Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

And then there was Chief Petty Officer Ray Parkin. Of the thousand or more men who sailed in Perth over her short life, none served her better or told her story with more love and grace.

  The young sea scout who had messed about in boats on the Yarra spent his life acquiring knowledge for its own sake. Captive in Java, on the railway in Siam, and at the mines in Japan, his enquiring mind had transcended barbarism to roam through botany and biology, literature and philosophy, inspired first by a fellow prisoner in Bandung – an RAF aircraftsman who had been a Cambridge professor of Classical Greek – and then by a friendship with the South African journalist, philosopher and explorer Laurens van der Post. One stormy jungle day, Ray had watched entranced as a mosquito sheltered from the rain beneath a quivering leaf – an epiphany in which he recognised the fragility of the insect and its survival in a hostile world as a metaphor for his own existence. This transformed him.

  Weary Dunlop had faithfully concealed the filmy manuscripts Parkin had given him for safe-keeping before leaving for Japan. He returned them after the war and from them came three books: Out of the Smoke, Into the Smother and The Sword and the Blossom. They tell a remarkable story of Perth’s life and loss, and of the Japanese oppression of her surviving crew; it is no exaggeration to say that they are classics of Australian literature. The Melbourne University Press has reprinted them as Ray Parkin’s Wartime Trilogy, with a foreword by the writer and humorist John Clarke, who says, rightly, that they are ‘wise, tolerant books and reveal a man not thrown from his purpose by hatred and not blinded to beauty and good sense by great catastrophe’.

  Parkin was demobbed from the navy in June 1946, hoping to make a living as an artist. His back pay kept him going while he studied art at the old Melbourne Working Men’s College – a grim Gothic-style fortress on La Trobe Street now part of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology – but it became plain pretty quickly that this was not going to support a wife and family. An acquaintance found him a modest job as a tally clerk on the Port Melbourne wharves, and he stayed there for the rest of his working life. Lunch hours and smokos would see him perched on a bollard on a wharf somewhere, contentedly painting ships as he had done since his early days in the navy. His son John recalls him making engravings and printing them on paper made from mulberry bark that, ironically enough, he would have sailors bring to him from Japan. By nights, he read poetry and philosophy, Shakespeare and Schopenhauer.

  There was one more towering achievement to come – the sea, always the sea. In 1997, Ray Parkin astounded maritime scholars the world over by publishing an account of all that was known – and a great deal that was not – of the voyage of discovery made by Captain James Cook in HM Bark Endeavour. It had been a labour of love for 13 years. In two heavy volumes, printed on creamy paper and illustrated by his own exquisite pen and ink drawings, he dispelled with an artist’s eye and a sailor’s insight the myths and legends that had encrusted Cook and his small vessel for two centuries. HM Bark Endeavour is now recognised as the surpassing reference work on the explorer.

  Sheer chance brought it to the light of day. It had taken 17 years to find a publisher. Time and again, he had been turned down. John Clarke discovered it in a conversation with Weary Dunlop and pushed, successfully, to get it published with a grant from the charitable foundation of Melbourne’s Grimwade family. It won Ray Parkin the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction in 1999, and, in 2001, Melbourne University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Letters.

  His name was made, but it mattered little to him. Thelma, the love of his life, had died of cancer in 1973, and he continued to live quietly in their home at Ivanhoe above the Yarra, never free of money worries. The end came slowly but not gently. Increasing frailty put him into the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital and finally into a private hospital on the Mornington Peninsula.

  ‘I’ve had enough now, I want to go,’ were his last words to his son John, and on the winter’s evening of Sunday 19 June 2005 he died peacefully in his sleep. In the peaceful surroundings of Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges, Ray was cremated in a simple coffin – plain sailor’s rope replaced fancy silver handles; it was covered with the naval White Ensign and topped by his chief petty officer’s cap – and the family divided his ashes into two parts. The first part was strewn on the Yarra River he had so loved, below the house at Ivanhoe. The second they scattered on the waters of Port Melbourne by the old minesweeper HMAS Castlemaine, a shower of rose petals drifting away with him, and the last post echoing.

