Ray Parkin - H.M. Bark Endeavour

H.M. Bark Endeavour

In 1967, Parkin started researching James Cook's voyage to Australia aboard HM Bark Endeavour. He was first inspired by an inaccurate picture of the ship when searching for a representation on which to base a Christmas card. Over the years he discovered and dispelled several misconceptions built up about Cook, his crew, and the ship, including rehabilitating the reputation of Sydney Parkinson's drawings of the ship.

Parkinson was a draftsman on the voyage and his sketches are the only surviving contemporaneous drawings of the ship, but the received wisdom among historians was that Parkinson had taken artistic license, since the drawings seemed inexact and differed from Admiralty plans. Parkin's detailed knowledge of the ship and seafaring showed that what had been thought just squiggles were actual equipment on the ship, and where the sketches and the plans differed it was almost certainly from variations during building (it being fairly common at the time for shipwrights to have some freedom).

Parkin's neighbour, history professor Max Crawford, encouraged Parkin to publish. The research took 13 years, and it then took a further 17 years to find a publisher. In the end John Clarke (best known as a satirist) showed it to publisher Mark Kelly, who in turn recommended it to the speciality academic imprint The Miegunyah Press at the Melbourne University Press.

The result was H. M. Bark Endeavour published in two volumes in 1997. 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. 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?"

In 2003, Parkin's three wartime memoirs were republished in paperback by Melbourne University Publishing.

A biography of Parkin, Ray Parkin's Odyssey, was written by Pattie Wright in 2012.