Golden Age: The Holden FC

Dandenong
Since beginning local manufacture in 1948, Holden had built more than 290,000 motor vehicles in Australia. And because they'd sold every one of them, there were still plenty of customers languishing on the waiting list, some of them for years at a time. The only solution was to ramp up production even more, so in 1954 the company embarked on another £7¼ million expansion programme ($320 million in 2024), which would include upgrades for Fishermans Bend, Pagewood and Woodville as well as Fortitude Valley, Birkenhead and Mosman Park. The jewel in the crown, however, would be an all-new assembly plant to be built to Melbourne's south-east, on the outskirts of what had lately been the satellite city of Dandenong.

Rare image of Dandenong under construction, c.1956.

Hitherto a dairy farming region, post-war immigration (especially from Greece and Italy) had forced Melbourne outwards in a new style of conurbation called "suburbs", and Dandenong was next in line to be absorbed by the blob. Finding a workable combination of cheap land, good transport links and abundant labour, Holden purchased a 153-acre site in March 1955 and broke ground on yet another state-of-the-art assembly plant. The plan was that Dandenong would take over vehicle assembly operations from Fishermans Bend, allowing the Bend to become a dedicated engine plant (as well as remaining head office); Woodville would remain the primary location for body panels. In theory, Dandenong would be capable of 152 bodies and 168 complete vehicles per day, meaning Holden overall would be in with a shot of completing more than 72,000 cars a year. The this would lay the foundation to work towards the ultimate goal of 100,000 per year.

The Dandenong body and assembly plant opened late in 1956, having cost nearly £4.5 million ($198 million). Sadly, there were no public-facing Art Deco buildings this time, just a huge area of sawtooth-roof warehousing punctuated by an office block for the adminisphere. From the moment it opened it was the fourth-largest GM-H plant in Australia, employing more than 3,480 people – so many that Holden was even moved to shell out for the council to build them their own train station, so their workers could commute to their new jobs. The Dandenong station opened either on 1 October or 18 November 1956, and was not accessible from the road, as the only way in or out was via the gate to the Holden factory.

Dandenong's front gate. Apparently the redgum is still there.

Holden was one of the "big three" (along with International Harvester and Heinz) who spearheaded the industrialisation of the Dandenong region. In the following ten years, more than two hundred other factories were built, attracting immigrants the world over who heard there were good jobs going (indeed, it is said Holden even had recruiters on the migrant ships to sign them up on the trip over!). Between 1948 and 1959 Dandenong's population increased from 6,000 to nearly 30,000, and the council was moved to build Doveton Housing Estate to ensure sufficient workers lived close to their places of work. Those who didn't take the train parked their Holdens in the 1,000-space car park out the front of the factory – and by 1958, many of those Holdens were the mid-life update to the ultra-successful FE, the FC.

Distracted by the Shiny
The mid-life update of the Holden FE saw GM-H take an already great car and add chrome – an oversimplification, maybe, but not by much. When the new Holden FC launched on 6 May 1958, the only thing anyone could talk about was the shiny new radiator grille. This was a styling update, and Holden made no apologies for it.

For a humble set of wheels in 1958, you could do worse than an FC Standard. Much worse (source).

Naturally, some journalists wondered whether Holden might've taken it too far for the ultra-conservative Australian market. All that extra chrome could've represented a real risk, but as usual they'd got it spot on. We were getting used to seeing the latest Chevrolets, Pontiacs and, yes, Ford Customlines rolling around local roads, so the ground was already prepared. The front bumper had been doubled with a moustache-like piece that merged into the lower part of the radiator grille, which contained the parking lights and, on Specials, the indicators as well. Being flat and long rather than round, the frontal light treatment created the impression of a stronger, wider car, even though not a single panel had been changed from the FE. It was evidence of how well Holden's aesthetic design and visual language department – better known as Alf Payze – knew his business. 

The interior didn't reinvent the wheel, it just took the lessons of the last decade and applied them (source).

But like the Holden FJ before it, the FC was more than just a pretty face, focusing on small quality-of-life improvements that added up to a big difference. In the cockpit, the full FE horn ring had been cut down to half a ring to make the instruments more visible, and the gauges had been given black hoods with matching black panels behind the switch gear to cut down on distracting glare (the black steering column was a running FE change – formerly it had been body-coloured). The seats and door trims had been given extra pleats, and there was a new vertical-bar radio speaker grille. The driving position had been made slightly better and it was a nicer car to drive all-round, with sharper steering (3.2 turns lock-to-lock rather than 3.8), better gear linkages, and a more responsive engine.

Although the bumpf didn't mention a power increase, subsequent road tests revealed the standby 132ci Grey straight-six had been given lifted to 54 kW at 4,000rpm, while torque peaked at the same 149 Nm at 1,200rpm. That meant peak torque was available at just 40km/h, so mountain roads could be dealt with by a single downshift to second. The better performance was owed to another small increase in compression ratio, from 6.8 to 7:1 – still a low ratio, even in 1958, but one that allowed Holdens to continue using low-quality fuel. A new camshaft grind and stronger rocker supports supported this increase with smoother breathing, reduced valve bounce and less frequent tappet adjustment. 

The "station sedan", as the wagon was still known, was the ride of choice for suburban dads (source).

Unfortunately, kerb weights had grown from 1,080 to 1,094kg for the Special, and only some of it was because of the extra chrome. Work had begun on toughening-up the flimsy, rust-prone FE almost as soon as it had gone on sale, and most of the mechanical upgrades on the FC had been running changes to the FE first. Combined with smaller but wider 13-inch wheels, that meant the FC could no longer be considered a performance car like the FJ had been. Acceleration was adequate and nothing more, as the engine still didn't like revving and Holden had (wisely) matched the gear ratios to the sorts of driving their customers actually did. That meant the same car that could lurch from 0 to 50km/h in just 4 seconds would take 19.8 to reach 100km/h – but the surge from 40 to 65km/h when you pulled out to overtake lasted just 5.6 seconds.

The standing quarter was 21.6 seconds, and the top speed was 136km/h, but those sorts of figures interested the Holden buyer not a jot. It was close enough to its market rivals not to matter, especially when most of those cost more and started falling apart the moment you introduced them to a corrugated road. The drum brakes would hardly pull your face off, and they were prone to overheating if abused, but that was normal for the era and it was the same for everyone on the road. If you resisted the urge to thrash it, fuel economy figures around 10 litres per 100km were possible, giving it a range of 400km between trips to Golden Fleece.

The price was virtually the same as the outgoing FE, with a Standard sedan for £1,110 ($43,400 in 2024) and the ritzy Special going for £1,142 ($44,500). And let's be honest, the Special was the one you wanted: not only did it come with indicators, side flashes and that lovely radiator grille, the chrome side pieces even made two-tone paintwork possible, hiding the seam between the two visits to the spray booth. Like the FE before it, there were some seriously lovely colour combinations to be had, such as Royal Marine over Skyline Blue, or Hialeagh Green over Cape Ivory.

Promo image of the ute. Note the body-coloure grille and headlight surrounds.

At the other end of the scale, the commercial range initially featured grilles, headlight surrounds and taillight surrounds in body colour to differentiate them from the passenger cars, but quickly switched to the same chrome units as all other FC models. This time the panel van was based on the utility rather than the station wagon, its 1.9 cubic metres of load volume meaning few loads were refused. In a rare misstep however, the extra weight of the FE's body-strengthening programme actually saw payload ratings decrease, with the ute dropping to 388kg and the panel van to just 378. It didn't end up mattering much though, as most tradies paid no heed to such trivialties and carried on overloading their ute or panel van to frankly dangerous levels.

