For filching food from the Japanese, he’d been tied with wire to a tree for three days and bashed with rifle butts.
In those days, cut off during the three-month “wet” and baked dry for the rest of the year, the region’s human population counted in the hundreds.Īt Normanton, not far inland, Shute and Riddell met pastoralist Jim Edwards, who had been a prisoner of war working on the Burma railway. From November 1948 until January the following year, Shute and his friend James Riddell toured this region in a light aircraft they’d flown out from Britain. When Shute died in 1960, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran an editorial declaring that “this country has lost one of its greatest friends and propagandists.”Īnd so, when a reporting trip recently took me to Queensland, I decided to look at the unlikely place where this infatuation began: the country on the southern shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria.
They helped fuel the surge of “ten-pound Poms” taking up the Australian government’s offer of assisted migration. Starting that year with A Town Like Alice, his immensely popular books portrayed Australia as a sunny land of opportunity - and plentiful steak and eggs - contrasted with a tightly rationed Britain in the grip of complacent civil servants and envy-ridden politicians.
This bestselling British author had upped sticks and moved to Australia in 1950, and would spend the last decade of his life on a property southeast of Melbourne. Despite the quip that Melbourne was “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world,” falsely attributed to Gardner, the British-born Shute showed great affection for the city, and indeed for Australia as whole. Many people have been reminded of that novel - or the film version starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner - in the depths of the pandemic lockdowns. Shute is best known for On the Beach, his 1957 novel about a Melbourne awaiting the deadly fallout from a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. I managed to reread Ulysses, but I also found myself tackling the less demanding works of Nevil Shute, the popular writer of the 1940s and 1950s. Some people used the lockdown to finally get around to reading Proust or Joyce.
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