The shield of distance : fearful borders at the edge of the world

The anxiety about the vulnerability of Australia's borders to outside influences has a longer history than current reality television programs. For many years, sections of Australian literature have competed with utopian impressions of the country by displaying a fear that often manifests itself in apocalyptic renderings of landscape and life (for example, Gabrielle Lord's Salt, Simon Brown's Winter, the Mad Max films). At work in many of these texts is a curious contradiction that seemingly rejects fears by asserting the popular belief of Australia as a "lucky country," isolated from the rest of the world's problems by geography, while at the same time constantly undermining this notion by showing that complacency and optimism can prove unfounded and false, and may very well lead to catastrophe and disaster. The following discussion examines the tension between security and fear by focusing on Nevil Shute's On the Beach, a key text that demonstrates the idea of the nation's vulnerability to the outside world. In Shute's work, and in many others, Australia's position on the edge of the world is understood not only to exclude it from the world, whereby the end of "the world" can occur even if Australia still exists, but also to shield the nation from crises as a kind of utopian space free from harm. Australia initially appears to be a relatively utopian setting while the rest of the world has been destroyed or is at war, and the country's remote location seems to have protected it from the disaster elsewhere, yet this is proved to be a false hope, for Australia ultimately cannot escape catastrophe. While Shute's work is symptomatic of the particular conditions of the post-World War II nuclear era and is by no means representative of Australian fiction generally, the same fearfulness evident in his work can be seen in later popular texts unconcerned with the atomic threat, therefore suggesting that this particular fear remains an underlying strand of the Australian culture.