An export FC in Fiji.

And of course, this being the 1950s, when Holden could do no wrong, the FC was an immediate sales success. It hit the market just as the first generation of Holdens (which had served their owners for nigh on a decade now) came up for replacement, and trading them in for FCs just made sense. With Dandenong now online, Holden hit their target of 100,000 vehicles in 1958, with a final total of 191,724 FCs produced between May 1958 and January 1960. An FC became the 500,000th Holden built and the 10,000th to be exported, with the model supplied to more than fifteen countries including South Africa (just embarking into an exciting new era called "apartheid"), Thailand, Hong Kong, Fiji (still British colonies at this point so technically not countries), and Singapore (which was about to be granted full self-governance by Britain and so yes, technically now a country). At the start of the decade Holden had held a solid 20 percent of the new car market: by the end, at the peak of the FC's tenure, that had risen to an incredible 50.3 percent. The nearest competitor was being outsold four to one, and Holden salesmen boasted they had the easiest job in the world.

Half-millionth Holden breaks the ribbon. Colour images of the day reveal it was bright red.

What made it truly impressive was that the FC's success came at a time when the competition was finally starting to get it together. Where the 48-215 had benefitted from being the best in a field of one, the FC launched into a six-cylinder family sedan market that was not only getting crowded, in some cases it was becoming a difficult choice. In their June '58 edition, Motor Manual ran a head-to-head between the Holden FC, Ford's Mk.II Zephyr, the Morris Marshall ( a local, Morris-branded version of the Austin A95 Westminster), and the Holden's own GM stablemate, the Vauxhall PA Velox. All were assembled on Australian shores and were far better than anything the FJ had faced, but all had their little foibles that could veto a purchase. 

It might've been quite good as a British Austin, but as a local Morris it was, like all British cars of this period, rather out of its depth (source).

After extensive road-testing, Motor Manual concluded that the Marshall offered the best handling, and its huge fuel tank gave it excellent touring range, but there was too much road shock coming up through the steering wheel once you hit the dirt. There was also a fair bit of sticker shock involved, as it retailed for an eye-watering £1,459 ($57,000 in 2024). 

Yes, I know the badge says "Cresta", it's close enough. It's hard to find images of the '58 when the '60 was so much more attractive (source).

The Velox (assembled by GM-H themselves and sold as an up-market alternative to a Holden) was probably the best car overall, offering a similar ownership experience to the Holden, but with a better engine, better interior, and generally just better overall. However, "similar to the Holden" wasn't good enough when the asking price was £1,437 ($56,000) – even if it wasn't as pricy as a Marshall, it was still £232 more than the Holden.

As we know, the Mk.II was the first Zephyr able to justify its extra cost. No wonder Ford made it the linchpin of their expansion plans for coming decade.

Surprisingly, it was the Zephyr that came closest to unseating the Holden, featuring the most powerful engine in the test (64 kW), but with a question mark over its fuel economy and concerns that its MacPherson strut front suspension didn't do enough to isolate the body from the rough stuff. And at £1,362 (just over $53,000), it still cost £157 more than the Holden. Overall, while the British cars were better whenever you had a sealed highway under you, none were as comfortable as the Holden when the going got tough. What's more, the FC's extra boot space and sensible placement of the spare tyre (where you could retrieve it without emptying out the entire boot first) gave it an edge over the others even before you sat down with your bank manager to talk finance. Wheels magazine wisely summed it up as: "A worthy continuance of the combination of features which made the previous model so popular. The designers have steered an excellent course through the paths of compromise. Holden has far fewer faults than many cars with higher price tags and imposing overseas origins."

But as Uncle Henry taught us, "You will come to see a man learns nothing from winning." Holden had worked hard to get where they were, but after ten years there was a definite "born to rule" mentality setting in, that would come back to haunt them once their rivals started releasing seriously competitive machinery. Holden might've been banking plenty of cash reserves, but the hard lessons – the kind you can only get from losing – were all going to their rivals, especially the other two Detroit giants at Norlane and Mile End South.

1957: To The Stars

A quiet end to 1957 came with the launch of a metal beach ball with aerials, better known as Sputnik 1. Quiet, yet profoundly disquieting: the simple, incessant beeping of its radio signal broadcast to the world that the Soviet Union now had the ability to drop a nuclear warhead anywhere on Earth.

Source: Colorado State University

Sputnik had been prompted by a U.S. announcement that they would soon launch a satellite of their own. The Soviets aimed to undercut the Americans by beating them to it, which is the main reason Sputnik 1 was such a simple device. They'd originally planned a much larger satellite incorporating scientific instruments measuring the solar wind, magnetic fields and cosmic rays, but the tight deadline meant they had to drop it for a very basic, proof-of-concept launch. The original device eventually flew as Sputnik 3, leaving Sputnik 1 to be... well, this video describes it best.

But what it was mattered less than where it was I.e. low-Earth orbit. As XKCD taught us, getting to space is relatively easy: the tricky part is staying there. Hitler's V2 rockets officially became the first works of our hands to reach space, peaking at a maximum 206km altitude if launched vertically, but these never carried enough fuel to boost their explosive payload into orbit. To do that, you needed to accelerate the vehicle to just shy of 8 kilometres per second, which wasn't a feasible goal for a Nazi mad-science project powered by haircare products. To do that required the unfathomable resources of a superpower with a chip on their shoulder.

Sputnik captivated the public like no satellite ever would again. Parties were thrown where everyone would go outside and lie down on the grass, hoping to spot it as it whizzed overhead. Ham radio enthusiasts worked feverishly to cobble together short-wave sets in the hope of hearing its famous beeping signal. Sadly, the window to do that was quite short, as the batteries ran out on 22 October 1957 – just 18 days after it had been launched.

But to those with young eyes, it was still visible in the sky if the orbit lined up right. Kurt Gottlieb, a design engineer at the Mount Stromlo observatory, told The Canberra Times it was, "a little brighter than the faintest star in the southern Cross." A certain Kym, 74, from Palmerston near Darwin, commented this to YouTube:

I saw Sputnik pass overhead, just south of Adelaide Australia on 4th October 1957. I was seven and with my uncle Dave at Christie's Beach. He had a pair of binoculars. Sputnik passed overhead from north-west to south-east, just after 8 p.m. local time – shortly after sunset. The evening sunlight was reflected by Sputnik's polished sphere, enough for it to be seen with binoculars or a telescope as a small light. I've been a Space Race kid ever since – and still have Dave's binoculars.

By the end of October, a Dr Przybyleski was able to comment that Sputnik's orbit was getting just over 4 seconds faster each day. A racing driver would commit bloody-handed murder to achieve something like that, but for Sputnik that could only mean its orbit was decaying – by pure geometry, a lower orbit is a faster one. Dr Przybyleski said it had lost 80km of altitude since its launch, and this indeed was the reason the Soviets had made it a sphere, so they could use its orbital decay to learn about the upper atmosphere. Sure enough, some time on 4 January 1958, Sputnik 1 finally fell back to Earth and burned up on re-entry, an event that took place somewhere near California. An Encino man claimed to find something glowing in his backyard that turned out to be the charred remains of a rubber hose, but whether it was actually part of Sputnik has never been determined.

