Tinkering

by John Clarke

  The main problem here is not the silliness of Cartlandising the story but a misreading of Elizabeth through the removal of the writer. Like Anne Elliot in the more faithful movie adaptation of Persuasion beautifully written by Nick Dear, Elizabeth Bennet is not conventionally beautiful any more than Jane Austen was. She is wise and perceptive and she sees folly in idle foreplay, manipulation and dissembling.

  In Persuasion, the Elliots’ house is being rented by an admiral and his wife, who talk to Anne about being at sea together. Jane Austen had two brothers who became admirals and most of the men in Persuasion are in the navy, so she knows whereof she speaks. The wife of the admiral tells Anne what it’s like going all over the world together, making a life, charting a course, defining a relationship outside the conventions of English society. Anne listens with keen interest and is persuaded. Like Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, Anne is rather assured, so when she behaves badly or makes a mistake, she does it in spades. Hence the self-knowledge lesson, when it comes, is exemplary.

  The movie Clueless catches this better than the film version of Emma, the novel on which it is based, because it doesn’t mistake film for a visual medium and it concentrates on the language of the central character and narrator. So we hear the mockery, the fun, the difference between what is said and what we see. In the BBC Pride and Prejudice there is no narrator, no irony, no Austen. And to save you the trouble of reading Leavis, it’s not the stories; it’s the way you tell them.

  Ray Parkin

  Ray Parkin told stories, real stories, non-fiction, and he didn’t tell them to amuse or to entertain. He told them to record. Ray wanted you to understand, to know how it was. This was interesting to me because I knew nothing about the Japanese war, or the navy. I was at his place with my daughter one day when a bird tried to fight another bird. She drew his attention to this and Ray said: ‘You should have seen it this morning. That big one came flying out of that tree straight at the honeyeater and he got her athwartships.’ I was learning these stories and I was also learning the way they were told. I was learning a new language, a new terminology.

  Laurens van der Post wrote in his foreword to Out of the Smoke, the first of Ray’s three books about being a prisoner of the Japanese, that he had read much of the story years before. This was true. Ray was sitting down drawing in Bandoeng camp in Indonesia one day when van der Post, a fellow POW, introduced himself. He asked Ray who he was and how he came to be there. Ray told him the story: he’d been at the wheel of the HMAS Perth, it was sunk in battle, he and some others got to shore, rigged up a lifeboat, headed for Australia, hit a typhoon and were blown down to Tjilatjap, on the coast of Java, some eleven hours later.

  ‘That’s a great maritime war story,’ said van der Post. ‘You should write it down.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve written it down,’ said Ray.

  ‘I mean it should become a book,’ said Laurens.

  ‘Yes, it is a book,’ said Ray.

  ‘How can it be a book? We’ve only been here a week.’

  ‘I met a bloke the other day who was a bookbinder and he bound it.’

  It was written in pencil on small individual sheets of shiny toilet paper. When Ray was moved from camp to camp it fitted in his shoe, down behind his heel. Van der Post explained that he had published books, and he undertook to introduce Ray to his publisher once the war was over. Years later Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, rang Ray in Melbourne. Ray went to England and Hogarth Press printed his book. Cecil Day Lewis was his editor.

  ‘Wasn’t he the poet laureate?’ I asked, impressed.

  ‘Yes he was,’ said Ray. ‘But he didn’t change anything in the book.’

  I learnt that Ray had been through a great ordeal. And I learnt he was not a racist. He did not hate the Japanese. ‘That was one of the causes of the war,’ he said. ‘It cannot be the result.’ Ray, like Weary Dunlop, was influenced by the East, by the place and the ideas. I sometimes saw Ray asked about his experiences by others, and his responses were seldom what they expected.

  ‘The Burma–Thailand Railway, The Speedo, Hellfire Pass—what was that like?’ they’d ask.

  ‘The flowers in that area are among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen,’ Ray would reply. ‘We were lucky to be there at that particular time of the year.’

