Several depictions of the world after nuclear war are situated in Australia and the Pacific, and this chapter closely analyses the colonial and postcolonial politics of one such depiction in detail. Seminal post-nuclear-war text On the Beach (novel 1957; film 1959) is set in the region, as are short stories by Martin Amis and J. G. Ballard, the comic Tank Girl (1990; film 1995), and a section of Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989) (in some of these texts the psychosis of focalizing characters makes actual locations and historical events uncertain). Novels such as Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence (1949) and Philip Wylie's Triumph (1963) see Australia and New Zealand as privileged sites of survival – their location is deemed to offer a greater chance of avoiding the fallout generated by a Third World War. Another factor influencing this tradition of representation is that nuclear bomb tests took place in Australia and the Pacific, including American tests in the Marshall Islands and British tests at Maralinga in the Australian Western Desert.

More pertinently, this chapter argues that this recurrent feature of nuclear representations is also determined by a specific image of the Outback emerging from a colonial tradition of representation, an image of recalcitrant emptiness foreshadowing the ordering of cartography. The trope of seeing the Australian desert as an empty and indecipherable ‘soft place’ is a feature of the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985; also known as Mad Max III), directed by George Ogilvie and George Miller; this chapter unpicks the complex relationship between post-nuclear-war landscape and colonial settlement in this American-Australian co-production.

The post-nuclear-war landscape and narrative of the film is influenced by at least two cultural forces, namely the history of colonial representation and the pleasure that SF and related genres offer in fulfilling expectations of character development.