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Re: Reliving the Stolen Years

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: December 11, 2003

"Reliving the stolen years
By Cathy Pryor
December 11, 2003

The "damnable struggle between physical agony and the eye for beauty" was how Ray Parkin described his body of work.

The physical labour was endurable: it would "stimulate a mind not dead to hope ... and what I lacked in food and comfort could be made up from all that is sheer nature around me". The year was 1943 and Parkin, one of Australia's little-known wartime artists, was interned as a prisoner of war of the Japanese on the Burma-Thailand railway.

Parkin's delicate work, hidden from the public eye in the years after the war, forms part of a travelling exhibition from the Australian War Memorial - Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War. On show at the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne, the exhibition includes artworks, photographs and memorabilia from Australian prisoners of war during World War I, World War II and the Korean conflict.

Included are Parkin's Sick Parade, a sketch of the skeletal men who were interned with him at the camp and his Will o' the Wisp Beetle, a finely textured watercolour on paper.

Also included are compasses used in escape plans, photographs taken in the jungle camps of Indonesia and Thailand and the original war diaries of celebrated commanding officer and doctor Edward "Weary" Dunlop.

A copy of Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester was scrounged by prisoner Harold Sutton, who used its alternate blank pages as a diary. It tells a poignant tale, this children's book, inscribed on one side with the words of Potter and on the other with scribbled misery.

Curator at the Australian War Memorial Nola Anderson says the aim of the exhibition, which will travel on to Queensland after Monash, was to include items collected by the prisoners to provide an insight into their everyday lives.

The art and writings they produced "showed a human spirit able to see beauty in something so terrible", she says. While the universal image of the wartime experience was of the hardships of Changi, the Burma railway and beyond, the collection shows there was also time to contemplate the passing of beauty.

"We wanted to make sure that everything was original and that it was the prisoners of war themselves telling the story," Anderson says. "One of the important things to remember is that the experiences of prisoners of war was extremely varied and it varied according to what conflict you were captured in.

"The prisoners of war in Germany did tend to have access to Red Cross parcels at least. During World War II some soldiers had pocket cameras and then proceeded to scavenge supplies so there were quite a few photographs coming out as well."

Parkin was 29 when the war broke out and working in the Australian navy when he was sent to Indonesia on the HMAS Perth to repel the Japanese advance. The Perth was sunk in East Java in March 1942. While coming ashore in a salvaged lifeboat to search for supplies, he was captured and sent to central Java before herded north to the Burma railway.

Using whatever he could find - usually carbon paper and pencils scrounged from the schools set up by the Dutch in Indonesia - he recorded the daily life around him, taking particular solace in nature.

"We managed to scrounge some of those things and (we) contacted some Chinese fellow outside the wire," he recalls.

"We got him to bring some watercolours in a small box. That was sufficient. I had two little boxes, one with watercolours and one with HB pencils in it."

Australian nurse Pat Gunther was captured by the Japanese when her ship, the Vyner Brooke, was sunk after the fall of Singapore. She also found bits of paper wherever she could and continued to draw for the duration of the war. "She sold her drawings to other prisoners and she would use the money to barter for food," Anderson says. "She did beautiful little pencil drawings ... she drew her little sewing kit, she drew her footwear. With her art it was almost saying 'there is a little bit of me that is important and that is the part of my old civilised life that I am going to hold on to'."

How the artworks survived form part of the story. "Because survival was so tenuous it is a little difficult to trace exactly how all of these works ended up in the collection," Anderson says.

Hiding the artworks called for ingenious methods; the hollow of bamboo found in the jungle was often used. Parkin worked under Dunlop in Thailand and in 1944 when he was shipped as a prisoner to Japan, Dunlop offered to hide his drawings and diaries for safekeeping, returning them to Parkin after the war.

Now living in Melbourne, Parkin continued to draw after the war, when working on the Melbourne wharves, but he dismisses the tag of artist, arguing instead that he was simply recording what he saw so he could tell his family back home.

"It is vital to get this straight," he says. "I didn't want to create art. What I wanted to do was record my experiences and to do that the best I could."

Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War, Monash Gallery of Art until January 18, then touring nationally until May 31, 2005.

© The Australian"