  I asked Ray questions, too. I learnt more things. I learnt the reason Australians survived better than others in the camps was not that they helped each other and were mates. Ray said the best thing you can do for anyone else in a situation like that is to be completely self-reliant. A few years ago he fell in the garden; it turned out he had a neurological virus with a French name. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t write. He went to a convalescence place. Then one day he told me he thought he might come home next week.

  I said: ‘Do you want to come home next week?’

  He said: ‘I’d want to know I could walk four kilometres, up to Ivanhoe shops and back, so I can do for myself.’

  ‘Do you think you can do that?’

  ‘Well, I can do three and a half.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I measured it out around the hospital and I’ve been doing it for a fortnight.’ Very self-reliant.

  Ray wrote and did drawings all the time he was in captivity. The penalty if you got caught was death. Dunlop, a surgeon, hid a lot of this material inside his operating table and gave it back after the war. One thing I asked Ray about was a series of little drawings of merchant ships. ‘Oh,’ said Ray, ‘there was an English bloke in one of the camps. He’d been in the merchant navy before the war. After lights out we’d lie there and I’d get him to remember ships he’d seen. Sometimes I’d seen them myself, before the war. Sometimes they were ships I had never seen. I’d ask him to describe the details. Where was the funnel? What colour was it? And then I’d draw it. And then I’d show him the drawing and he’d look at the drawing and he’d say: “Yep. That’s it.”’

  The drawings were beautiful. The war finished. The camp was liberated. The authorities came around and asked the men to fill out forms naming the commandants and guards who had done these terrible things. Ray called it ‘name your war criminal’. Anyone listed in the forms was going to be charged with war crimes. ‘We won’t be here,’ thought Ray. ‘These people will be charged and we’ll be back in Australia. They’ll have no defence. They can’t cross-examine us.’

  Ray thought the commandant of this last camp had shown them kindness. Instead of marching them down the beach before they went into the coalmine, he let them walk. Ray was able to pick up flowers and leaves and butterflies. One day the commandant summoned Ray to his office, sent the guard out of the room and gave him a small tin of children’s watercolours. This meant he knew about Ray’s drawings—a summary offence. Maybe it was a trap. But Ray trusted him and took the paints. The commandant made Ray put the paints in his pocket before calling the guard back in and dismissing Prisoner Parkin. Later this same commandant had the prisoners dig a big pit in the yard, but he didn’t shoot them. Each day he’d get them to re-dig it, or to dig an extension on, or something. But he didn’t shoot them.

  So when they were liberated, Ray didn’t fill out his form. He drew a picture of the camp and gave it to this man, and he wrote: ‘To commandant X, with thanks for his kindness, Parkin.’ The commandant was later charged with war crimes. Unlike a lot of the others, he wasn’t executed. He had one piece of evidence to present in his defence.

  Another thing Ray told me about was Captain James Cook. Ray was a great admirer of Cook’s seamanship and gifts as a navigator. Ray’s neighbour Max Crawford, a history professor at Melbourne University, had asked him various questions about the ship and Ray knew so much about Cook and his voyage that Crawford encouraged him to write it down. He did, recording everything in big foolscap books, each day of the voyage: Cook’s log, Cook’s diary, what Banks wrote, what Parkinson wrote. Then Ray wrote what the ordinary person on board would have experienced that day. Then there wer
e all the exquisite drawings of sails and ropes and equipment, all the charts, all done by Ray.

  I said: ‘This should be published.’

  ‘If you can get it published, good for you,’ Ray replied.

  H. M. Bark Endeavour was eventually published by The Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University Press. In 1999 it won the New South Wales Premier’s Book of the Year award. Ray, who was eighty-eight by this time, enjoyed his success.

  After that Ray began to write about his philosophy of life. He saw the world as a whole thing. One day he told me he felt particularly close to Thelma, his late wife, in a couple of places in the garden. I asked him where he met Thelma. ‘Do you see the way the river comes around that corner there?’ he said. ‘And that bump there, and that tree? Thelma was sitting under that tree when I first saw her.’

