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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