Today the sky is so cluttered with orbital bits and bobs it's become the premise of a Sandra Bullock film, so it's sobering to consider that in 1957 no-one had ever seen a man-made object orbit the Earth before. I've heard tales of uncontacted peoples whose first experience of the outside world was noticing the satellites above and wondering what the hell they were, but I can't find them now so I can't comment on how true they are. What I can say is that some people will still set an alarm for a Starlink launch, and the real enthusiasts will still look for Iridium flares, but overall we've become a bit inured to it. So take a moment, once in a while, to cast your mind back to the days when everything was mechanical, and imagine what it must've been like to look up and see a new star gliding across the sky at warp speed – to see something that human eyes had never seen before.

Country Roads: The 1957 Coonabarabran Speed Trials

The traditional complaint about American cars is that they're only fast in a straight line.

Well, what if that's all you're looking for?

(Source: Primotipo)

How Leonard got his Pennies
Defeat at Albert Park didn't dim Len Lukey's star in the slightest. The Melbourne-born businessman might've come to racing relatively late – aged 32, having already established Lukey Mufflers at 1142 Nepean Highway in Highett, Victoria – but many a slow start has been made up with some slick gear changes and opportunism. The sheer attitude with which Lukey attacked the racing scene made it clear this was not a man who let opportunities slip by.

Leonard Frank Lukey began his motor racing career in a 1953 Anniversary Mainline ute, which also happened to serve as his runabout on workdays. The ute was probably a better choice for racing anyway, given it was lighter than the sedan, but it came with the perennial utility handling defect – no weight over the rear wheels. Rocking up in 1954 for the inaugural meeting at the new Altona circuit (a swampy, snake-infested road ringing Cherry Lake, south-west of Melbourne), Lukey's inexperience gave him away when he bombed into the Esses at unabated speed and spun... right in front of Stan Jones' expensive new Maybach 2 Grand Prix car.

It's unclear whether the father of the famously combative Alan Jones had a few short words with Lukey, but either way CAMS (the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport, motor racing's governing body), voted to ban utilities from touring car racing shortly after, arguing that they were "inappropriate". Undeterred, Lukey switched to a navy-blue '55 Customline sedan (rego GJL-432), on the theory that neutral handling and V8 power covereth a multitude of sins. If nothing else, the lazy, pig-iron burble of its Ford Y-block would make a thrilling counter-note to the snarl of Holden sixes.

Lukey rounding the hairpin in the Melford Motors Trophy, a 5-lap sprint at Fishermans Bend, 12 February 1956. A lap or so later, while trying to run down Hurst's Delahaye, he ran out of brakes and speared off the track, rejoining chastened but undamaged. Also in the race was Jack Myers, his cream 48-215 sporting a green roof. Screengrab from the Ken Rankine footage linked below.

To make it into a racecar, Lukey turned to another motor industry insider with a taste for racing – Harry Firth. At this stage Harry was known more for his work with small British sports cars (apparently, he built twelve MG Specials during this period... plus a Triumph!), but Lukey knew his talents would apply just as well to a big American saloon. Most of his time was spent tidying up the minor mistakes inherent to a mass-produced vehicle: ensuring the internal clearances right, raising the compression ratio, and getting the oil surge under control. The suspension was stiffened with heavy-duty springs and Armstrong shock absorbers, and he also ported the cylinder heads for better flow and crafted a special high-performance valvetrain. The final touch was a set of Lukey's own high-flow exhaust extractors, which were especially designed to work with a huge pair of two-barrel carburettors adapted from a Ford truck. Harry claimed around 186 kW at 6,000rpm from his tweaked Y-block, which was good for a top speed above 190km/h with the right diff and gear ratios.

The only thing he couldn't do was reduce the Customline's immense weight, which left its cast-iron drum brakes overworked and prone to severe heat fade after just a few laps. Firth replaced them with new drums of his own design (cast locally, with integral fins to aid cooling), and fitted special Ferodo high-temp brake linings that only worked when hot, but braking zones remained the car's biggest weakness.

Still, Lukey started breaking records as soon as he gave the car its debut, at the Templestowe hill climb in Melbourne's outer east on Sunday, 3 July 1955. From there, he quickly set class records at Rob Roy and Hepburn Springs as well, then set the fastest time for a sedan over the quarter-mile (171.5 km/h) at the South Pacific Road Racing Championships meeting at Gnoo Blas, 30 January 1956. He also handily beat Jack Myers, an early iteration of the Holden-vs-Ford rivalry that also happened to play to the eternal bitterness between Melbourne and Sydney.

Lukey soon graduated to a front-engined Cooper-Bristol for Gold Star open-wheel racing, but he still used the Customline to contest the supporting touring car races (as the Cooper's tow car, he had to bring it along anyway!). He saw plenty of success, too, at least until the opening meeting of the new Phillip Island circuit on 15 December 1956. Here Lukey had one of his little mishaps, which this time had big consequences: the car rolled at the Southern Loop, and Lukey himself was lucky to crawl out from behind the wheel alive.

The car would need an extensive stay at the panelbeater's, so Lukey removed its Firth-fettled race engine, souped-up brakes and suspension and installed them in a new Olympia Blue 1956 model, which also became the Cooper's new tow car. Lukey simply picked up where he'd left off, contesting (and not infrequently, winning) his class in hill climbs and the touring car support races at any meeting where he was racing the Cooper-Bristol.

Then, in September 1957, he took it to the most unlikely place imaginable – a nondescript stretch of road cutting through the scrub between the towns of Coonabarabran and Baradine, in rural NSW.

The BP-COR Speed Trials
We've already noted how public outrage over their chicanery had forced the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to rebrand as British Petroleum. What we haven't really covered were the knock-on effects here in Australia. The local branch of the company had been Commonwealth Oil Refineries, established in 1920 in partnership with the government of Prime Minister Billy Hughes. Now we were in the golden age of Menzies, however, the Party was just itching to offload its share so they could do what Liberals always do, privatise everything. The decision brought a howl of protest from Hughes – his final ever speech to Parliament – but the decision went through and the government's share was sold back to AIOC in 1952.

But the cost of the share buyback was substantial and, coupled with the 1954 rebrand as BP, necessitated an ongoing promotional blitz, one big enough to sustain them through the change and keep their new green-and-yellow signage in the public eye. One idea floated in early 1956 was to sponsor some Australian land speed record attempts – a publicity stunt of course, but one with at least a sheen of substance. BP commissioned one Graham Hoinville (a rally navigator, CAMS administrator and, not least, one of their own employees) to scout suitable locations, and after working through a shortlist he selected a six-kilometre section of dead-straight road linking Coonabarabran and Baradine, just north of the Warrumbungle National Park.

The Coonabarabran Shire Council and NSW Police agreed to the proposal, and arrangements were made to close the road for two days. First prize for the BP-COR Speed Trial was set at £275 (nearly $11,000 in 2024), with profits from the event going towards the construction of homes for seniors in Coonabarabran. The road itself was only 5.5 metres wide (it's not much wider today) and had a pronounced crown, bounded to the east by trees and to the west by the Gwabegar branch railway line and a string of telegraph poles, with additional hazards provided by the small dirt roads accessing the farms. The main industries in this part of the world were forestry and cattle grazing, and indeed the road ran right past the gates of Tipperary Station (not to be confused with the huge one in the Northern Territory): for the day, the spot became known as the Tipperary Flying Mile. Since it had recently been resurfaced there was no central white line and, considering this important, painters were brought in to apply one by hand – all five kilometres of it!

