MovieChat Forums > On the Beach (2000) Discussion > The last survivors being in Australia ju...

The last survivors being in Australia just wouldn't happen?


For one reason more than anything else- Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap. The satellite tracking station located in the middle of the Australian outback would be an early target of United States enemies in the event of a all out nuclear exchange. Radiation wouldn't need to seep south.

Or maybe not. The point is, Australia wouldn't be pristine once a nuclear war ended.

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Well, when the book and original film of On the Beach first appeared, the Pine Gap facility hadn't been built yet. As this version of the film is set around 2006, an attack on Pine Gap may or may not have happened, but it probably wouldn't have made any significant difference.

"The point is, Australia wouldn't be pristine once a nuclear war ended."

Pine Gap is in a desert, so if it had been hit by a nuclear warhead, it's unlikely to have made that much of an impression on the population at large, most of whom live near the coastline. It probably wouldn't have been much different to the time when the British tested their nuclear weapons in Maralinga.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga

As this version of the film depicted a war between the United States and China, I find it hard to imagine the Chinese would want to waste nuclear weapons on a non-nuclear armed country.


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while i dont think australia necessary needs nuclear weapons to be shut down, i think there woudl be other places with survivors, like say Africa.

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Applied Science? All science is applied. Eventually.

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"while i dont think australia necessary needs nuclear weapons to be shut down, i think there woudl be other places with survivors, like say Africa."

In the novel the South African city of Cape Town was mentioned. It was said that the very last human survivors would be the people living in Tierra del Fuego.

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This makes sense, in that Shute really didn't try to map out air currents and such. Instead, he simply thought of the poisoned air as a curtain, coming down on the human race. Or as a curtain coming down on a Mercator map, taking "out" one parallel of latitude at a time.

And Tierra del Fuego is the closest land to the South Pole, except for Antarctica.

(This map is from 2005, the time of the movie.)
https://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/islands_oceans_poles/antarctic_region_ pol_2005.pdf

But ... didn't the novel also mention the scientists in Antarctica? I think I remember that from the part where one character was incensed that rabbits had a greater resistance to radioactivity, so that for as long as a year after the last Australian died, the rabbits would have free ownership of the continent.

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This makes sense, in that Shute really didn't try to map out air currents and such. Instead, he simply thought of the poisoned air as a curtain, coming down on the human race. Or as a curtain coming down on a Mercator map, taking "out" one parallel of latitude at a time.


Not exactly, tontac. Shute does have a scene where Dwight explains to Moira that no winds blow straight down from the north to the south; that if they did, they'd be dead already. He then goes on to explain about the pressure equator, picking up winds from the north and transferring radioactive particles down to the south as it shifts with the seasons. This was why it was taking so long -- two years, in the book.

It's true Shute envisioned the radiation gradually seeping down uniformly, latitude by latitude. Whether that's what would really happen I have no idea. But he did in fact go into the matter of air currents.

But ... didn't the novel also mention the scientists in Antarctica? I think I remember that from the part where one character was incensed that rabbits had a greater resistance to radioactivity, so that for as long as a year after the last Australian died, the rabbits would have free ownership of the continent.


No, the book makes it clear in a couple of places (once by Dwight, once by John Osborne) that there's apparently no one still in Antarctica...though these statements are tempered by the characters saying they don't believe anyone's down there now. It's never made absolutely definite, but it seems we're supposed to infer that there is no longer anybody there. If there were, Dwight says, "they might go on for quite a while." But ultimately they too would die.

The rabbit business comes up in the Pastoral Club, where Osborne's uncle is the member trying to get through the club's store of vintage port. Late in the book they're at the club and it's Osborne who tells him that the rabbit is the most resistant animal they know of, and that after people are gone rabbits would be running about Australia eating all the feed the next year...though they'd all go in the end; there'd be nothing left alive by the end of the next year.

Neither the 1959 nor 2000 movies makes sense in saying that Australia would be the only place left with life. A look at the map shows how this is almost physically impossible, not to mention logically ridiculous. In the book of course the entire Southern Hemisphere is left, slowly dying over two or more years. When the main characters in Melbourne all die, Tasmania, the South Island of New Zealand, and the southern portion of South America (southern Chile and Argentina) are still left, with the "Indians" in Tierra del Fuego fated to be the last human beings on Earth to die.

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I see your point.

(Reference to Pine Gap) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap

Seeing that, by 2005, the place was being used for drone control and for lots of spy satellite control, I would see that the PRC would want to take it out, say with a surgically small strike.

But both the USA and PRC have reasons to be gentle with Australia. While it is an "ally" of the US, it is more of a "partner" with China. China has had tons of emigration to Australia, and there are lots of Chinese there. If China would want to have any sort of existence after a war with a nuclear exchange, it would want Australia to be functioning and friendly.

The stuff I'm quoting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93China_relations If you see the "Cultural Relations" section, you'll see those kind of ties even before the novel was written. But the rest just shows that China had a big big stake in Australia, cultivated in the time between the 1970's and 2005.

In keeping with your post, I'd say the Chinese would reluctantly launch attacks on U.S. military interests in Australia after trying very hard to get Canberra to shut them down quickly, probably by warning them beforehand "you do know, don't you, that if this turns into a shooting war, although we wouldn't want to, we would be forced to target places like Pine Gap?". Despite the remoteness of that one spot, the population would be aware that nukes had taken out some Australians, so, no, the people would certainly not feel like the Sino-US War had nothing to do with them, and no Australia wouldn't be "pristine".

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