GROUND ZERO: AUSTRALIA AT THE END OF THE WORLD

The short spike in international film production in Australia at the very end of the 1950s saw a partial shift of focus to urban settings. Three of the four major British and US productions made during this relatively brief moment in time – Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Season of Passion, Leslie Norman, 1959), The Siege of Pinchgut (Harry Watt, 1959) and On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959) – eschew the ‘outback’ for contemporary or marginally futuristic stories set within the expanding metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne. Yet only one of these films, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, provides a vibrant, energetic vision of the close living characteristic of the inner city. Both The Siege of Pinchgut and On the Beach use their respective cities as staging grounds for dramas that progressively depopulate their urban environments. The Siege of Pinchgut was made on a smaller scale and on a more mundane theme than On the Beach, yet its generic crime drama largely staged at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour shares some interesting commonalities with its more famous and prestigious cousin. It must have been striking indeed to view these two films on first release in Australia and compare their stark representation of two ‘rival’ cities that had, to this point, only very occasionally appeared in international or transnational productions.

In fact, aside from brief appearances in movies like The Road to Bali (Hal Walker, 1952), Melbourne had never been the focus of such a fiction feature before. Nevertheless, it is the city's palpable and actual sense of isolation, as well as its capacity to be rendered as both a specific place and a generic ‘anywhere’, as a modern metropolis and a colonial backwater, as both familiar (English-speaking but also an important base for US soldiers in World War II) and slightly exotic, that made it an appropriate geographic location for this widely publicised and discussed end-of- the- world drama. This was, of course, also justified by the pointed setting of the film's source novel as well as the ongoing if peripatetic practice of filming US and international productions in Australia throughout the 1950s.