Officials looking exactly as professional as they were. Note the car battery powering the equipment! (Source: Primotipo)

Being at its core a big advertisement, only BP-contracted drivers were selected for the event. The "Racing Cars" category included Lex Davison's Ferrari 500/625, John McMillan's Ferrari 555 Super Squalo, and Len Lukey's immaculate Cooper T23 Bristol. "Sports Cars" counted Derek Jolly's Aussie-built Decca Mk.2 Climax, and Lukey's Olympia Blue Ford Customline. At the last minute it was decided to include motorcyclists as well, and despite the short notice they managed to get Jack Forrest (of Forrest's Elbow fame) and his ex-works BMW Rennsport 500, Trevor Pound (Eric Walsh's BSA Bantam) and Jack Ahearn, with his Manx Norton 350 and a 250cc NSU Sportmax. Sidecars were represented by Frank Sinclair's 1,080cc Vincent and Bernie Mack's Norton 500.

The first day – Saturday, 28 September 1957 – was warm and dogged by strong winds, either caused by or contributing to some nearby bushfires. Ideally, all record attempts would've been held in the cool of the morning for peak engine performance, but media demands meant they had to be held later in the day. That meant the morning was free for last-minute testing, which led to tragedy. Jimmy Johnson (not to be confused with the seven-time NASCAR champion), a Leichhardt garage owner by day, decided to give his MG TC Special one last test run shortly after dawn to check whether a persistent misfire had been sorted. Johnson arrived at the Tipperary Station gates around 6:30am at maximum speed – listening carefully to his engine, but his mind perhaps not fully on the road in front of him. Since the Trials hadn't officially begun the road was still open to normal traffic, and a fuel truck – just a speck in the distance a moment earlier – unexpectedly turned right to enter the Station, just as Johnson arrived on the scene. Johnson went underneath it and was killed instantly. The truck didn't have external rear mirrors, so its driver hadn't been aware of Johnson's advent until it was too late. It was an inauspicious beginning given the event hadn't technically started yet...

Despite the loss of Johnson, the bushfires and the winds – all of which threatened to cancel the event outright – there were still 3,000 spectators in attendance, which is a substantial proportion of the district today, never mind seventy years ago. As the winds were so blustery, motorcycle attempts were postponed until the Sunday. As per Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) rules, a record attempt would consist of two runs, one in each direction, which had to be made within one hour. Each run would be timed to the hundredth of a second. Cars would make their attempt over the flying kilometre, while bikes would be measured for a flying half-mile. John Crouch and George Hutchings were the official CAMS observers.

• Class C (3,001-5,000cc): John McMillan set an early benchmark with a pair of runs averaging 152mph (244.62 km/h) in his Ferrari 555 Super Squalo. The Super Squalo was named for its bulging fuel tanks, which did indeed give it a sinister, shark-like appearance, but like any proper Italian car it refused to perform without extensive spanner work first. For reasons unknown, McMillan and his mechanic and been forced to virtually rebuild the car the morning of the trials, so 152mph was a good result given absolutely zero testing. Victorian Ted Gray did his best to beat it in the Tornado 2 Chev, but couldn't get it to run properly and resigned himself to trying again on Sunday.

McMillan's Super Squalo (front), Davison's Starlet (middle) and Gray's Tornado (rear) being wheeled up to the starting line. (Source: Primotipo)

• Class D (2,001-3,000cc): Lex Davison's mount was a champion already, chassis 005, the very Ferrari 500 "Starlet" aboard which Alberto Ascari had won his two World Championships. Since then the car had been rebuilt as a Ferrari 500/625 with a 3.0-litre Monza 750 engine, and sold into Australia for Formula Libre use, meaning Lex had Class D all to himself. In-keeping with established Dunlop practice, he deliberately used half-worn tyres for his runs to minimise losses from overly-deep treads: the result was an average of 155.99mph (249.58 km/h), breaking the Class D record of 143mph comfortably.
• Class E (1,501-2,000cc): Len Lukey set his sights on the existing record of 113mph in his beautifully-prepared Cooper-Bristol. Len and his mechanics fitted a more slender nose to improve aerodynamics, and also sealed in the sides of the cockpit. Although thereby plagued with overheating, Lukey averaged 147.46mph (235.94 km/h) on his runs, which were voted the best of the meet.
• Class G (751-1,100cc): The existing Class F record of 103.5mph would've been Johnson's target had he survived, so in his absence the meeting moved on. Class G was the challenge set before South Australia's Derek Jolly, scion of the Penfold family of Barossa Valley wine fame. His Climax-engined Decca Mk.2 Special was one of only two Australian-built cars (and the only proper sports car) taking part that day. Modified by the fitment of a head fairing, his runs netted a combined 116.75mph (186.6 km/h), setting a new record.

Jolly racing the Decca at Port Wakefield. (Source: Primotipo)

• Class H (501-750cc): Cooper Cars Ltd had made their money (and their name) building small, sturdy cars for Britain's native 500cc formula, which the FIA had recently adopted as Formula 3. The imminent rear-engine revolution was thus not the result of any deep naval-gazing on their part, but simple pragmatism: the cars were powered by motorcycle engines, which used a chain drive to get that power to the rear wheels. Putting the engine in the back just made everything much simpler. Jim Madsen's Cooper was powered by a slightly larger BMW motorcycle engine, however, so he went faster than a true F3 car, 109.97mph (174.8 km/h).
• Class I (351-500cc): Last but not least, Roy Blake climbed aboard a true Formula 3 car, a Cooper-JAP owned by Steve de Bord. "JAP" referred its 500cc motorcycle engine, built from the soon-to-be-defunct John Alfred Prestwich Industries. Despite an engine, "about half the size of a Morris Minor," Blake cut the traps at an impressive 102.47mph (164.8 km/h).

As an extra bit of excitement, Len Lukey unhitched his new Olympica Blue '56 Cusso and went to town with it, sealing up every crack with masking tape, enclosing as much of the radiator as he dared, and placing pointed cones over the headlights to eliminate these virtual parachutes. The car was so buttoned up he had to climb in and out via the window, but the result was phenomenal, stopping the timers with an opening run of 130mph (209 km/h)... aided, admittedly, by a tail wind. Even so, the average of his two runs was still better than 123.3 mph (198.4 km/h), of which the official results noted admiringly: "This is the fastest speed yet recorded in Australia by a saloon car." And observers at the time said, if BP's antiquated timing equipment hadn't been on the blink, it might've been even faster.

Lads in Leather
By Sunday, 29 September, the winds had mercifully abated, and the bikes finally got their chance. Jack Ahearn rode three different machines that day, his most notable runs taking the 251-350cc Solo class on his Norton Manx 350 at 125.68 mph (202 km/h), and the 175-250cc class with his NSU Sportmax at 121.25mph (195 km/h). Frank Sinclair took the big 1,200cc Sidecar class with his Vincent HRD at 124.25mph (199 km/h) with Bernie Mack's "newly-acquired" Norton making easy work of the 500cc Sidecar class at 122.22mph (196 km/h). Jimmy Guilfoyle was unlucky after clocking 124mph on his streamlined 350cc BSA Special (BSA meaning Birmingham Small Arms Co.), as gusting winds prevented him making a return run. Trevor Pound (riding Eric Walsh's 123cc BSA Bantam) was equally unlucky, clocking 103mph in one direction but unable to make a return run within the required time due to a faulty magneto.

