Raymond Edward Parkin AM (6 November 1910 – 19 June 2005) was an Australian naval seaman, writer, draftsman, artist and historian.
He is noted for his memoirs of World War II (including his time as a prisoner-of-war), and for a major work on James Cook's Endeavour voyage.
He rose through the ranks of the navy to become a chief petty officer and, in 1939, he was drafted onto the newly commissioned light cruiser HMAS Perth.
Over 16 days, covering 500 miles, they managed to slip past enemy shipping and endured tropical storms before reaching occupied Tjilatjap where they were greeted by Dutch Officers, who handed them over to Japanese troops.
Van der Post managed to get Parkin a set of watercolour paints from a Chinese contact and with these he would create portraits of fellow prisoners.
Dunlop had a false bottom in his operating table, where he could hide things like Chalker's medical drawings and Parkin's collection of artworks & papers.
Sir Laurens van der Post recommended them to the Hogarth Press in London, and these were published as Out of the Smoke (1960) Into the Smother (1963), and The Sword and the Blossom (1968).
It won the Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction and the NSW Book of the Year in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for 1999.
[1] Parkin thought himself a little out of place at the awards ceremony, as he put it, "It was funny, though, this doddering old bloke who used to work on the wharves–what did I have in common with the intellectual literary crowd?".