Shute has characters dance the night away, drinking brandy and running riot on Swanston Street. Photograph: Archive Photos/Getty Imagesįor a while, Melbourne embraces its status as party capital of the world. Gregory Peck walks with Ava Gardner in a scene from the 1959 film On The Beach.

The quote was fabricated by Sydney Morning Herald journalist Neil Jillett for a satirical piece and endures in Victorian folklore to this day. An apocryphal quote was famously (and erroneously) attributed to Ava Gardner, in which she described Melbourne as “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world”. It came out in 1959, only two years after the novel.ĭespite hewing fairly closely to the book, even going so far as to shoot scenes in Frankston, Berwick, Melbourne CBD and on Phillip Island, the movie was not a success. A movie was immediately rushed into production, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins, directed by Stanley Kramer.

On the Beach sold millions of copies upon release and was hailed as the most important Australian book ever written. First out of the gate was A Town Like Alice, which saw him quickly accepted as a major Australian writer.

It later appeared on Dad’s Army.ĭisenchanted with Britain, Shute moved to Australia in 1950 and wrote one book a year until his death in 1960. It almost wiped out the entire Allied high command, who were observing from a very unsafe distance. In testing, the Panjandrum ran amok, haring off along the beach at 100km/h, launching missiles in every conceivable direction. The idea was you rolled it out of the boat, lit the fuse and stood well back, whereupon it would spin up the beachhead like an out-of-control Burning Man installation and blow the Nazis to smithereens. The Panjandrum was two giant wheels connected by a drum, powered by rockets and loaded up with explosives. Figuring it might be a tad suicidal to launch a frontal assault on the Nazi machine gun nests in Normandy, the British called upon Sub-Lieutenant Norway to come up with a device capable of breaching defences while everyone sheltered in the landing craft. Nevil Shute Norway (he dropped Norway when writing) must have been fond of the beach, because he invented a beach-based weapon of mass destruction called the Panjandrum.

On the Beach is instead about a bunch of miserable Melburnians waiting to die slowly and horribly from radiation poisoning after the world has been annihilated in a nuclear holocaust started by the Albanians. I often wonder how many people bought On the Beach when it came out in 1957, assuming it was a novel about a group of gorgeous, sun-kissed surfers catching breaks all summer long.

Shute nevil on the beach