This fictional quote, attributed to have been said by Ava Gardner during the filming of "On The Beach" in 1959, is perhaps the most memorable thing anyone has ever said - and was allowed to print - about the capital of Victoria.
"On The Beach" is, of course, about a group of people facing certain death from radioactivity after World War 3. In the film - and the book on which the film is based - this nuclear holocaust was due to wipe out Australian life in 1964. If it did, we didn't notice.
The author, Nevil Shute, wrote arguably Australia's most important novel - important in the sense of confronting a mass international audience with the defining issue of the age. "On The Beach", the story of humankind's thermonuclear extinction, sold more than 4 million copies.
Australians were shocked to see themselves so cast. Helen Caldicott, then a 19-year-old medical student, was radicalised into a lifetime of anti-nuclear activism: "Shute's story haunted me ... Nowhere was safe. 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.
The 1959 film adaptation with Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck is still my favourite, despite a TV-movie remake in 2000 with Bryan Brown.
I mean, who could forget the apocalyptic scene of Swain escaping the submarine so as to spend his last days in irradiated San Francisco?
It must've left an impression on someone called Paul Hagl, too, who searched the streets of Melbourne to Geelong, Phillip Island, Berwick, Queenscliff and even Marysville for the film locations of "On The Beach".
Here's the final scene, to the tune of "Waltzing Matilda" - what else?
Oh, and even though Ava Gardner never said "ON THE BEACH is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it", she admitted in her autobiography that she wished she had.
