ON a windy, blue-sky day, a crowd of about 2000 gathered at the Glenelg foreshore — and waited for Adelaide to be destroyed.
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It was a carnival of colour down there, with people carrying signs declaring the end to be nigh and urging with mock earnestness to "repent now", while kitted up in goggles and flippers, or with surfboards at the ready. Some added a more refined touch to the pending doom, dressing for fine dining, ready to sit down to their last supper.
It was January 19, 1976, and the City of Churches was fated to face its very own judgment day. Melburnian John Nash had predicted a tsunami would wipe out Adelaide — the wave presumably coursing down Anzac Highway, obliterating Colonel William Light's meticulously laid out terraces and boulevards and eventually turning nearby Mount Lofty "into a beach resort".
The latest doomsday blockbuster 2012 is based on the theory the world will end in 2012, the end date of the Mayan Long Count calendar.
Oh the joy and excitement of such folly — especially through the eyes of a 10-year-old — witnessing that festival of freaks, naysayers, the endlessly curious and the morbidly fatalistic.
And of course, the irrepressible Don Dunstan.
Armed with a megaphone, the reformist premier climbed above the crowd to reassure the throng that the sea would not swallow us up that day (just as my wise parents had assured me) — and then mingled among us until the fateful hour passed.
But what made Nash's doomsday prediction so interesting — for disasters and the end-of-days have been foretold over millennia by prophets, mystics, humble yak herders and the criminally insane — was just how many people believed him.
They really believed him. They packed up their belongings, sold up their homes and headed off to the Riverina — believed him! (The nervous but slightly more sceptical just sought the higher ground of the Adelaide hills.)
Nash had been variously described as a "housepainter" and "clairvoyant" — but with no established mystical credibility or, for that matter, any semblance of deep spiritual proclivity. From what I have since read — he did not claim to have been "chosen" by any of the great faiths to deliver forth his message.
And yet he was still believed. In the pre-internet age, his vision of destruction found a captive audience.
Perhaps it was simply a sign of the times. Here was a generation primed by some counter-culture mysticism and tuned to the apocalyptic timbre of post-Vietnam nihilism. A potent mix into which the disaster movie found its niche.
We had witnessed on screen the immense destruction wrought by the shifting of tectonic plates in Charlton Heston's Earthquake, and volcanic eruptions in the geographically challenged Krakatoa: East of Java. It was the decade of disaster — bold, fatuous and destructive — and Hollywood mined its dark material from nature, science, religion and the zeitgeist.
It is a formula that has continued to prove successful. End-of-day scenarios abound. Everything from biblical rapture, to the durability of the North Atlantic current and the search for the God particle under Switzerland, have found cinematic form.
But the doomsday seam is no longer buried in arcane text or scientific journals being shrewdly drilled by scriptwriters. The World Wide Web has exposed it, allowing everyone to go a'fossicking.
Hypertext has hyper-extended our reach into history's ancient realms and space's infinite possibilities. From there the dedicated and deranged have plucked obscure prophecies and prophesied on civilisations lost.
So, into this world of constant chatter, instant paranoia and quest for meaning beyond the material will come the latest big-budget disaster movie, 2012. And it's a doozy. Why? Because it has dusted off one of the biggest internet doomsday scenarios, courtesy of astronomical calculations thousands of years old, and spiced it up with some supervolcano action (yep, more catastrophic than Krakatoa).
Google "2012" and you will get a couple of hundred million hits, at last count. The fascination with this Mayan mystery knows no bounds. (One wonders, if a prediction from a housepainter in 1976 can cause sensible South Australians to turn quite skittish, what mischief or mayhem will an ancient puzzle — supercharged down the superhighway — unleash in three years' time?)
Very basically, the fuss surrounds the Mayan Long Count calendar. It runs over about 5125 years and its end date is — you guessed it — 2012. December 21, to be precise.
Now, because the calendar ends on that day, apparently so must the world! (Or at least it will be a day of great transformation, coinciding with a "galactic alignment".) A 2007 New York Times article, "The Final Days", catalogues some of the speculation surrounding 2012, with one academic postulating it has brought together the "religious right" and the "spiritual left" — The Book of Revelations meets New Age mysticism.
My favourite of the more unusual theories attached to 2012 is the Timewave Zero system, the brainchild of the late Terence McKenna. He believed "time" had more active properties — novelty and habit — and created a computer program of a time-scale wave that pictured the ebb and flow of "novelty" through history and into the future. Quite coincidentally, the wave peaked — or ended — in 2012. At that point, McKenna posited, artificial intelligence or time travel may occur.
So on December 21, 2012, I may head down to the Glenelg foreshore again and wait to catch another "wave" — in the form of McKenna's singularity. If time escapes its linear constraints, spirals into infinity or turns around on itself to touch the past, I might just get to see Don Dunstan in full swing again, megaphone in hand. Groovy.
Duska Sulicich is an Age editor.