Cruiser (7 page)

By January, 7000 men were out of work. The Federal
Attorney General, a silver-tongued Melbourne lawyer named Robert Menzies, went to Port Kembla to confront the workers on the docks. Union leaders reluctantly cleared a path for him through an angry crowd. Menzies told them that government policy decreed the iron should go to Japan. That policy could not be set aside by a trade union or anyone else. In the end, it was the Dog-Collar Act that broke the union's resistance. The wharfies crumbled and the pig iron was loaded and shipped. Forever afterwards, trade unionists would refer to Menzies contemptuously as Pig Iron Bob.

Every so often, though, the Lyons Cabinet sought reassurance that the British were awake to the Japanese threat. Comforting noises flowed smoothly back from London. As ever, Singapore would be the rock upon which any Japanese wave would break. The British had resumed work on the naval base there, in fits and starts, as the Depression receded. Some Australian leaders, however, held strong doubts about the promise of ‘Main Fleet to Singapore'. While still in opposition in 1936, the new Labor leader, John Curtin, put his finger on the matter with telling foresight:

The speech provoked predictable uproar from the government benches, with cries that Curtin, the wretched socialist, had insulted Britain and trampled the bonds of Empire. But the question he had posed would not go away, despite purblind complacency in official quarters. In March 1937, the Australian
naval staff prepared for the government a confident appraisal, which read, in part:

The ‘almost impregnable base' was opened, with great fanfare, in early 1939. Winston Churchill would call it ‘the Gibraltar of the East', and it was, indeed, a monumental feat of engineering and construction. There was only one flaw: there was barely a warship in sight and only a handful of obsolete aircraft of the RAF. Fortress Singapore was an empty shell, a grand delusion that would have tragic consequences.

The
Autolycus
berthed in Hobart only long enough to load her cargo of apples, then plodded back north across Bass Strait and into Port Phillip Bay to collect another contingent of sailors from Melbourne.

There were 300 men waiting at Station Pier to join the
Perth
crew. Many of them, too, were still teenagers, wet behind the ears, fresh from their basic training at the Naval Depot. They were rated as ordinary seamen and wore the square-rig naval uniform as proud as you like, but they had not yet been to sea. Others were more experienced sailors with homes in Victoria, or who had returned from leave in Tasmania, South Australia or Western Australia. One of them was Charles William Lawrance, 26 years old, a leading stoker, known to everyone as Jock. Born in Rotherham, near Sheffield, in England in 1913, Jock's few years in Australia had done little to take the edge off the thick Yorkshire burr of his youth. His shipmates had decided off their own bat that he was Scottish, so Jock he became.

His early life had been hard. His mother had died when he was a baby. When Jock was just eight, his father, a railway ganger, was found badly hurt beside the tracks one morning after a night of thick Yorkshire fog. Months later, he died of his injuries. Jock lived with his elder sister and eventually worked on the railways for a while himself, training to be a signalman for the old LMS – the London, Midland and Scottish company
– but they sacked him when he became entitled to a man's wage at the age of 20. With the Depression beginning to bite, he wrote to an uncle in Tasmania and another in Canada, asking about emigration. The Tasmanian uncle offered him a roof over his head and a job on his small farm on Bruny Island, south of Hobart:

Jock signed up on 4 June 1934. When he passed out from Flinders, he thought about becoming a seaman or perhaps a cook, but the navy told him it wanted stokers, so a stoker he turned out to be. The name came from the early days of steam, when coal was stoked into the furnaces to fire a ship's boilers. Naval folklore had it that stokers were all muscle and no brain; they messed apart from other sailors in all but the smallest ships and tended to stick together when they went for a run ashore in a foreign port. If there was a brawl in a dockside pub, it was a fairly safe bet there would be a stoker in it somewhere. The name lasted beyond the arrival of oil-fired machinery even though the job changed, and by 1939 stokers needed more brains and had significant mechanical skills. But they still did the dirty work.

Jock's farewell from Melbourne was a family affair because his brother-in-law, Arthur Close, was sailing with him. Not long after Jock had joined the navy, he had chatted up some girls in Melbourne's Swanston Street, and the prettiest of them, Mavis Malloy, had stayed in touch. As they'd got to know each other, the Malloy family had welcomed him as one of their own, and in 1935 he and Mavis were married at a church in suburban Brunswick. Baby Joan was born in 1938. The Malloy girls must have liked a sailor, because Mavis's sister Jean married one too. Arthur Close was not a stoker but a leading seaman. He and Jock got on like brothers and, with a bit of luck and good management, they wound up together in the Melbourne draft for HMAS
Perth
. On Saturday 20 May, the girls were there to see them off.

