AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'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)
Adaptations
-
form
y
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.
-
form
y
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.
-
form
y
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.
Notes
-
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.
-
Condensed and translated for Reader's Digest, Mexico, in 1971.
-
Adapted for radio by the Australian Broadcasting Commission and broadcast in 13 parts from August 1951.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Braille.
- Sound recording.
- Large print.
Works about this Work
-
A Town Not Quite Like Alice
2021
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Inside Story , 13 August 2021;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.
-
An Epic Journey : The Making of A Town Like Alice Part 1
2016
single work
column
— Appears in: FilmInk , 17 May 2016; -
Writing on the Sheep's Back
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Author , June vol. 44 no. 2 2012; (p. 13-15) 'Bush fiction has a long and proud tradition in Australia but it has enjoyed a new lease of life over the past decade. Why is it booming agaian and what's different this time.' Nicole Alexander. -
The Historiography of Reading in Australia
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory 2010; (p. 139-151) Patrick Buckridge explores the historiography of reading in Australia and presents a discussion of why, what and how Australians read. -
Alice
2007
single work
prose
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 20 March 2007; (p. 4-5)
-
The Emotional Background
1950
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Week-End Review , 14 July vol. 1 no. 8 1950; (p. 118)
— Review of A Town Like Alice 1950 single work novel -
[Review] A Town Like Alice
2006
single work
review
— Appears in: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die 2006; (p. 519)
— Review of A Town Like Alice 1950 single work novel -
Remaindered with Little Honour in His Adopted Land
2003
single work
column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 25 July 2003; (p. 9) A column comparing the results of surveys undertaken early in 2003 in the United Kingdom and Australia. Readers were asked to nominate their favourite books. In the United Kingdom, readers included Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice in their top 100, but Shute's novel failed to make the Australian list. - y 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)
-
Revisiting A Town Like Alice
2006
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Feminist Studies , March vol. 21 no. 49 2006; (p. 85-1-1) -
Alice
2007
single work
prose
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 20 March 2007; (p. 4-5) -
'They Crucified Him' : Fiction of the Prisoner-of-War Experience under the Japanese and the Prisoner as Christ-Figure
2005
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Beyond Good And Evil? Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region 2005; (p. 53-64)
- Alice Springs, Southern Northern Territory, Northern Territory,
- Malaya, Southeast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
-
cJapan,cEast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
- 1940s