  Perth lay undisturbed for a quarter of a century at a position of 05.51.42S 106.07.52E, some five kilometres off St Nicholas Point on the north-western tip of Java. In 1967, a diver and adventurer from Adelaide, David Burchell, began a search for the wreck, with the somewhat suspicious permission of the Indonesian Government but the enthusiastic help of the Australian naval attaché at the embassy in Jakarta.

  Burchell was a remarkable figure. For a start, he had only one leg – something of a handicap for a diver, but it didn’t stop him. Sheer chance had led him to the story of the ship, and his fascination grew. After much consultation with the survivors, he put together the money for a diving expedition in Bantem Bay, and luck was with him. With help from local fishermen, he found the ship almost immediately, in about 35 metres of water – a difficult but not impossible depth for a scuba-diver at that time.

  Perth had rolled over onto her port side. The water was murky and the current was strong, but in successive dives Burchell built up a picture of her. There were great gashes in her starboard side where the torpedoes had hit, and her superstructure, particularly around the bridge, was peppered with holes from shells and shrapnel. Her two masts had gone, and her after funnel and the Walrus crane had been flung onto the seabed. The 6-inch gun turrets were still in place fore and aft, although the guns themselves pointed at crazy angles. Fish and sea creatures had made their homes in various nooks and crannies. Burchell encountered octopuses and sharks, and a giant groper that seemed to have taken command of the bridge. Everywhere, the hulk was encrusted with coral and marine growth.

  Aware of the sensitive nature of diving on a war grave, Burchell had been careful to secure the blessing of the HMAS Perth Association. He was keen to recover relics – not for himself but so there might be some part of the ship on view in a public memorial. With painstaking work, he managed to secure various instruments and artefacts from the bridge, along with brass shell cases that had been scattered about from the 4-inch guns. The three great prizes were the brass binnacle cover from the compass platform, a signal light – its panes of glass broken but its steel and copper intact – and the bronze-encased gyro compass from the wheelhouse. He presented the lamp holder from the binnacle to Nancy Waller, and to Ray Parkin he gave a small copper hold-all that had hung above the wheel. The disappointment was his failure to find the ship’s bell, despite a long and arduous search. That was discovered by an Indonesian diving team in 1974, and it now rests at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

  There are other memorials to the ship and her crew: a stained-glass window at the Garden Island Naval Chapel in Sydney, a plaque in the Perth Town Hall, a tree planted at King’s Park in Perth and an outdoor monument of a naval anchor at Rockingham, south of Fremantle. In March 2010, a sculpted stone memorial to Hec Waller was unveiled in the public gardens at Benalla, his birthplace. His two sons, Michael and John, were there, and Gavin Campbell laid a wreath on behalf of Perth’s ship’s company. And at America’s Arlington National Cemetery, in Virginia, just outside Washington DC, there is a small stone and brass tablet in the gardens that reads: ‘In memory of the crews of USS Houston (CA 30) and HMAS Perth. Still standing watch in Sunda Straits.’

  But the most poignant relic is a triangular scrap of canvas now held by the War Memorial. Faded to a mottled cream colour, it is the foresail of the lifeboat christened HMAS Anzac, the vessel that carried those intrepid ten men down the Sunda Strait and into captivity at Tjilatjap. At the camp in Bandung,
Ray Parkin and others had hidden it from the Japanese while adorning it with lettering and artwork. The signatures of the ten can be seen today. After the war, Vic Duncan added the names of men who survived the sinking to become prisoners, as well as a poem he had composed himself:

  We’ve lost well nigh four hundred men,

  From the finest land on Earth.

  They fought it out to the bitter end,

  And went down with the Perth.

  T’was indeed a glorious action

  ’Gainst overwhelming odds,

  And they showed how Aussies ‘stick it’,

  When unfavoured by the gods.

