I was 15 or 16 and remember being totally gripped by the story. It was about this time that I read Nevil Shute’s nuclear holocaust novel On the Beach. The protest turned nasty when the French Foreign Intelligence Services sunk Greenpeace’s flagship, The Rainbow Warrior, in the port of Auckland in July, 1985. Meanwhile a Greenpeace campaign was in full swing to protest against French military testing of nuclear weapons on Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. This short film (below) sheds further light on what happened. I still remember the veterans who had been subject to the blasts being interviewed on TV news broadcasts. Not long afterwards, in 1985, the McClelland Royal Commission investigated secret British nuclear tests on Australian soil, including Maralinga, in the 1950s. (The band’s singer, Peter Garrett, even went on to stand for the Nuclear Disarmament Party although he didn’t get voted in.) I bought it upon release in 1984 and remember feeling incredibly impassioned by the lyrics, which were filled with political messages about the nuclear threat we all faced.

I still remember the terrifying image, depicting Sydney Harbour after a nuclear strike, on the front cover of Red Sails in the Sunset, an album by Australian rock band Midnight Oil. It frightened me so much I still remember writing English essays about nuclear war and angst-filled poetry about world peace.Īustralia may have seemed a long way away from the two main adversaries, the USA and Soviet Union, but anxiety about the nuclear threat was very real at that point in time. At the time there was a very real fear that Armageddon was just around the corner. Urn:oclc:212106287 Scandate 20100811020229 Scanner – paperback Vintage Classics 320 pages 2009.Īs a teenager in the 1980s, I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War nuclear arms race.

OL2779813W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 93.74 Pages 296 Ppi 400 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0099530252 Urn:lcp:onbeach00shut:epub:4372f6dc-b70a-4d2e-a0d8-f3d1a6e79bfe Extramarc OhioLINK Library Catalog Foldoutcount 0 Identifier onbeach00shut Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t4zg7cq8w Isbn 0345311485ĩ780345311481 Lccn 57009158 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 17:30:27 Bookplateleaf 0008 Boxid IA124124 Boxid_2 CH105401 Camera Canon 5D City New York DonorĪlibris Edition 1.

On the beach nevil