Sheltering Down Under

by Charlie Canning

Sheltering Down Under is a meditation on the nuclear issue written from a bomb shelter in South Australia. In this essay, the spotlight is on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear tests of 1953, the Cold War, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Tokaimura (the accident before Fukushima).

Analogies and extended metaphors are drawn between the United States and the Brigadier in John Cheever's short story "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" and Australia and New Zealand as de facto bomb shelters for the Northern Hemisphere.

Kindle Edition

First published August 15, 2010

About the author

Charlie Canning published his first novel "The 89TH Temple" shortly after receiving a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide in 2012. A second novel "The Sign of Jonah" followed in 2015. He is currently working on a grey nomad road novel entitled "Gideon's Trumpet" and a memoir called "The Arnold Trail" about growing up in a family of cigarette and alcohol distributors in Maine.