Others, like English-born artist Jack Chalker, recorded the horrors of the camps. In March 1944, Parkin was among a group of prisoners selected to be shipped to Japan. He couldn't keep his collection of drawings and diary notes concealed on that trip, so Dunlop offered to look after them for him. 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. Parkin ended up working in an underground coal mine near the Japanese village of Ohama and remained there until the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Post war experience Back in Melbourne and reunited with his wife and children, he went to work as a tally clerk on the wharves. Weary Dunlop had kept his drawings, and Parkin made them into a little volume dedicated to Dunlop. Some of the sketches were printed in Dunlop's published diaries about the camps. Parkin too wrote about his experiences as a prisoner-of-war. His memoirs he wrote in novel form; the character of John (or Jack) is Parkin in all but name. 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). The books were praised for the simple and direct quality of the writing. He continued to work on the Melbourne waterfront till retirement in 1975. 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