It shows, says author, Judy Nunn, that someone had a perverse sense of the poetic.

Perhaps the same can be said of Judy Nunn who proved at last week’s literary dinner that she could add witty raconteur to her many talents: author, star of stage and screen and screen-writer, to name just a few.

More than a hundred book lovers turned up at the joint Macintyre Young Writers,-Queensland Library-Courier Little Book Club dinner at the Royal Hotel last week after an excursion in to the “theatre of the mind”.

Which isn’t surprising for an author who began her working life as a struggling actress in Sydney while the golden era of radio was fading.

Stints in London broadened her experience of life, stage and screen before she returned to the “land of oz” and starring roles on our television screens which included the show that pushed the boundaries of 1970’s values, “The Box” and more recently a long-running stint on “Home and Away”.

But it is her literary career which has allowed to open new doors of creation and delve more deeply in to the history of this “wide, brown land”.

Which is why she said, the British Government was so keen to drop a few atomic bombs into the desolate heartland of the colony “Downunder”.

What could it possibly hurt?

“You have this wide, brown land. Could we blow up a bit of it?”

Of course no-one lived there. Well no-one except a civilisation that had lived there for thousands of years.

“At least they dropped a few pamphlets, written in English, to let them know they should move on.”

“It was laughable in its ghastliness,” she said.

As her husband Bruce Venables narrated,“World War II was forgotten but there was a new world at war - The Cold War.”

In those “sinister times” testing “the bomb” was a national priority, and in the desert of angry spinfex and salt bush a town sprung up virtually overnight, and the “stillness of 40,000 years was shattered by man’s desire to conquer and destroy”.