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. Urn:oclc:212106287 Scandate 20100811020229 Scanner 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. 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 shute