But the ride of the day surely belonged to Jack Forrest. Born in Wellington, NSW in 1920, he was known to be a brave man who lived large, and briefly held the title of fastest man in Australia. In an effort to raise the gearing of his BMW Rennsport, Jack and his mechanic Don Bain had fitted a larger-section rear tyre. Unfortunately, on his first run along the Tipperary Flying Mile, centrifugal force swelled the tyre so much that it jammed against the swinging arm, melting the rubber, locking the rear wheel and leaving a black skid mark on the road that was still visible over a year later. With the clock ticking and no other tyres available, Baradine garage owner Vane Mills stepped up and vulcanised the spot where the tyre had worn through to the canvas. With this bodged-up rear tyre, Forrest climbed back on his bike and roared through the speed traps at 152mph, despite the BMW developing an almost uncontrollable tank-slapper. Forrest set a new outright motorcycle record of 149mph (239.8 km/h) despite the ruined rear tyre, handling woes and, oh yeah, an encounter with a flock of galahs that left visible damage on the front fairing.

Forrest after the Run: note the galah-divots. (Source: Primotipo)

Bi-State Tornado
The star of the event, however, ended up being Ted Gray and his home-brewed Tornado 2 Chev. A Wangaratta native, Gray had made some headlines in 1946 when he recorded a 73mph average speed (117 km/h) on the trip from Wangaratta to Melbourne to win a bet. In those days the Hume was a simple two-lane country road, a world away from the poor man's autobahn it is today, so Ted must've driven with some attitude to manage that time. But he was probably quite familiar with the route, as his home and motor dealership were in Wangaratta, but at least one account mentions an engineering shop in Little Bourke Street (today the heart of Melbourne's Chinatown).

The original Tornado chassis (retroactively the Tornado 1) had been built by Gray to compete in local Formula Libre events. Typical of the time, it was a real bitza – Lancia stub axles, Peugeot steering rack, even the brake mechanism from a World War II P-51 Mustang – but the centrepiece was of course its engine. A Ford Mercury V8 bored and stroked to more than 5.0 litres, with locally-cast aluminium pushrod heads to replace the side-valve originals and – a first for Australia – fuel injection. This was the responsibility of Gray's partner in crime, Lou Abrahams.

The Tornado 1 made its debut at Gnoo Blas, Orange in January 1955, but its career was cut short before the end of the year. Gray and Abrahams took it to the NSW Road Racing Championship at Mount Panorama that October, and virtually wrote it off in a monster shunt Gray was lucky to escape alive. Rather than try to rebuild the car, they decided to salvage what they could and build something better.

Abrahams got to work on the Tornado 2 while Gray was recovering from his injuries in hospital (a process that took six months). The new car was a conventional ladder-frame design that inherited the original's Peugeot steering, Lancia stub axle and Holden suspension components, the Halibrand diff, Ford engine and gearbox. The P-51 Mustang braking system however was junked in favour of conventional drums-all-round system, built by Paton's Brakes in Melbourne, later a Repco subsidiary. It was clothed in a fibreglass body painted deep blue, with a red ring around the radiator inlet.

The car returned to the track well before its driver, contesting a handful of minor events with Ford power, but late in 1957 Gray and Abrahams replaced the ageing Mercury V8 with a 283ci Chevy small-block, as seen in Chevrolet's post-1955 Corvettes. Exactly how Gray got his hands on a Corvette engine in 1957 is something I'd love to know: Primotipo says it was, "sourced using contacts of Abrahams and Jack Mayberry at Holden," which is good but frustratingly vague. GM-H offered Chevrolets, Pontiacs and Vauxhalls as prestige buys above their bread-and-butter Holdens, but even so Chevy small-blocks couldn't have been thick on the ground at that time. A clue might be the so-called "Carter Corvette", which was a similar project built a year later by Murray Carter: he originally planned to build a Formula Libre car using conventional Holden Grey power, but Melbourne car dealer Boyanton Motors was able to offer him a 283 after a customer ordered one for a power boat, then went bust. However they got their hands on it, the Chevy V8 was an obvious upgrade over the Mercury – lighter, designed for overhead valves from the beginning, and there were plenty of parts on sale in the U.S. if you were looking for more performance.

With the Speed Trials starting on 28 September, however, Gray and Abrahams were left with only a week to adapt the Chevy to the Ford gearbox, fit the fuel injection system and get the whole ensemble running. The car was actually taken off the trailer during the 1,000km tow to Coonabarabran and driven over 300km on public roads to run the engine in! By all accounts it sounded like a Formula 5000 car, which must've stood plenty of hairs on necks along both sides of the Tipperary Flying Mile. Gray fitted the Tornado with a 3:1 final drive ratio and 19-inch wheels, aiming for a speed above 160mph.

Gray and the Tornado beginning their run. (Source: Primotipo)

Sadly, magneto dramas limited the engine to 5,300rpm, well below its intended redline. To compensate, overnight the team lowered the final drive to 2.8:1, and in this spec Ted achieved 157.53mph (253.5 km/h) on the Sunday to take the outright record from Davison's Ferrari. 157mph was faster than any Australian motorist would be able to go for quite some time yet.

There's some controversy over whether the BP-COR Speed Trials counted as genuine Australian record attempts (it will surprise nobody to report there were question marks over procedures on the day), but changes to the FIA's methods in 1983 render it a moot point anyway. As a promotional campaign, however, the meeting was a roaring success, and BP were very proud of what had been achieved, noting in their official release:

As the list of results shows, each of the competitors achieved a performance of which he can be very justly proud and it is obvious that a great deal of painstaking effort and skill was lavished on the preparation of each of the machines.

Also the enthusiasm and willing co-operation of all competitors, despite certain unavoidable difficulties, contributed very largely to the outstanding success of this meeting.

Today
I was recently able to make a pilgrimage out to the Tipperary Flying Mile (this being my neck of the woods, it's not such a long way after all...). I was hoping some of it might've matched up with photos from 1957, but of course, it doesn't. Trees grow, die, and then grow again too fast, and who knows how many times the road's been resurfaced in the decades since then? But it was nice to stare back up the infinite straight and imagine brave men roaring towards me in machines they'd cobbled together themselves, with the driver (or rider) himself considered to be the crumple zone, at speeds never before witnessed in this country. It's difficult to imagine.

The entry to Tipperary Station today. It should feel spooky remembering that a man died on this spot, but in truth it's not unusual for the roads out here to feature crosses. (Own work.)

What I didn't expect was to be equally distracted by the railway line. This section of the Gwabegar line only opened in 1923, after which it was maintained by (among others) one of my great-grandfathers. A fettler by trade, he worked to keep the line humming in the dark days of the 1930s, sometimes necessarily dragging along his young daughter (who I’m sure was an unholy nightmare even at that age). She later told stories of those days her son – my father – who then passed them on to me. So it was nice to take some time and walk a little way along the rails, sidestepping the small pines (the section above Coonabarabran closed in 2005), wondering if this spike or that sleeper had been laid down by my forebear, unlikely though it is. Grandma grew up to love Waratah motorcycles, so she certainly would've taken notice of the record attempts along the road where she used to play, and I'd love to hear her thoughts about it today. Sadly, I never knew to ask her while she was alive.

(Own work.)

 

Nevil Shute's "On The Beach": A Very Fifties Apocalypse

Content Warning: Includes discussions of suicide, and euthenasia of a child.

On The Beach is not a famous novel ("famous" in this context defined as, "even people who don't read books have heard of it"). But it's still pretty well-known, and I was prompted to track it down in dead-tree format after happening across Liam Pieper's mid-pandemic essay, On the Resolute Nihilism of an End-Times Classic. Pieper neatly described it as, "...a strange, dark novel – no plot and all coda … a book without villains, without antagonists, without conflict." Just the bleak inevitability of certain death, approaching at its own steady, measured pace.

