Underground Read Online Free PDF

National Museum, or for various government archives, or for any other such placewhere the national treasures and records might be in need of rescuing.
    Staring at those trucks, a dark part of me found the whole thing hilarious. Paintings by dead artists, relics of dead racehorses, old bats belonging to dead cricketers. How bizarre are the things we value? And once we’d saved the family jewels, well, sure—blow up Canberra by all means. I didn’t mind. It was such an
inconvenient
place. Off in the middle of nowhere. Stinking hot in summer. Freezing in winter. And totally soulless, all year round. Still, there were one or two decent restaurants I would miss, and what would happen to the nation’s sex industry, once the mail order warehouses and porn studios of Fyshwick had been vaporised? That, at least, was a grim business.
    Either way, after forty-eight hours of the most frenzied activity imaginable, Canberra was stripped of virtually everything that mattered. By then, it was populated purely by soldiers and police, some still searching for the bomb, but most of them sweeping through the suburbs, house by house, to make sure everyone was gone. The last evacuee left Canberra just fourteen hours before the deadline. And who do you think that person was? It was my brother, of course.
    The footage is famous. The Prime Minister waiting bravely until all his subjects have reached safety ahead of him, and then the farewell from the grassy lawn atop Parliament House. The solemn lowering of the flag, the final salute, the official party wafting away by helicopter, eastwards, fading into the ironic sunrise as hope and beauty die. Not a dry eye in the house. My brother—forever after to be known as Bernard ‘Last Man Out’ James.
    What bullshit. They left a cameraman behind to film that chopper flying away, for one thing. So maybe
he
was the last man out. Or most likely it was some anonymous soldier, performing a final sweep. And no doubt there were a few crazy loners who never left at all, hidden away cleverly from the evacuation teams—those who either refused to believe there really was a bomb, or those who were bent on looting until the last possible minute, or those who simply decided to martyr themselves in the fireball. Whoever the last man out was, it wasn’t the Prime Minister.
    Anyway, with an hour to go the army had pulled back to a fifty-kilometre radius from the city centre. Nine p.m. was zero hour. The highways were barricaded, the airspace over the town had been cleared. There was nothing to do now but wait and watch. I was safely ensconced in a Sydney bar by this stage, drinking up big for the occasion, eyes glued to the TV screens. Camera crews were filming from vantage points near Yass, a half-hour’s drive north of the capital. It was, without question, the most highly rated moment in television history—throughout the world, not just here in Australia. A live nuclear explosion was news, even if it was in some unheard-of little city far away down-under. The only frustration was that nothing of the actual town could be seen. From fifty k out there was little visible but hills and sheep paddocks and scrub.
    The explosion wasn’t bad though. It went off five minutes late, no doubt for the sake of good drama, and then the night sky lit up, white and stark and shocking. (The bar around me went dead silent.) For a moment after that there was only darkness, but then the cloud rose majestically over the hills. I’m told that to observers on the fifty-k limit, the fireball was in fact disappointingly small. They were just too far away. But for those of us in that bar, and for the billions of viewers around the globe, the television cameras zoomed in and it was an awesome sight, boiling and evil, and an indisputable sign that the world had changed forever, yet again.

    It sure as hell changed Australia. True, we’d been fighting the war on terror for years, and we already had some of the toughest security laws in