'Nevil Shute’s most beloved novel, a tale of love and war, follows its enterprising heroine from the Malayan jungle during World War II to the rugged Australian outback.
'Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese and forced on a brutal seven-month death march with dozens of other women and children. A few years after the war, Jean is back in England, the nightmare behind her. However, an unexpected inheritance inspires her to return to Malaya to give something back to the villagers who saved her life. But it turns out that they have a gift for her as well: the news that the young Australian soldier, Joe Harmon, who had risked his life to help the women, had miraculously survived. Jean’s search for Joe leads her to a desolate Australian outpost called Willstown, where she finds a challenge that will draw on all the resourcefulness and spirit that carried her through her war-time ordeals.' (Publication summary)
A Town Like Alice
Australia
:
ABC Radio National
,
1951
12880048
1951
series - publisher
radio play
An adaptation of Nevil Shute's novel for ABC radio.
A Town Like Alice
( dir. Jack Lee
)
London
:
Rank Organisation
,
1956
Z1220335
1956
single work
film/TV
Set in Malaya during the Second World War, A Town Like Alice tells the story of Englishwoman Jean Paget. When Paget is captured by the advancing Japanese army, she joins a group of women and children who are forced to march from prison camp to prison camp because the Japanese had devised no plan to deal with them. She later meets up with an Australian digger, Joe Harman, who hails from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. Although a prisoner of war, Joe is occasionally allowed outside his camp to help his guards, and subsequently helps the group with medicine and food, which he appropriates from the Japanese without their knowledge. When Joe is eventually caught and tried for stealing the commandant's chickens, he is sentenced to death. After being forced to watch him being tortured, Jean and the group are sent once more on the relentless march to nowhere. When their sole remaining guard later dies, they seek refuge in a village, where they remain until the war ends. Shortly before she returns to England, Jean finds out that Joe's execution was stayed and that he is still alive. She later travels to Alice Springs to find him. Joe, in the meantime, has travelled to England in pursuit of her. They eventually meet in the Alice Springs airport lounge and are finally able to express the emotion they feel for one another.
A Town Like Alice
Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice
( dir. David Stevens
)
Australia
:
Seven Network
Alice Productions
,
1981
Z1743377
1981
series - publisher
film/TV
romance
Set during and immediately after World War II, A Town Like Alice is both a love story and a war story. It spans two decades and three continents. The story begins with the capture of a group of civilian women by the Japanese and follows the nightmare of their captivity in the jungles of Malaya. It is during this time that one of the women, Englishwoman Jean Paget, meets a cheerful and laconic Australian prisoner of war, Joe Harman, who hails from Alice Springs. When he is tortured for a simple act of kindness, she believes that he has died. Later, after the war has ended, she discovers that he didn't die, and sets out to find him in Australia. Meanwhile, he travels to England to find her. The two are eventually reunited in the rugged outback of Australia.
Epigraph:
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
'When You Are Old', W. B. Yeats.
In 2021, Hamish McDonald visited Burketown in the Gulf of Carpentaria to look at 'the unlikely place' where Nevil Shute's 'infatuation' with remote Australia began. McDonald examines the changes in Burketown since Shute's writing of A Town Like Alice, especially the lives of the local Aboriginal population.
McDonald also comments on Shute's 'hatred' of the welfare state and illustrates the ways in which this disdain seeps through into Shute's fiction writing.
Prisoners of the Japanese : Literary Imagination and the Prisoner-of-War Experience
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
2006
Z1288176
2006
single work
criticism
'In this book Roger Bourke analyses the major novels and films of the prisoner-of-war experience under the Japanese, and uncovers the extent to which these fictions have influenced our beliefs.' (Back cover)