Source: JSTOR Daily

For those who mightn't know, On The Beach is a 1957 novel written by British immigrant Nevil Shute, set in the not-too-distant future of 1963. It’s been roughly 18 months since World War III, a "short, bewildering war … of which no history had been written or would ever be written now." Atomic bombs have completely annihilated the northern hemisphere, and now all that radiation is slowly making its way south, drifting on the trade winds and poisoning everything in its path. Basically, it's HBO's Chernobyl if they never put the fire out.

Our dramatis personae are: Lieutenant-Commander Peter Holmes, a young RAN officer who loves his family and the sea in roughly equal measure; his wife Mary, a rather sexist caricature of a dutiful 1950s housewife, who spends most of the book in the denial stage of grief; Commander Dwight Towers, an American submarine captain whose crew survived the war, but whose wife and children were back in Connecticut; Moira Davidson, another sexist caricature, this time of a good-time girl who is nevertheless the most sympathetic character in the book; and Professor John Osborne, a CSIRO scientist who initially tags along to be the Spock to Dwight's Kirk, but slowly develops more personality than either of our two leads.

They're characters, barely, but they're not heroes, as their circumstances leave them without agency: there's nothing for them to do. The closest thing we have to a plot involves a pair of long-distance cruises aboard Dwight's command, the USS Scorpion, but there's no jeopardy to it because everyone already knows what they'll find. Everybody in the north is long dead, and everyone in the south will be following them soon enough. The only thing left to do is decide how to spend the handful of months they have left, months that become weeks, then days...

The War to End All of Everything
Shute's vision for World War III involved such an absurd sequence of events that I can only conclude the absurdity was the point. The first time we hear of it, he tells us very little:

...[Towers] learned for the first time of the Russo-Chinese war that had flared up out of the Russo-NATO war, initiated by Albania. He learned of the use of cobalt bombs by both the Russians and the Chinese...

At first I had to assume this was meant to reflect the confusion of events that moved too fast for anyone on the ground to keep up. Shute lived through both world wars, after all, and surely knew the strange texture of front pages full of propaganda, guesses, disinformation and the occasional stray bit of truth that slipped past the censors. During Scorpion's first cruise, Osborne and Towers discuss the war in more detail, Osborne revealing at least 4,700 devices were detonated if the seismic readings are to be believed – probably more. Which was a pretty pessimistic estimate when the novel was being written, as that would've been pretty close to all the nuclear weapons ever built. By the real 1963 however, the U.K. had 211 warheads, the Soviet Union just over 3,300, and the United States more than 25,000, which makes Osborne's numbers seem positively Polyannish. The expansion of the U.S. arsenal in the late 1950s was a feat of genuine insanity.

Although the Soviet stockpile was hardly comforting either. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The war supposedly started because Moscow needed a warm-water port (nothing ever changes...), their strategy to depopulate northern China so they could move in and take Shanghai; the Chinese counter-strategy was to revert the Soviets back to a pre-industrial people with no need for Shanghai. Both strategies involved blanketing large areas of the world with radioactive fallout, which brings about the consequences our cast spends the rest of the novel dealing with. It's worth noting, however, that although the novel technically has an omniscient third-person narrator, said narrator stays locked to our core characters and never weighs in on these matters. John Osborne has the seismic readings, but he doesn't actually know how the war was waged; similarly, Dwight Towers knows what the intel experts were predicting only weeks before his final cruise, but has no way of knowing if that's what actually happened. We only see what our main characters have see, hear what they’ve heard, so we’re allowed only a ground-level view of these vast events, creating a sense of realism and no small amount of claustrophobia. It's ironic that we feel most free during the chapters spent cooped up in a nuclear submarine – at least for that time we’re doing something.

That narrow, subjective view however is the only thing that salvages the weirdness that comes next. So far the course of events hasn't involved Britain at all, and for our extremely British author that cannot be allowed to stand. It takes a leap of imagination, but Shute finds a way to get nuclear weapons on London – a false-flag attack from that noted nuclear power, Egypt.

"The very first attack. They were Russian long range bombers, Il 626s, but they were Egyptian manned. They flew from Cairo."

"Are you sure that's true?"

"It's true enough. They got the one that landed at Porto Rico [sic] on the way home. They only found out it was Egyptian after we'd bombed Leningrad and Odessa and the nuclear establishments at Kharkov, Kuibyshev, and Molotov. Things must have happened kind of quick that day."

The Ilyushin Il 626 is a fictional aircraft, but it's also the least implausible part of that exchange. We don't need to look far for a reason a British author might be hostile toward Egypt, but come on. Ol' Nasser really must've been the Saddam of his day (as far as being the west's bogeyman, at least).

"The first one was the bomb on Naples. That was the Albanians, of course. Then there was the bomb on Tel Aviv. Nobody knows who dropped that one, not that I've heard, anyway. Then the British and Americans intervened and made that demonstration flight over Cairo. Next day the Egyptians sent out all the serviceable bombers that they'd got, six to Washington and seven to London. One got through to Washington, and two to London. After that there weren’t many American or British statesmen left alive."

So the course of this war is a bit strange, even a bit silly, but I'm still fairly sure that was the whole point. Events were confusing, and major decisions had to be made on the spot by low-level commanders. I have to wonder if a fair bit of this book is actually leftover trauma from the Second World War rather than anxiety about a Third. Shute didn't immigrate to Australia until 1950, but his description of the radiation coming south, of the cities of the Pacific going dark one by one, it sounds a bit like an echo of the nightmare days of 1942, when Hirohito's finest were popping up everywhere and seemed unstoppable. Similarly, his description of a society suddenly without oil hits harder when you remember petrol rationing wasn't that far in the past.

The Scorpion's Tale
I was a bit taken aback to realise Dwight Towers was the commander of USS Scorpion (SSN-589). Scorpion was launched in 1959, a couple of years after the novel's publication, and it sailed until 1968 when it was lost in an incident the U.S. Navy has never deigned to clarify. Someone almost definitely knows what happened, but speculation is rife that the Americans and their Soviet counterparts agreed not to talk about it publicly, so we'll probably never know. What we do know is that, along with USS Thresher, it was one of the two submarines Robert Ballard was searching for when he found the wreck of the Titanic in 1985 (the Navy's deal was, more or less: "We'll need a cover story so the Red Fleet doesn't come snooping... Titanic? Perfect! We'll even let you use any leftover budget to search for real, as long as you find our subs first...").

Scorpion's launch in Connecticut, 19 December 1959. (Source: Wikipedia)

Scorpion was highly-classified military tech at the time, but Shute still makes her sound far more advanced than she actually was. Holmes ends up seconded as Australian liaison aboard the American vessel, and early on he takes a tour of her engine spaces:

[Peter] had never served in an atomic powered ship, and as much of the equipment was classified for security a great deal of it was novel to him. He spent some time absorbing the general layout of the liquid sodium circuit to take heat from the reactor, the various heat exchangers, and the closed-cycle helium circuits for the twin high-speed turbines that drove the ship...

Nevil Shute had an engineering background, so he likely had contacts within the emerging nuclear industry who could pass on rumours of what was in the pipeline. The sodium-cooled reactor wasn't made up like the Il 626 (it was an experiment briefly tried in the 1960s), but it would've been massive overkill for a mere attack submarine. Sodium's big advantage is that it runs hot, allowing it to transfer much more energy in high-output use cases, but it comes with matching disadvantages – such as the fact sodium explodes when it touches water. Might not be the best thing to put on board a Navy vessel, especially when they don't need nearly as much power as an entire city. The real Scorpion ran a very basic water-cooled S5W reactor, because that was all she needed (sound military reasoning, I'm sure you'll agree, especially when it would be maintained by edgy 19-year-olds).