  As the first gun thundered ‘Action’,

  They were ready undismayed,

  And as the battle raged about,

  Their courage was displayed,

  For steadfast to their duty,

  With Nelson as a guide,

  And comrades falling ’round them,

  T’was thus they fought and died.

  With all her shells expended,

  She slid beneath the sea,

  And though her story’s ended,

  Her name is liberty.

  So think of them with honour,

  As they rest beneath the waves.

  They fought for King and country,

  And earned a sailor’s grave.

  There have been two ships of the RAN named Perth since the Second World War. HMAS Perth (II) was an American-built guided-missile destroyer of the Charles F. Adams class, known to the navy as DDG 38. With a displacement of 4850 tons and a crew of 332, she joined the RAN in 1965 and saw service in the Vietnam War, winning two United States Navy unit commendations. In 1967, she was hit by a North Vietnamese artillery shell fired from ashore, which penetrated one deck but caused no casualties. With their long, rakish lines, Perth (II) and her DDG sisters, Brisbane and Hobart, were three of the most handsome ships ever to wear the Australian White Ensign. They were also the last of the navy’s ships to be powered by steam. Perth (II) was decommissioned in 1999 and sunk as a dive wreck off Albany in Western Australia in 2001.

  HMAS Perth (III) is the last of eight Anzac-class frigates built for the RAN in Australia to a modified German design. At 3600 tonnes, smaller than her namesakes, she was commissioned into the navy at Fremantle, Western Australia, in 2006.

  Two men sit at a table in the Bowlers’ Club at York Street in Sydney, quietly nursing a beer. They have chosen this place because the upstairs bar has comfortable chairs, an enticing smorgasbord lunch and not too much noise from the poker machines, so you can hear yourself talk and think. It is about the same distance from each man’s home, so that makes it convenient, too.

  One is in his ninetieth year, the other not far from it. One is tall, with a big frame that suggests he might have been a long-limbed athlete in his youth, although now he walks with a slight limp. He is Gavin Campbell, former sub-lieutenant. The limp, you realise with a little start of recognition, is the result of Bob Collins’s makeshift splint-job on a broken leg in the Sunda Strait.

  The other is a smaller man, wiry, thin on top, with a twinkle in his eyes and a ready chuckle. This is Frank McGovern, former able seaman. He shows no sign of the back injury he received the night the Americans bombed him in Tokyo – although, if you ask after his health, he will admit that he does get the odd ache and pain. No complaints, though.

  The two have been coming here for as long as they can remember – not to tell old war stories or to relive past triumphs and tragedies, but because their lives have been entwined for so long that it is good to catch up every month. Gavin’s wife Sue will sometimes be with him. Frank used to bring his wife Merle until she passed away a few years ago. The bustle of the club goes on around them, the other drinkers unknowing of the make of man in their midst.

  When Frank left the navy in March 1946, he found the Sydney Water Board was as good as its word; his job was still waiting for him as he had been promised in 1939. He took it back gratefully and raised a family. Gavin married in 1947 and stayed on in the navy until 1950, when he resigned his commission and struck out for civilian life. His first wife, Adrienne, contracted polio in the epidemic that swept Australia after the war, and she spent 23 years immobile in an iron lung, Gavin nursing her with devotion until she died. He held down a job as a manager with James Hardie, the asbestos-products manufacturer, but at the company plant at Camellia in western Sydney he contracted asbestosis – a cruel blow for a man who had survived the atrocities of the railway.

  Sharing a drink with them is a humbling experience. After all they have endured, age has brought them wisdom and serenity. There are no nasty surprises left. They are courteous and modest, pleased to help a writer with his intrusive questions and fussy attention to the detail of events more than half a century ago.

  It is a curious thing about the Australian story that we celebrate defeat as much as victory, if not more. The Anzac legend of Gallipoli, a disaster born of folly, is seen by many as seminal to the creation of our national identity. Children are taught that character is built upon the bones and shards of military failure.