  ‘Is that why you bought this piece of land and built the house here?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  Ray searched for a way of understanding the world and the things he’d seen and experienced. He arrived at a Taoist philosophy and a deep respect for nature. The way a tree knows. Where the sun is. Where water is. He remembered being in the small park over the road from the house where he grew up, in Vere Street, Collingwood, and seeing a dragonfly under a leaf, hiding from a bird. They have knowledge, he said. ‘We have knowledge too, in each cell. We should listen to that knowledge. Not be fooled by desire for things we don’t need.’ Scattered among the things he wrote are ideas from the books he read: the Bible, Plato, Freud, Jung, Spinoza, Kant, novels, political works, philosophy. I once asked him what he needed. He said he needed good food twice a day and it was good if he could sleep dry.

  A couple of other things gave Ray satisfaction. When he led the Anzac Day parade in Melbourne a few years ago they asked if he wanted a jeep to ride in. ‘It’s a march,’ he replied. ‘I’ll march.’ But he wanted a navy uniform; he didn’t want anyone thinking he was army.

  ‘They won’t give you a uniform,’ his son John told him.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They gave you one in 1928 and you lost it.’ He got one in the end, and marched all the way.

  Another satisfying moment came in 1967 when they found HMAS Perth in the Sunda Strait. People had been looking for it for years. They consulted Ray. It was where he said it would be.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like from the ship?’ asked Dave Burchell, the diver.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ray, and he asked for the save-all from the wheelhouse, where he had been standing during the battle. The save-all is a little scallop-shaped metal holder in which a bosun’s whistle or keys might be put for safekeeping. Burchell did the dive, found the save-all, brought it back and it sat on the wall of Ray’s study. A place for everything. And everything in its place.

  Ray Parkin (1910–2005)

  Paul Cox

  When Paul Cox was moved from hospital into palliative care, we prepared ourselves for tough news. Paul was getting smaller and weaker, his voice was in retreat and family and friends had attended his bedside to say their goodbyes. His siblings flew out from Europe. I didn’t expect to see him again.

  A week or so later, Paul decided he was going home and explained to the palliative care people that although he loved them dearly, he would not be dying just yet. He travelled home in a Popemobile-shaped taxi and began blessing people as he passed them in the street. This cheered him up enormously and when we saw him a few days later he rose to meet us, offered us coffee and sat rather grandly in a chair, chatting for hours with a keen emphasis on the future. His voice was stronger, his memory was wonderful, his manners were elegant, his talk was clever and in some cases what he said was astonishing. At seven o’clock each evening, for example, he went out on to his little balcony in Melbourne and raised both arms high in the air in order to receive healing waves being beamed to him by a woman in Uzbekistan. Paul was very amusing about all this but as he said, ‘At this stage I believe in nothing and everything.’

  A few years earlier, the first time he was going to die, he received a liver transplant and, in a state of profound gratitude, he continued writing and making films. Last year he made a movie in which David Wenham played a man who has a liver transplant and falls in love. Paul met his partner, Rosie, when they were both receiving liver transplants. He was in his late sixties at the time and she is a beautiful Balinese woman of somewhat more tender years. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Johnny,’ Cox said to me when he introduced us. ‘Rosie is much younger than I am. But I want you to know, Johnny, my liver is younger than Rosie’s.’

  Half a lifetime ago Paul and I wrote some films together and we’ve always stayed in touch. I’d never written a movie before and I quickly learnt it was no use suggesting to Paul a thematically consistent sequence involving sport, for example. That wouldn’t fit in a Cox film. Too healthy. And there wasn’t much interest in men who fixed cars and called each other ‘mate’. Paul’s films looked like Dutch interiors with dappled light playing through the window and they were full of urban characters who were ill at ease, often slightly wounded or suffering from incongruity of some kind. As with many collaborations, we wrote by talking a lot together and then writing separately. Paul’s house was always full of good conversation. At one stage Werner Herzog was living in a shed in the backyard with a dingo. Peter Watkins also lived there at some point, while he and Paul were discussing a film project. Peter had made the brilliant 1964 docudrama Culloden in which 1960s British journalists report live from a battle which occurred in 1745. This strategy of anachronism was new in 1964 and the effect in Culloden was terrifying.

