Then I got better—much to the frustration of the doctors because I did so before they were able to work out what had been wrong with me.
“Did they launch the missiles?” I anxiously asked my mother, who was the first thing I saw when I regained my wits, knitting by my bedside, frowning over her plains and pearls.
“Missiles?”
“They were going to have a nuclear war. Did it happen?”
“No, dear. At least I don’t think so.”
She watched the news on TV every night. I pushed her to remember. “You better ask your father,” she said.

 

He went upstairs, and found the main transmitting room. There were two transmitting desks, each with a towering metal frame of grey radio equipment in front of it. One of these sets was dead and silent, the instruments all at zero.
   The other set stood by the window, and here the casement had been blown from its hinges and lay across the desk. One end of the window frame projected outside the building and teetered gently in the light breeze. One of the upper corners rested on an overturned Coke bottle on the desk. The transmitting key lay underneath the frame that rest unstably above it, teetering a little in the breeze.
   He reached and touched it with his gloved hand. The frame rocked on the transmitting key, and the needle of a milliameter upon the set flipped upwards. He released the frame and the needle fell back. There was one of USS Scorpion’s missions completed, something that they had come ten thousand miles to see, that had absorbed so much effort and attention in Australia, on the other side of the world.

    In 1959, Melbourne was all agog because a real Hollywood film crew was coming to town. In fact they had been before to make rotten films like Smiley and Captain Kangaroo but this time everyone seemed to sense that it would be different. The truth was that Melbourne in those days was a dreary place, an unregarded outpost of a dying empire, parochial and very unsophisticated. All that was about to change as Auntie Melbourne came face to face with the rest of the world. For the film was to be the classic On the Beach, directed by the critically acclaimed Stanley Kramer whose films were so serious that he always made them in black-and-white and would this one too. He was bringing with him real stars—Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire in a rare dramatic role and a young man named Anthony Perkins, a year ahead of Pyscho. So unused to such famous people were we that we had completely failed to notice that the author of the brilliant book, Australia’s most successful writer by far, Nevil Shute, was still alive and living quietly in Frankston, but no one bothered him because we didn’t know how to handle him. He set the book in Melbourne and Frankston, by the marvellous logic that as the post-nuclear war radioactive cloud killed everyone in the northern hemisphere and then drifted southward, the last surviving major population centre would be Melbourne. The novel deals with its last days. Everyone who was anyone in Melbourne society sucked up to the stars and clambered for a moment as an extra in the film. What sycophantic fools they must have seemed in their uncouth and callow ways. Mr Peck was far to polite a man to express his opinions of all this and left quietly as soon as shooting was done, but Miss Gardner went on the record with the immortal remark that Melbourne was ..a great place to make a film about the end of the world. And she was right, but she wouldn’t be for much longer. For, as if stung by her comment, the city immediately began to flourish and struggle out its sleepy-hollow ways. Its progress has continued unabated ever since. In this city of my birth, we will always have a soft spot for the caustic Miss Gardner, but don’t ever tell her that. And how did the film see the end of the world? Newspapers blowing freely through Bourke Street, the major shopping and business precinct usually thronging with vast herds of people pouring across the intersections and weaving amongst the gliding trams—now suddenly totally devoid of all life. That was it. Actually, at the time, the scene wasn’t any different to the average Sunday…