Kenneth Cook wrote twenty books, but his reputation still rests on"Wake in Fright", his first published novel. On its strength he could give up his work as a rural journalist, reporting on everything from Country Women’s Association meetings to sheep sales, and devote himself to fiction full-time. He died in 1987.
If he’s remembered at all today it is because of that book, a bleak, frankly horrific depiction of the rampant, unthinking savagery of the white man let loose in the outback, a book that turns the traditional Australian bush tale on its head. In 1968 it came out as a movie, directed by the Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, a film so violent it was almost too difficult to watch.
Ken was a member of a passing generation of writers. He prized above all the narrative art, the ability to turn out a story and turn it out well. He was contemptuous of language deployed for its own sake, the language of, say, Patrick White, whose influence on younger writers was at its peak at the time.
Typically, "Wake in Fright" never made him much. After its publication he kept afloat by repeatedly selling the film rights until the book found the producer who actually went ahead with the film. But he said he was diddled grandly by another Australian writer — Morris West — who refused to write an endorsement for the cover of the American edition but then took up the film option and reaped the profits for himself.
This film was lost for almost 40 years. Then, in 2002, a negative was found in a shipping container in Pittsburgh labelled "For Destruction". It was painstakingly restored frame by frame and re-released in 2009.
Ken's second wife, Jacqueline Kent, wrote "Beyond Words: A Year with Kenneth Cook" which I'm unlikely to find in an op-shop, so I might as well lash out and buy it on ebay.
For those of you who haven't seen the movie yet, here's a trailer:
Brutal, uncompromising and stunning, "Wake in Fright" tells the story of a young teacher, John Grant, who arrives in a rough outback mining town planning to stay overnight before catching the plane to Sydney. But, on this one hot night in Bundanyabba, Grant decides to go into a smoky, crowded pub.
One night stretches to five, in which he discovers gambling, ruins himself financially and plunges headlong toward his own destruction. When the alcohol-induced mist lifts, the educated John Grant is no more. Instead there is a self-loathing man in a desolate wasteland, dirty, red-eyed, sitting against a tree and looking at a rifle with one bullet left.
There is no Australian film quite like "Wake in Fright".
