Chapter 1 Summary

On The Beach, written in 1957, is a story about a group of people spending the last six months of their lives waiting for the end of the world to arrive, casualties-to-be of radiation fallout from a nuclear war. The story takes place in 1961 in Melbourne, Australia, the southern-most city on the Australian continent. Numerous atomic bombs have detonated in the Northern Hemisphere of Earth and slowly, but steadily, the radiation fallout is moving into the Southern Hemisphere bringing certain death to everyone in its path. Soon every living person on the Earth will be dead. This story is about how they faced it.

Lt. Commander Peter Holmes of the royal Australian Navy, his wife Mary, and baby daughter Jennifer live in a bungalow in the country not far from Falmouth, Australia. It is just after Christmas and Peter and Mary have had a...