Another man waiting in the crowd with them at Station Pier, Ray Parkin, would, in time, prove to be one of the most extraordinary men ever to wear the uniform of the RAN. Like so many working-class boys of his generation, he had left school at 14, but he was a voracious reader and a talented painter and writer, with remarkable powers of observation. He carried a small collection of carefully chosen books to sea, and the study of history, philosophy and natural science, entirely self-taught,
enriched his mind. Towards the end of his years, the gifts of his intellect and his achievements in literature would win him a global reputation as a naval historian and the award of an honorary doctorate of letters from Melbourne University. But on this day he was merely Petty Officer Raymond Edward Parkin, aged 28, with the two crossed anchors and the king's crown of his rate displayed on the left sleeve of his brass-buttoned jacket, and another crown and circled anchor on his cap.

Ray was a Collingwood boy, the son of Arthur James Parkin, a coach and motor trimmer, and his wife Laetitia. In later life, he would write of the sights and sounds of his birthplace: the gritty gaslit streets; the lamplighters cycling by with their long poles at dusk; the bells of the trams and the rumble of iron cartwheels; the roar and clang and heat of the local blacksmith's forge, where the ‘blackie' hammering horseshoes would sometimes let him pump the bellows to set the coals glowing red.

After the First World War, the Parkin family moved away from Collingwood to the new suburb of Ivanhoe, then little more than scrub and paddocks. But already ships and the sea were calling the young bloke, exerting a magnetism that would fascinate him until the day he died:

If the boy could not yet go to sea, the next best thing was the Yarra River, winding through its valley east, then south, of Ivanhoe. Sometimes an uncle would take him out in a wooden rowing boat, resting under the willows or the great gums for sandwiches and fruit cordial. As Ray grew older, his love affair with the Yarra deepened:

In 1928, the day after his eighteenth birthday – it was ordained; it was inevitable – Ray Parkin joined the navy. He thrived with the singular happiness of a young man whose dreams were coming true. It was the art and science of the sailor that claimed him, seamanship in its purest form; that and the majesty of the ocean itself. Naval routine and logic appealed to his disciplined mind. He revelled in learning to steer by a compass, in heaving a line, in lowering a boat, in standing a watch on the bridge on a starry night.

Away at sea, in the cruisers
Australia
or
Canberra
, he would write long letters to Thelma Kerwin, a girl he had met on the river when he was a Sea Scout and who intuitively understood his sailor's calling: ‘I would tell her of my amazing adventures; she would tell me of home, of which I could never hear too much.' In 1934, they were married in the respectably sober brick Methodist church in Ivanhoe. Thelma was just 21. In four years, she gave him a daughter, Jill, and a son, John. Ray had signed up for the customary 12-year stretch in the navy. If all went well, he would be out of uniform and back with his family in 1940.

Stoker Norm King almost didn't make it on time. He and a mate had been stuck in a lift at the YMCA, where they had spent the night. They rushed into Station Pier with just minutes to spare, out of breath, frantic at the thought the ship would leave without them.

Born in the London suburb of Finsbury, at the age of four Norm migrated with his family to Adelaide, where his father, Charlie, got work as a cabinetmaker. The Kings did well to begin with. Charlie managed to scrape together a £50 deposit on a £700 house in Colonel Light Gardens, which was then an Adelaide outer suburb of bush and paddocks with the Mount Lofty ranges rising in the distance. Norm and his three siblings enjoyed a country childhood of climbing gum trees, yabbying in creeks and occasional trips to the beach. But the Depression hit the King family as it did everyone else. Charlie lost his job, and at 13 Norm had to leave school for work in a furniture factory that would bring in a few shillings to help out. He was 16 when he enlisted in the navy and 17 when he joined the cruiser
Canberra
as an ordinary stoker, the lowest of the low:

Norm liked the mateship of the navy and the travel, especially a trip
Canberra
made to the island of Bali, where he and his mates, still teenagers, were agog at the sight of the local women wearing only sarongs, their breasts bared. But he chafed at the naval discipline: