E-biking along a bush track in the far-flung parts of our shire a few weeks back, I noticed on the other side of a barbed wire fence a heavily bolted doorway embedded in a large mound of dirt.
I stopped to examine it at closer range, but there being no easy way to get over the fence, and with the idea lurking somewhere in the back of my mind that it might be a meth lab being guarded by machine-gun wielding crims, I observed from the fence-line.
It provoked a vague memory from my childhood, but I couldn’t quite put it together.
And then it dawned on me. The shape of the mound and the heavy door took me back to the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which momentous events in Cold War history I was 10 and 11.
It was the shape of a backyard nuclear fallout shelter.
Were they back in vogue?
Certainly Putin and the other schoolyard bullies of geopolitics have put the N-word back in our vocabulary, and not as a somewhat dubious source of alternative power.
Of course, we’ve been laughing off the corpulent Korean’s big bang threats for years, but this is potentially more serious as we enter into the most turbulent era since the 1960s.
This is not just the world view from Noosa, and in fact I remain optimistic that what used to be known as mutually assured destruction (MAD, appropriately) will trump (no pun intended) the crazed idea that political immortality can be achieved by destroying the planet.
But I do read the pundits of the loony left and ridiculous right from time to time, and then I refer to the almost daily missives that arrive at the Noosa Today news desk from our honorary global affairs editor, a prolific Indian gentleman named Kushal Kumar.
Of course these are not quite exclusive to us, since Mr Kumar also sends them out to about five million other news sources around the world, and like us, none of them publish him because what he writes may have something to do with Vedic astrology, whatever that is.
Just last week Kumar informed us: “Media news reports suggest that threat of World War 3 appears to be shaping up fast to grow real in the month of October 2022.”
He went on to quote Presidents Biden and Trump as saying that the nuclear threat was greater than at any time in 60 years.
Which gets us back to the hysteria of the school drills – “get under the desk and assume the brace position” – and those funny little steel-walled cubby houses of the middle of last century.
Fear of nuclear annihilation was a reality from the start of the post-war era, with memories of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but people who actually built backyard shelters were often ridiculed. My own fear of being nuked began in 1961 when, fresh from banging his shoe on the table at the UN, Nikita Kruschev built a wall through the middle of Berlin to prevent his own Soviet citizens fleeing from the deprivations of the Russian sector. It reached its peak the following year when Kennedy and Kruschev faced off over the instillation of nuclear missile firing sites 100 miles from the US in Cuba.
After I started sobbing at the breakfast table, Dad banned all political conversations and hid all newspapers in the laundry, where of course I found them and devoured the tear-stained shock horror front pages of the afternoon tabloids while he was at work.
I wasn’t alone in this paranoia.
The late playwright and master of dishevelment Bob Ellis confessed in later life that he and his girlfriend had stolen her father’s car and fled to the Blue Mountains, where at least they had a chance.
After a last night of bliss in the back seat, he woke and “found to my amazement the world hadn’t ended. There wasn’t a mushroom cloud over Sydney, and I had to bring her back and face down [her father].”
Understandably, the US was considered to be the most likely target of the Russian madmen, and predictably the mass marketers saw a solid future in fallout shelters and ridiculously inadequate protective suits, commercials for which were wedged between Disneyland and Bonanza.
Here in Australia we took a lighter and more reasoned approach, although there were many who advocated that we too could become the target of Russian aggression. Not that we didn’t already have a few problems with “friendly” atomic bombs being exploded on or near our soil.
In 1948 the Americans started atomic testing in the Marshall Islands in the near Pacific, and the environmental issues from that are still present today.
In 1953 the Brits joined the party, disgracefully testing their bombs on Indigenous land in outback South Australia.
But we still saw the funny side, particularly when, in the early ‘60s thousands of flyers were circulated in Sydney informing residents that they had been selected as a “nuclear warden” for their street and should have at least three buckets of water at the ready to put out fires from bombs, as well as a full pantry for feeding their neighbours if required.
Of course it was a hoax, and much of the stuff going around on social media now similarly requires a suspension of disbelief. But just because we are in perilous times, doesn’t mean we can’t have a laugh, perhaps in the spirit of the caption that accompanied an Arthur Lowe photo published in California in 1951: “Beautiful Mary Lou Miner suns herself atop a new West Los Angeles bomb shelter on Santa Monica Boulevard. If we’re not bombed, it’ll make a good den, play room, or dog house”.
Or here, perhaps a short term accommodation, if you’re prepared to pay the tax.
