She sat there dumbly watching as the low grey shape went forward to the mist on the horizon, holding the bottle on her knee. This was the end of it, the very, very end. Presently she could see the submarine no longer; it had vanished in the mist. She looked at her little wrist watch; it showed one minute past ten. Her childhood religion came back to her in those last minutes; one ought to do something about that, she thought. A little alcoholically she murmured the Lord's Prayer. Then she took out the red carton from her bag, and opened the vial, and held the tablets in her hand. Another spasm shook her, and she smiled faintly. "Foxed you this time," she said. She took the cork out of the bottle. It was ten past ten. She said earnestly, "Dwight, if you're on your way already, wait for me." Then she took the tablets in her mouth and swallowed them down with a mouthful of brandy, sitting behind the wheel of her big car."
Last words in the apocalyptic novel "On the Beach", published in 1957.
I had only heard of the book after I had come to Australia in 1965. It had been written by British author Nevil Shute after he had emigrated to Australia in 1950. Perhaps he did not feel as complacent as the natives did with their backyard barbecues, footie, cricket, and six-o'clock swill.
And how right he was! In Europe, only three years before my leaving, people had been confronted on their television screens for thirteen long days by the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Australia, the 1959 film "On the Beach" was just another film with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner; in Europe, if it had been shown, it would've looked like a documentary.
Set five years in "the future" (which would've been 1964 at the time of its release), the film tells the story of the survivors of a nuclear war, living out the last months of their lives in Australia, as a cloud of radioactive fallout envelopes the globe. Ironically, the stark visual image in the final frame of this film still resonates with me sixty years later: the deserted streets of Melbourne, the ticking of a clock slowly winding down, the banner "THERE IS STILL TIME .. BROTHER"
Now we have a long dragged-out war again in Ukraine, another war in the Middle East, China flexing its muscles - is there still time, brother?
P.S. They remade "On the Beach" in 2000, starring Armand Assante, Rachel Ward, and Bryan Brown, but I think I stick with the original.