There's some irony that the only vessel capable of traversing the rad zone is a nuclear sub. With spicy rocks providing infinite electricity, Scorpion was able to make drinking water and breathable oxygen out of seawater, so the only limit on her endurance was food stores (today, the standard line about how long a nuclear sub can stay submerged is, "120 days, or 5 days after the coffee runs out"). Their first cruise is a simple recon trip up Australia's east coast and around the Top End, checking in on Cairns, Port Moresby and Darwin. Darwin would've looked much like it did in Baz Luhrman's Australia, but the mention of Cairns and Green Island cut deep for Yours Truly. We as a family went on holiday there in 2000 to get away from the Sydney Olympics, and made some fantastic memories along the way. The whole section reads like a reverse Mary Celeste, where the ship is inhabited and it's the rest of the world that's eerily vacant – except we know why everyone's gone in this story. The radiation levels are so high an unshielded person would survive only a few days in Cairns, and even less in Darwin.

The Saline Solution
The thing that made me want to read On The Beach was the question of radioactive fallout: What did Shute know, in 1957? When did the public become aware that atomic bombs weren't just big firecrackers, and a radioactive Sword of Damocles was now dangling over all our heads? Because it manifestly wasn't 1945.

The guru on this stuff is of course Alex Wellerstein of the Nuclear Secrecy blog, and way back in 2012 he wrote about who knew about radiation sickness, and when. The scientists who developed the bomb certainly knew there'd be radiation effects, but apparently that intel never got passed up the chain.

J. Robert Oppenheimer never seemed to be very interested in that. Why not? It remains something of a mystery — how do you find out why someone wasn't interested in something? ...

Because Oppenheimer didn't know/care about radiation effects, General Leslie Groves didn't really, either. Groves actually thought he could march American troops through an area that was recently atomic bombed — had he been given the opportunity to do so, his ignorance would have actually cost American lives.

If Groves didn't know/care, then the Targeting Committee and Interim Committee, Secretary of War Henry Stimson's turf, didn't know at all. If Stimson didn't know, Truman didn't know. … They didn't really care, they didn't really know, and it never got passed up.

So I did some digging, expecting the tipping point to be the Crossroads Baker test, or maybe Castle Bravo (which I've briefly mentioned before). But the real moment appears to've been a radio broadcast by physicist Leó Szilárd on 26 February 1950. The true author of the Einstein-Szilárd letter, which kicked off the Manhattan Project (Einstein merely signed it to give it some clout – celebrity endorsements aren't new), Szilárd was a pacifist who, in the post-war world, was vigorously campaigning for nuclear disarmament. He was trying to scare us straight, warning that nuclear weapon technology would soon reach the point where we could end human life on Earth. I've been able to find neither a recording nor a transcript of this broadcast, sadly, but all the sources agree this was when Szilárd described the cobalt bomb, also known as the "salted" nuke – as in salting the Earth, to ensure nothing could ever grow there again. Which handily also answered my question about why this book (and films like Dr Strangelove) were all obsessed with cobalt.

The 27th element, cobalt is named after kobold, the German word for "goblin", because miners in the Holy Roman Empire found its bluish ores were poor in known metals and gave off toxic arsenic fumes when smelted. When isolated in 1735, it was the first new metal to be discovered since antiquity, and was named "cobalt" in honour of those long-suffering German miners. The human body needs it in trace amounts, as it's a component of Vitamin B12. Virtually all natural cobalt is Cobalt-59, a stable isotope with 27 protons and 32 neutrons. But if you place it beside a neutron source – say, a working nuclear reactor – it can absorb an extra neutron and become Cobalt-60, one of the most dangerously radioactive substances on Earth. Cobalt-60 has a half-life of 5.27 years, or right in the sweet spot to be harmful to humans – any shorter and it wouldn't hang around long enough to cause trouble (nuclear blasts result in some seriously spicy fission products, but they're virtually gone within 72 hours), any longer and the radiation would be so mild it's barely above background. Instead, Cobalt-60 emits three main decay releases, one beta and two gamma – and the gamma decays both have extremely high energy. For this reason, cobalt rods are engraved with one of the most famous warnings in the industry: "Drop & Run".

Some joke it should just read, "You Poor Bastard".

At the time of Szilárd's speech, cobalt rods were just being introduced as sources for radiotherapy machines – a revolution in cancer treatment – so the element was already in the public eye. Szilárd theorised that it wouldn't be hard to jacket a nuclear weapon in stable cobalt and let the neutron release of the explosion convert it all to Cobalt-60, which would then be vapourised and carried on the winds to God-knows-where.

According to Wellerstein (again), a 30-year-old physicist named Frederick Reines did some back-of-the-envelope calculations back in 1947 to work out what it would take to irradiate the entire planet. Assuming a uniform spherical shell around the Earth (that "spherical chickens in a vacuum" joke is barely an exaggeration), he worked out that it would take a staggering 900,000 devices to give the entire world acute radiation sickness, or ARS. However, the only devices available in 1947 were Fat Man implosion bombs of around 20 kilotons, so...

That does, however, work out to "only" 18,000 megatons, which, in the thermonuclear age, is not so much after all – that is less than the peak megatonnage of the US Cold War nuclear stockpile.

That equation becomes even less comforting if you're talking salted bombs. Theoretically, around 500 tons of cobalt would be enough to cover the the Earth to a density of 1 gramme per square kilometre, with each gramme producing half a gray (0.5 Gy) of ionising radiation per minute (I know, I can hear physicists groaning in the background, but for our purposes we'll say 1 Gy equals 100 Roentgen. Yes, I know they're measuring different things). So 0.1 Gy would raise your lifetime fatal cancer risk but otherwise be unnoticeable; 1 Gy results in radiation sickness and unambiguous spikes in cancer rates; 3-5 Gy for just six minutes would kill half the population within 30 days; 10 Gy would mean 100 percent mortality rates within days. The timescale in the book, with total mortality occurring within a fortnight, seems consistent with exposures somewhere in the 8-10 Gy bracket.

It goes without saying, but ARS is one of the worst ways to die imaginable. Early symptoms include headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, fever and skin reddening (i.e. radiation burns). Following this there may be a latency period where the patient seems to recover, sometimes known (without the slightest hyperbole) as the Walking Ghost Phase. With sufficient medical care, such a victim might live long enough to die of thyroid cancer or leukaemia instead, though at higher doses it starts to get ugly. Like Chernobyl firefighter ugly. If you really want to traumatise yourself (and I mean that literally – genuine content warning here), look up what happened to Japanese nuclear worker Hisashi Ouchi in 1999. Yes, the man who suffered the most agonising, drawn-out death in history was named Ouchi; this reality is being written by a hack.

Everybody's Dead, Dave
Later in the book, Towers takes Holmes and Osborne for another cruise across the Pacific, this time to investigate an intermittent Morse signal coming from a naval base in Seattle. It's not a coherent signal – they speculate it might be a lone survivor never trained to use a Morse set – but it's still a signal, which requires power, and there isn't supposed to be any power up there. Of course, it turns out to be nothing. The bombs haven't touched the nearby hydroelectric plants, so the power grid is still live, and it just happened that a window blown open by the blast is now depressing the key of a Morse transmitter. Every time the wind blows, the window rocks, transmitting gibberish. With that, the last flame of hope is extinguished, and our trio sail back to Melbourne and, effectively, become unemployed. There's nothing else to do now but wait for the end to come.

