Ray Parkin
Ray Parkin (
6 November 1910 –
2005) was an Australian writer, amateur artist, and self-taught
historian, noted for his memoirs of
World War II and a major work on
Captain Cook's
Endeavour voyage.
Parkin was born in the
Melbourne suburb of
Collingwood. As a boy he was always interested in ships and was in the
sea scouts. He was always keen on drawing (especially drawing ships), and after leaving school at age 14 that interest got him a job at an
engraving firm. In
1928 aged 18 he joined the
Australian Navy, which took him to ports around the Pacific and gave him plenty more subjects to draw.
He rose through the ranks of the navy to become a
chief petty officer and in
1939 was drafted onto the newly commissioned
HMAS Perth. Its sole peaceful mission was a trip to
New York to represent Australia at the
World's Fair, from which it was straight into
World War II.
Parkin's first attempt at writing was during his war service. He started a
romantic novel, which was lost when the
Perth was sunk by
Japanese action in the
Sunda Straits in the early hours of
1 March 1942. He spent about 11 hours in the water, and reckoned it was during that time he realized the romantic novel had a fatal flaw – life is not romantic.
Parkin was among ten men who washed up on a small island. They found a steel lifeboat washed up too and rigged a sail to try to get back to Australia. For 16 days they slipped past enemy shipping and tropical storms before reaching Japanese occupied
Tjilatjap where they were captured.
In June
1942 Parkin was imprisoned in
Bandoeng camp. He met
Laurens van der Post there and they immediately became friends. Several prisoners there liked to draw, including for instance Dutch artist
Keis von Willigen, and they would scrounge up paper from wherever they could. Van der Post managed to get Parkin a set of watercolour paints from a Chinese contact. Portaits of fellow inmates were a favourite.
In November
1942 Parkin was among the "Dunlop 1000" under elected commander and surgeon
Lieutenant Colonel "Weary" Dunlop who were sent to the building of the infamous
Burma-Thailand Railway. In that misery Parkin focused on the beauty that could be found: plants, butterflies, nature generally. Others like English-born artist
Jack Chalker recorded the horrors of the camps.
In March
1944 Parkin was to be shipped to
Japan. He couldn't keep his collection of drawings and diary notes concealed on that trip so Dunlop offered to look after them for him. Dunlop had some kind of false bottom in his operating table where he could hide things like Chalker's medical drawings and Parkin's papers.
Parkin ended up working an underground
coal mine near the Japanese village of
Ohama and remained there until the Japanese surrender in August
1945. Although his war experiences were harrowing, they didn't leave him with hatred of the Japanese, as he believed hate caused war.
Back in
Melbourne with his wife and children he worked as a tally clerk on the wharves.
Weary Dunlop had kept his drawings just as he said he would and Parkin made them into a little volume dedicated to Dunlop. Some of the sketches were printed in Dunlop's published diaries about the camps too.
A lot of ex-POWs wrote books about their experiences. Parkin wrote his memoirs in novel form, the character of John (or Jack) is Parkin in all but name.
Laurens van der Post recommended them to the
Hogarth Press in
London and the result was
Out of the Smoke in
1960,
Into the Smother in
1963 and
The Sword in
1968. The works were praised for the simple poetry in the writing.
In
1967 Parkin started researching
Captain Cook's voyage to Australia on the
HMS Endeavour. He was apparently first inspired by an obviously inaccurate picture of the ship on a
Christmas card. Over the years he discovered and dispelled several misconceptions built up about Cook, his crew, and the ship, including rehabilitating the reputation of
Sydney Parkinson's drawings of the ship.
Parkinson was a
draftsman on the voyage and his sketches are the only surviving contemporaneous drawings of the ship, but the received wisdom among historians was that Parkinson had taken artistic license, since the drawings seemed inexact and differed from Admiralty plans. Parkin's detailed knowledge of the ship and seafaring showed that what had been thought just squiggles were actual equipment on the ship, and where the sketches and the plans differed it was almost certainly from variations during building (it being fairly common at the time for
shipwrights to have some freedom).
Parkin's neighbour, history professor Max Crawford, recommended Parkin publish. The research took 13 years, and it then took a further 17 years to find a publisher. In the end
John Clarke (best known as a satirist) showed it to publisher Mark Kelly, who in turn recommended it to the speciality academic imprint
The Miegunyah Press at the
Melbourne University Press.
The result was
H. M. Bark Endeavour published in two volumes in
1997. It won the Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction and the NSW Book of the Year in the
New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for
1999.
[Past winners Premier's Literary Awards, at the NSW Ministry for the Arts] Parkin thought himself a little out of place at the awards ceremony, as he put it, "It was funny, though, this doddering old bloke who used to work on the wharves – what did I have in common with the intellectual literary crowd?"
[An interview with Ray Parkin by Murray Waldren, after the Premier's Literary Awards]In
2003 Parkin's three wartime memoirs were also republished in paperback by
Melbourne University Publishing.
*
Out of the Smoke*
Into the Smother*
The Sword and the Blossom*
H. M. Bark Endeavour,
Miegunyah Press, first edition 1997 (two volumes), second edition 2003 (one volume) ISBN 0-522-85093-6.
*
Out of the Smoke; Into the Smother; The Sword and the Blossom, 2003,
Melbourne University Publishing, ISBN 0-522-85067-7. (See also
Publisher's web page.)
*
H. M. Bark Endeavour, cited above.
*
Be content, frugal, said a wise man by
Martin Flanagan,
The Age newspaper,
3 February 2003 (Parkin knew Flanagan's father on the
Burma-Thailand Railway)
*
Battle Lines: Australian Artists at War, Scott Bevan, 2004, paperback ISBN 1-74051-329-0.
*
A 'damnable struggle', but he won, obituary by Tony Stephens,
Sydney Morning Herald,
1 July 2005
