‘These Final Hours’ Proves Australia’s The Perfect Place To Set Your Apocalypse Movie

This article contains spoilers for These Final Hours.

While shooting On The Beach in 1959, Ava Gardner described Melbourne as “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world.” In 2014, These Final Hours awards the title to Perth. With so much desert and so many endangered species, Australia’s got a head start on the apocalypse.

There’s a tradition of Australian stories about the precariousness of the nation’s existence, like Tomorrow When the War Began. Both On the Beach and These Final Hours rely on what Geoffrey Blainey famously called the “tyranny of distance” to create a growing sense of hopelessness and futility in the face of impending death. Geographic isolation and white occupants recognisable to American audiences make Australia a prime choice for this kind of story. Australia is a prime setting for the end of the world.

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The Apocalypse Is Coming, But Which One?

Both films set up an extinction event that was relatively instant for the Northern Hemisphere but with a lag time for the global south.  In On The Beach, it’s an invisible cloud of radiation that takes months to spread; in These Final Hours it’s a shockwave that takes only hours. Both films deal with the slowly-dawning realisation that nobody will make it out alive. Neither film is post-apocalyptic; despite what James Robert Douglas pointed out a few weeks back, nothing survives these catastrophes.

Grief is at the centre of both narratives. Everyone in both films is trying to grieve for themselves along with everyone that they love, all at once. But the emotional and political worlds of both films reveal that the way Australians think about the world has changed significantly since 1959. In On the Beach, a flash-fire nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere has left a cloud of invisible radioactive debris spreading south on the wind. Lt. Commander Peter Holmes and his wife Mary continue to plan their futures and that of their infant daughter despite their coming demise. American submarine Commander Dwight Towers, refusing to acknowledge his wife and children’s deaths in the US, refuses to fall in love with Moira Davidson, who drinks to mask her sorrow at the future family she’s been robbed of.

In These Final Hours, it’s a meteor that strikes the North Atlantic, and an inexorably deadly shockwave is spreading from ground zero. It will arrive in Perth in twelve hours, and everyone knows it. Jimmy is trying to navigate suburbs full of corpses and madmen, working his way to a rave at his mate Freddy’s house. On the way he picks up Rose, a girl who has lost contact with her father and wants to be reunited with him before the end. If On the Beach is all about depression and denial, appropriate to the atomic fear that characterised daily life in the 1950s, These Final Hours is about anger and bargaining, more in line with contemporary neoliberal individualism.

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Will Society End When The World Does?

On the Beach still stands alone in apocalyptic fiction as imagining a world in which the government and the social order not only continue in the face of certain extinction, but sustain those who remain as their doom approaches. The Holmes’ marriage contains their despair, the government and the armed forces keep the peace, and even when things start to fall apart, people are still kind to one another. It’s a genteel, classical liberal apocalypse, drawn from Shute’s own trust in the Westminster system and British society.

But just like Margaret Thatcher, These Final Hours doesn’t believe in society. Like so many American apocalypses before it, it’s a libertarian survivalist’s wet dream; there are guns and bunkers everywhere. An establishing shot of downtown Perth burning is reminiscent of September 11 coverage, along with the snippets of telephone conversations that accompany the meteor’s penetration of atmosphere in the opening shots of the film. Jimmy’s first encounter is with a machete-armed maniac, bereft of reason. A dishevelled policeman who has lost his way demonstrates that the state has dissolved alongside society.

For Shute, death comes lethargically in the form of radiation sickness. For Hilditch, it’s a white-hot curtain of flame. Shute’s characters can rely on a welfare state distributing free euthanasia pills as a last act of altruistic paternalism. Hilditch’s characters have only three options – violent suicide, self-medication, or facing the painful end straight. The apocalypse is more violent in 2014, but so are the suicides that precede it. Just as the legacies of Thatcher and Reagan have privatised healthcare, when people can’t face the end they have to manage it themselves.

Just as the Cold War context of On The Beach gave Shute the idea of a nuclear apocalypse, our neoliberal milieu has bequeathed These Final Hours with its particular extinction event. In an Australia that accepts climate change but refutes its anthropogenic qualities, what better way to end the world than an environmental disaster that wasn’t our fault? Shute’s nuclear war was definitely caused by humans, but not Australians. In These Final Hours, nobody can be blamed. Australia’s geographic distance, but also its place in the world as a minor player, infuses the despair with frustration. Both films ask, “What did we do to deserve this?”

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Australia: At The Ends Of The Earth

Australia’s geographic position conceals one very important aspect of that part of the world. The deaths of Rose in These Final Hours and Jennifer, the baby, in On the Beach, take place off screen; they are unrepresentable. Audiences cannot stomach seeing the death of a child. It’s one reason why the constant stream of wounded children coming out of the recent Israeli operation in Gaza is so shocking — unlike the rest of the Global South, Australians can comfortably ignore the fact that children are killed every day.

The reason that underpins life in the Global North continues on in Jimmy, who spends most of the film telling irrational women around him what to do. Rose often refuses to obey him, requiring her to be picked up and carried. His girlfriend Vicky is in denial about their chances of survival, which necessitates repeated rational explanations of their coming deaths. A hysterical woman who tries to adopt Rose as her own daughter is simply beyond understanding or reason.

On The Beach has the similar vignette of Peter Holmes calmly trying to explain that Mary may have to administer the suicide pills to their daughter which produces a torrent of hair-tearing and abuse. The state might go to shit, the world might be ending, but the gender order always survives the apocalypse.

Both stories are blunt but compelling, following characters desperately trying to make their last hours of life meaningful in the face of the obliteration of significance itself. Shute took On the Beach’s title from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’, which also includes the line “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper”. Eliot’s stately words can’t contain a modern apocalypse. In These Final Hours, the impending wasteland is brought by a rough beast, but it’s definitely not slouching.

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Nick Irving is a modern historian interested in twentieth-century Australia and America. He has written for Drum Unleashed and New Matilda, and can be found on Twitter at @beardyreviews or @nickrirving.

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These Final Hours is out now.