The grimmest thing anyone could do is introduce a child into this situation, so of course that's what Shute did. Peter and Mary's baby daughter Jennifer is just starting to crawl (by the end of the book she's teething as well); Mary steadfastly refuses to confront what's about to happen to herself and her baby. She has Peter bring her home a playpen (on the tram, no less), then frets that it's painted green, which contains toxic verdigris ("No, it's Duco. She'd need to have acetone in her saliva to get that off."). When a case of measles breaks out on the sub, she makes Peter sleep outside to avoid giving it to Jennifer. When Peter, gently, explains how to use the provided syringe to euthanise Jennifer when the time comes, she flies into an incandescent rage. H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." He was talking about a gigantic semi-divine squid monster, so we may be grateful he never lived to see the nuclear age: the horror would simply have been out of his league.

Letting her have her delusions, Peter obediently helps Mary plant a garden they'll never see, while Dwight and Moira carry on with their awkwardly chaste non-affair. That leaves John Osborne to save us by growing a personality. Late in his life (perhaps stimulated by the 1956 Albert Park meetings), Nevil Shute was bitten by the racing bug, and his new passion was written into On The Beach. Before the cruise to Seattle, Osborne shows off his new toy, a shiny red Grand Prix Ferrari: "It's the one Donezetti raced the year before the war," he says proudly. "The one he won the Grand Prix of Syracuse on." (Some echoes of Brooklands, there? The traditions of horse racing survived longer at Brooklands than anywhere else. Drivers were distinguished by coloured jersies rather than numbers, and were said to sit "on" their cars rather than in them.) Well, the Syracuse Grand Prix was real, but there was never a piloti named Donezetti (intriguingly, there was a Luis Donizetti, but he was a Brazilian F3 driver from the '90s). Although descriptions are vague, it's clear what Shute was imagining was a front-engined car, so despite all his engineering nous apparently not even Nevil Shute saw the rear-engined revolution coming.

Which is a shame, because if it was from the 1961-'62 era, that would make it one of the iconic Ferrari 156 "Sharknoses". (Source: Ferrari Fan Club of Riga)

This machine Osborne intends to race in the final Australian Grand Prix, to be held at the fictional Tooradin circuit, presumably located near the town of Tooradin in South Gippsland. In geography it sounds like a loop of country roads, but in layout it sounds suspiciously similar to Phillip Island, which had opened a few years prior. We only see one of the qualifying heats, but it plays out as almost the platonic ideal of a motor race: with nothing to live for after the finish, everyone involved pushes to the absolute limit, with the result that even a mere heat ends with multiple fatalities. There's a scene later on where some paperwork needs to be signed in a hurry, so as the only person in the room with a functional car, Osborne acts as courier, roaring around the streets of Melbourne in the Ferrari – the 1950s version of that infamous scene from Driven, I suppose. He does end up winning the Grand Prix, but it occurs off-screen, our heroes hearing about it on the radio – as if to underscore that this, too, does not matter.

At the last, we start hearing cases of radiation sickness in Canberra, and John reminds us that the official announcements are always a few days late: through his CSIRO connections, he's able to reveal there are already cases in Albury. In effect, the radiation is already here: their time is up. One by one they start to feel sick, struck by bouts of vomiting or diarrhoea. The Australian government has already distributed the necessary suicide pills, so all that remains is to decide when to take them. Osborne swallows his sitting at the wheel of his beloved Ferrari; Peter and Mary Holmes give little Jennifer a needle, then curl up in bed together to take theirs. Dwight Towers and a skeleton crew take the Scorpion out to international waters to scuttle her, wary of leaving tech like that lying around for just anyone to find. And Moira...

I've barely talked about Moira, but she's easily the most likeable character in the entire story. People have criticised Shute for writing female stereotypes, but I don't think that's the whole truth. Moira is dragged into the story by the Holmeses, her mission (should she choose to accept it) to keep Dwight company and make sure he's kept too busy to grieve over his lost family in Connecticut. Throw a whore at him, in other words; a loose woman, a party girl. Except she kind of isn't. When we meet her she's a hard-drinking twenty-something (what other kind is there?), but she and Dwight never quite get together. Their quasi-relationship is quite weird, chaste to the point that it starts to feel like Dwight is leading her on, and yet... when the Commander is too hung up on his lost wife to sleep with this younger woman, Moira understands. When he seeks a pogo stick to give to his (long-dead) daughter as a Christmas present, Moira has her old one from childhood refurbished and gifts it to him. She's a subtle contrast to Mary, who – despite being cast as a model 1950s housewife – is actually very selfish in her traumatised, completely forgiveable way. Moira, under the same circumstances, is quite stunningly generous. Fallen woman? Not in your life!

The book's final scene follows Moira as she farewells Dwight from the Williamstown docks, then jumps in her father's Customline and races the Scorpion down through, "Laverton with its big aerodrome, Werribee with its experimental farm … [then] passed the grammar school away on the left and came to shabby, industrial Corio, and so to Geelong, dominated by the cathedral." From there, she roars through Barwon Heads and doesn't stop until she pulls up beside the Point Lonsdale lighthouse. Her reward is one final glimpse of the Scorpion – just a grey shape eight kilometres away – knowing Dwight would be there, standing proud atop the sail. Then she recites the Lord's prayer, takes her pills and washes them down with a last hit of brandy, and because she was our last POV character, that's the last thing we ever know from this story. The last humans in the last city on Earth have been snuffed out.

Yes, it's a grim read. I saw one commenter who said they took it to read in their downtime in Afghanistan, and couldn't finish it because it was more depressing than the war. It's been adapted for film twice, once in 1959 (which was allegedly so bad it hastened the author into an early grave), and once in 2000, which suffers mainly from being low-budget made-for-TV slop. I can imagine another reboot being done by – pick a name out of a hat – Denis Villeneuve, master of the long, beautiful static shot that would really make Melbourne look haunting. I can imagine him shooting that last scene to resemble the Bridge of Death sequence from Episode 1 of Chernobyl, the same ominous slow-motion as the particles descend and swirl, the same whuum-whuum leitmotif signalling that radioactive Death has finally come. It'd be a hell of a way for the human experiment to end.

Truth Hurts
The superpowers never stockpiled cobalt bombs, but don't take too much comfort from that. It wasn't out of any ethical concern, it was simply because they don't make very effective weapons. "Dirty bombs" are just too unreliable for serious militaries, leaving them the preserve of terrorists and anyone else who doesn't have to worry about collateral damage. You'd never get the kind of even radiation coverage Shute imagined, especially not the kind that would produce the frequent "beautiful sunny day/empty streets" paradox that makes On The Beach so haunting. But the phrase "nuclear winter" wasn't due to enter the lexicon until 1983, decades after Shute's own final extinction, so he wasn't to know radiation alone wasn't the problem. On The Beach is an artefact of its time, a specific and applied case of technophobia captured and preserved like a butterfly under glass. But despite what Pieper said, it's not a nihilist text, not even slightly. Shute is far too good at making us feel really sad about everything that's happening for the reader to embrace it as a grand return to Nirvana. He just had the balls to point out that, if the end really was nigh, most people would carry on doing what they were already doing anyway. And that, apparently, is just too confronting for most of us to bear.