A post that I never wanted to write!
When you are young, especially growing up in the 80’s, Australian literature as taught at school was always a little bit folksy, and that is a result of the education system not of the quality of writers we have. Lawson and Banjo Paterson were the ‘go-to’ authors who portrayed a cultural cringe that is not of this world, today.
As with most literary greats, many would seek inspiration beyond their home and English novelist Nevil Shute joined that queue and introduced further world views to his new adopted Australian homeland. I was lucky, when I had an enforced leave from school one year, I delved into my mother’s collection of great Australian authors, ignoring the usual colonial expressions, I found Shute’s seminal work and began to be absorbed in its pages.
On the Beach, was published in 1957, and made into a Hollywood movie two years later staring some greats of the time, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins before his Psycho breakout. What made On the Beach that important to afford such investment from this huge American industry? it was the topical subject of nuclear devastation brought about by the fears of the burgeoning cold war.
During this period, all people of the world were under immense fear of being annihilated by an atomic blast within seconds, and being prepared or ‘prepping’ is what is now termed for an industry determine to survive such disasters. However, the essence of the book explores the slow but eventual demise of humans due to the inevitable radioactive poisoning following an all-out nuclear war. It seems that being in the southern hemisphere Australia gave you a couple of years grace, and this reason was how it became part of our new exciting literary genre replacing the stockman chasing horses.
In both the novel and movie, tension is built around the encroaching radioactive cloud and how each character addresses their eventual mortality. It traces how Brisbane, then Perth and Sydney go silent before reaching the last holdout of civilisation in Melbourne, the last great city of humanity. From a scientific perspective, On the Beach alludes us to how mankind had become stupid enough to cause its own extinction through technology use without considering its consequences.
When I was doing my Urban Design Master’s degree, and moved away from an ecological view point of city design driven by my earlier specialisation in landscape architecture, I started exploring the importance of equitable transit solutions. Being a child strongly influenced by Shute’s work, imagine the surprise when I came across A Very Public Solution, by Paul Mees (2000), with the cover being Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner at Frankston Station from that impressionable movie.
However, Mees’s book was another eye opener, about how we constantly fail to deliver equality mobility to the growing suburbs at the expense of a city’s sustainable footprint. Until reading his book, I hadn’t understood how to really put an argument together, one that is balanced between a great narrative of storytelling and factual reality. His book like others were a true credit to Melbourne’s tradition of intellectual dynamism that drew me to that wonderful city soon after I graduated. The rich tapestry of publications dedicated to our inconsistent approach ensuring the built form did not transform from its humanist quality that Melbourne aspired to.
However, its European centric urban culture was to undergo radical surgery that led a 10 to 1 investment in highways over public transit. Post war when approximately 65% of people used trams, trains and buses, it only took 30 years for the culture to flip where public transit was often seen as a blip on the transport modal share graphs. As Graeme Davidson quite rightly stated in Car Wars – the car won our hearts and conquered our cities with a lot of effort by an inequitable approach to suburban mobility.
We had the knowledge, since the 80’s urban planners have been arguing the need for equitable transport solutions in new developments. It was like the response to the nuclear threat but we knew the technological problems in how it was making our cities poorer, less sustainable but the people in charge, who were responsible just didn’t care, they sat dumbfounded and corrupt, complicit to irresponsibility ‘on the beach’ with their mortality uncontested.
Today, we face another similar fear, of a warming climate. We know factually that there is a limit that the world can take, some say 4 others suggest 5 degrees above pre industrial averages. The Paris Agreement was meant to restrict this to 1.5 degrees, but this now looks already reached by all accounts in late 2024. It’s now thought that 3.4 degrees will be the target for the end of 2100, if as of 2024 current policies are maintained.
Come 2025 the world has changed and some countries have withdrawn from these policy commitments, while putting further pressure on financial institutions to remove any Paris Agreement targets to investing in long term energy businesses that drive up these temperatures. Therefore, could we top 4 or 5 degrees above pre industrialised levels by the end of the century, and what does this really mean?
Don’t want to seem alarmist but 5 degrees, will most probably lead to a critical point where humanity is hanging on by a thread. Due to collapses of economic systems caused by environmental degradation of soils to feed the displaced populations caused by the 2-metre sea level rise. The cost of re-housing and retooling industries to address this transformation, there will be no shining light for the losers in this, and that is most of us.
There is no place that isn’t impacted, as there will be many unliveable regions due to unrelenting heat, infrastructure and energy system failures, ecosystem collapses and mass extinctions, food and water insecurity, health crises and social instability. You would think we are living with the 1950’s fear again, the same human induced problem with the same outcome.
We know how to avoid this threat; we have the technological answers but not the political will. We can’t sleep walk to a cosy spot on the beach and contemplate what could have been, when we can actually do something about it today. Let’s hope that in 100 years, another great author will write a ripping yarn about how close we came instead of the last grasps of a failed organic experiment.
Not a post I ever wanted to write – but one that needs to be discussed. If you ever get the chance to read Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, I recommend it over the movie, because it frighten me as a boy far more than reading Jaws! during the same break. If you want to get off the beach – get a copy of my new book, Net Zero Suburbia it outlines what we need to do in this critical period before 2050.