Background
Ray Parkin was born on November 6, 1910 in Melbourne, Australia.
Ray Parkin, 12 May 1999.
Ray Parkin, 31 January 2003.
Ray Parkin, 31 January 2003.
Ray Parkin at home, 1 May 1998.
Ray Parkin, 12 May 1999.
Ray Parkin, 12 May 1999.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001OFSBRO/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i2
1960
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000CLWXP/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i3
1963
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0522847161/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i1
1997
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0522848877/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0
1999
Ray Parkin was born on November 6, 1910 in Melbourne, Australia.
Ray Parkin made his career in the Australian Royal Navy from 1918 until the end of World War II. During that conflict, he spent three years as a Japanese prisoner of war. Parkin was captured in 1942, when his ship, the H.M.A.S. Perth was sunk by the Japanese in the Sunda Strait. Parkin and the other survivors sailed seventeen days in an open boat to the south coast of Java, where they were captured by the enemy. Parkin tells this story in his first book, Out of the Smoke, originally published in 1960 and, like the subsequent volumes he published, illustrated with his own line drawings.
In Parkin’s second book, Into the Smother, he offers an account of the fifteen months he spent as POW slave labor in Thailand, working on the Burma-Siam railway, drawn from the secret diaries and drawings he kept at the time. Parkin was determined to survive and that meant downplaying his own hardships, focusing his attention outside himself. Parkin gave his diary and drawings to Edward "Weary" Dunlop, another POW who later became famous for his war diaries, for safety’s sake when he was transferred out of the country to work in a coal mine under the Inland Sea of Japan.
The sea journey to Japan aboard an overcrowded barge left Parkin and the other POWs suffering from malnutrition and dysentery, but they were, nonetheless, immediately transferred to work in inhuman conditions in a coal mine until the explosion of the atomic bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima brought an end to the war. This is the subject of Parkin’s third book, The Sword and the Blossom, originally published in 1968. Throughout this last volume, the author recalls that his struggle to survive took the form of trying to understand his captors, and the Japanese culture as a whole. The terms of the title exemplify the two sides to the Japanese character as Parkin and his comrades came to understand it.
In addition to authoring three books, over the years, Ray Parkin discovered and dispelled several misconceptions built up about James Cook's voyage to Australia aboard HM Bark Endeavour.
Ray Parkin was married and had three children, six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
