’t already. The question remains: will it be with a bang or a whimper?

On The Beach runs at the Sydney Theatre Company July 24 to August 12, 2023, with previews July 18–21. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-23/nevil-shute-on-the-beach-nuclear-annihilation-hot-button-issue/102621052