  The loss of Perth was one of our great naval defeats. The death of her sister Sydney took a higher toll, of 645 men killed, but the story of Perth is unique and hallowed because she fought to the last in a battle she could never have won and because so many of her crew survived the brutality of Japanese imprisonment to tell that story. There is no comparable event in the history of the RAN. The men of Perth were special. No matter in what other ships they might have served, those who lived would forever call themselves members of her ship’s company – a badge of honour they wore with pride. Those who died at sea would have no headstone to mark their graves, but the memory of their heroism endures. In those poignant words of Laurence Binyon’s ode ‘For the Fallen’:

  To the innermost heart of their own land they are known As the stars are known to the Night.

  They were the flower of Australia’s greatest generation. No other has been so tested. For the most part, they were born into the Depression, and their late adolescence and early adulthood were spent at war. They took up arms not for conquest, nor for notions of glory or honour, but because they believed their country and their people were worth saving from tyranny.

  In that, they were not defeated. They succeeded in full measure – a victory beyond price that entitles them forever to the nation’s gratitude. Australia endures because of and beyond their sacrifice.

  Captain Harold Farncomb, HMAS Perth’s first Commanding Officer, went on to a distinguished wartime career. (AWM 001220)

  Captain Hec Waller in HMAS Stuart, with the Scrap Iron Flotilla in the Mediterranean, 1940. (AWM 005002/13)

  Captain Sir Philip Bowyer-Smyth RN (wearing binoculars) on Perth’s bridge in the Mediterranean, 1941. (AWM 006605)

  Waller on the bridge of HMAS Perth in Australian waters. The sandals are not exactly regulation uniform. (FAIRFAX 10151674)

  Lieutenant-Commander Warwick ‘Braces’ Bracegirdle, Perth’s first Gunnery Officer. (AWM P04749.002)

  Petty Officer Cook Roy Norris, nearly killed when the ship was bombed off Crete, 1941. (NAVAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA)

  Lieutenant Michael Highton RN, one of Perth’s British officers killed when the ship sank. (AWM 006617)

  Chief Petty Officer Reg Whiting, lost in the sinking. He left behind a wife and two young boys.

  Petty Officer Ray Parkin, who was at the wheel when Perth was sunk.

  Ordinary Seaman Paul Doneley, who died on the Burma–Siam Railway, 1943.

  Able Seaman Fred Skeels, from Western Australia – another Perth survivor.

  Paymaster Sub-Lieutenant Gavin Campbell, secretary to Captain Waller.

  Able Seaman George Hatfield, a Perth diarist who went down with the ship.

  Able Seaman Frank McGovern. He survived the war but his elder brother Vince was lost with the ship.

  Leading Seaman Basil Hayler, one of the crew who commissioned the ship in Po
rtsmouth, 1939.

  Able Seaman Arthur ‘Blood’ Bancroft. He was torpedoed, then rescued, by the Americans in 1944.

  Wireman Fred Lasslett. As a POW he kept a diary in the form of letters to a girlfriend.

  Able Seaman Allan ‘Elmo’ Gee, from country Victoria – one of Perth’s buglers.

  Signalman Bill ‘Buzzer’ Bee. He was sent to Japan as a slave labourer.

  Petty Officer George ‘Slim’ Hedrick – one of Elmo Gee’s mates as a POW.

  Petty Officer Bill Bracht – another Perth diarist nearly killed in the Mediterranean.

  Petty Officer Jim Nelson – another of Perth’s buglers and an invaluable diarist.

  Signalman Brian Sheedy. After leaving Perth in the Mediterranean, he fought with the Royal Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic.

  Petty Officer Stoker Charles ‘Jock’ Lawrance. At the time of writing, he was Perth’s oldest living survivor, aged 97.

  Electrical Artificer Peter Murdoch (left), lost overboard from Perth in the Mediterranean, 1941. (AWM 006842)

  Able Seaman George Morriss, who died at the infamous Sandakan POW camp in Borneo, 1945. (AWM P02149.001)

  Lieutenant David McWilliam, the Observer in Perth’s Walrus aircraft, died in the Sunda Strait. (AWM P07953.001)