  Paul’s public presentation was that of a serious artist, but he was nevertheless given to fits of amusement which produced a snuffling and rumbling sound such as might occur if a badger were attempting not to explode. When he regrouped, he expressed matters once more in his formal mode, which was not unlike an antiques catalogue. A suggestion which would solve a problem was ‘good’, a great idea for a scene was ‘fine’, and if he completely approved of a whole section of plot and dialogue he would pronounce it ‘very fine’; as in, ‘I read that section again last night, Johnny. That really is very fine.’ When Lonely Hearts, the first film we wrote together, was about to be released thirty-five years ago, Paul wrote me a letter which I have always kept. In the last line of the letter he said he hoped that having worked on this film together and seeing it come to fruition, would ‘strengthen our shy human friendship’. It did.

  Having received blessings from Uzbekistan, Paul announced he was going to America. The only people who thought this wouldn’t happen were those unfamiliar with Paul’s willpower. The doctors wouldn’t allow him to fly across the Pacific for fourteen hours so he’d negotiated overnight stays in Bangkok, Dubai and Frankfurt and then a trip across the Atlantic to Chicago. His film Force of Destiny was to play at the Ebert Film Festival and Paul had been invited to speak. Rosie would go with him and make sure he rested, ate the right food and took his tablets. The couple left on April Fool’s Day and that night Rosie, whose canonisation is imminent, sent a message reporting that Paul had gone out to dinner in Bangkok. This was probably a PB for the palliative care unit at the Austin but Cox was just limbering up. After Dubai and Frankfurt the official party arrived in Chicago and Paul made a gracious, honest and very engaging speech to an audience who couldn’t believe quite what they were watching. Following the festival, Paul and Rosie made their way home and Paul was planning another movie. The fact that he died on Saturday will probably slow him down a bit, although I expect he’ll call sometime during the next week or so with a revised schedule. ‘I’m still going to do it,’ he’ll say. ‘Why not? I have some good ideas. I want to talk about it. Come to dinner.’

  Paulus Henrique Benedictus Cox (1940–2016)

  Memories and Reflections

  A while ago I received a letter from Susie. When we were very young and she was Susan, we were in the same class at primary school. I rang her at the gallery
she was running in Northern New South Wales, to thank her for the letter, to say hello and to ask her a question.

  Susan had been in a memory of mine for sixty years and I’d always wondered whether the memory was accurate or whether, over the years, I’d edited it anecdotally to the point where, like Captain Cook’s axe, it had six new heads and nine new handles and no longer bore any necessary resemblance to Captain Cook’s actual axe.

  I told Susan this and asked if she remembered an incident which might conform to these general guidelines. She thought for a minute but sadly she didn’t. I told her that was OK and she asked me if I could give her a clue. I told her I didn’t want to give her a clue because I wanted her memory to exist on its own so I could check mine against it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I can remember it. We were only in the same class for a year.’

  ‘It didn’t happen at school,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ she said, more deeply mystified. ‘We didn’t know each outside school, did we?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Where did it happen?’ she asked.

  ‘It happened at a birthday party,’ I said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said to her own considerable surprise. ‘It was at David’s birthday party.’

  She then described a memory which she didn’t know she had, and which was almost a complete facsimile of my own. We were seven or eight years old and there were a few of us looking at an old shipwreck on Waiterere Beach. Susan and I and a couple of others were on the seaward side of the vessel when a very large wave came in and swept us out to sea. David’s older brother ran into the sea, yelling, ‘Who can swim? Who can swim?’ Susan and I both yelled out above the roar of the sea that we could swim and he rescued the other kids first, running into the waves again and again, fishing kids out and getting them to shore. In my mind Susan and I were just off the coast of Peru by the time he got to us but in fact we probably weren’t far out. I felt no panic or fear and I remember being comforted to see Susan’s head bobbing in the sea. She had big hair and she was to the north of me and we were both bobbing in the enormous sea.