Physical description

Ill, maps, index, p.654.

Publication type

non-fiction

Summary

In 1939, Ray Parkin was serving on the Australian light cruiser HMAS Perth. At first glance he looked every inch the archetypal petty officer that he was - tough, practical and a model of naval discipline. Yet Ray was no ordinary sailor. Despite a lack of formal education, he had the soul of an artist and a philosopher's enquiring mind. As HMAS Perth was embroiled in war - in the Mediterranean and then in South-East Asia - Ray became both a witness and a chronicler of the conflict through his meticulous diaries and his minutely observed watercolours and sketches. When Perth was sunk off the coast of Java, Ray was one of the survivors. After a valiant attempt to sail back to Australia in a lifeboat, he surrendered and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Japanese, first building the Thai-Burma Railway and then working as a slave labourer in a Japanese coalmine. The horrors and privations of those years saw some of his most memorable artwork - documenting both the beauty of the natural world and the savageries and humiliations of the POW ordeal