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Robert Drewe (photo by Lorrie Graham for <b>The Bulletin</b>)
Robert Drewe (photo by Lorrie Graham for The Bulletin)

The Shark Net

(DVD NOW AVAILABLE)

The Bulletin

by Maxine McKew (August 12th, 2003)

A voyage around the writer's dad and mum - and an exquisite slice of 1950s Australia under that nice Mr Menzies.

WHEN LIFE SEEMED TO be genuinely relaxed and comfortable, back in the 1950s, Robert Drewe's father Roy was given to wondering out loud, in front of the family's very new HMV telly: "Why would anyone bother watching anything Australian?" Not an unusual view for the time but those of us who've been hungering for a decent bit of home-grown television drama can only be grateful that Drewe's cultural inheritance didn't swing on his dad's tastes.

I don't know about you but I feel it's high time that my Sunday night viewing was rescued from the world of British buggery, establishment dishonesty and peculiar monarchical family practices. Cambridge Spies and The Lost Prince have been diverting enough but a reconnection with something a little closer to home is way overdue. So, thanks to those outrageous elites in the drama department at the ABC, and a partnership with Optus and ScreenWest, the next three Sunday nights will be given over to a recreation of Robert Drewe's childhood memoir, The Shark Net.

Drewe tells me that from the time the book was published "there was a fair bit of interest. The book seemed to hit a nerve, so people were sniffing around. Originally I was thinking of it as a 90-minute feature film but, when the producer Sue Taylor got interested, she persuaded me that a lot of the quirky family domesticity would be lost in a feature."

My advice is to book the sofa and claim the remote now because you won't want to miss this. It's a beauty. Drewe has done for post-war suburban Australia what George Johnston did for the country's inter-was years in My Brother Jack.

In the world of The Shark Net, the sun shines on a thousand Victa-mown lawns and kids tear around the neighbourhood in bare feet as that nice Mr Menzies looks after everyone from afar. For Drewe and his family, it was "afar" - the family's migration from Mellbourne to isolated Perth was the seminal event that sealed the family fortunes. Roy Drewe's appointment as assistant state manager for Dunlop gave the entire family its definitional centre. Drewe's mother was constantly told by her husband: "Dorothy, Dunlop comes first." Even the family budgie was trained to repeat the company slogan, "Today, you'll use a Dunlop product". A bright, athletic woman, it seems even the devoted Dorothy had her moments of quiet rebellion.

The Shark Net crackles with such authentic recognition that across the land baby boomers will either weep or yelp at the sight of the Drewes' command-and-control family, where dad pronounces on everything but goes through life under-standing very little. It's funny and poignant. Drewe's talent is to paint the big picture but at the same time to remember the minutiae that gave the time its texture. There are some great touches. Watch for the always-overflowing Dunlop tyre ashtrays and you'll wonder, probably not for the first time, how any of us grew up free of smoke-related cancers.

Drewe, I note, is a nicotine-free individual and has the healthy glow of someone who spends what spare time he has kayaking on the waters of the NSW Central Coast. Today he has travelled down to Sydney by train and is more than up to a decent lunch at Iceberg, courtesy of his old employer The Bulletin. Before he settled on what he'd do as a grown-up, he worked in the 1970's with Trevor Kennedy, Bob Carr, Malcolm Turnbull and others, and if he doesn't pine for the assignments, he does occasionally "long for the banter and the gossip and the fun. Journalism is as much of a club as the law or anything else. Once you're out of it, there's a gap for a while."

Drewe began his professional life as a young cadet on The West Australian and quickly found himself covering the story that galvanised Perth in the late 1950s and early 1960s: the estimated 20 murders or attempted murders committed by Eric Edgar Cooke, who terrorised the city's affluent suburbs and eluded police capture for years. He was eventually caught after a series of brutal attacks on Australia Day 1963 and was the second-last man to be hanged in Australia.

Geraldine Doogue, one of many celebrated sandgropers, still talks about this period as a time when children lived with real demonic fears, not imagined ones. "I'd get mum to check and recheck the locks on the doors every night," she has told me. This in a city that in the sweltering summer favoured the ever-banging flywire door and wide-open windows.

Alert and alarmed doesn't begin to describe it. With Cooke there was no pattern. As Drewe recalls it: "Cooke's victims were male and female, young and old, and he stabbed, shot, hit with blunt instrument, or ran over people with cars. The only thing he didn't do poison or push someone over a cliff. And for years, the police investigation was block-headed. They had no idea what they were dealing with."

For Drewe, apart from his coverage of the story, there were bizarre and tragic connections. "He killed one of my friends, one of the implements he used was stolen from another friend and, at one point, my father had actually employed Cooke. If you tried to put all this into a piece of fiction, people would say, 'Come on'. But real life does throw up all these coincidences."

The courtroom scenes in The Shark Net have an eerie sense of time and place. Drewe, sitting with his note-book not far from Cooke, would sneak looks at the accused and wonder about the evil inside the wretchedly damaged defendant. The dehumanising process seems to have started with Cooke's father, who christened his hare-lipped son 'bird mouth'. There was the added therapy of constant beatings. Always an outsider, Cooke moved from petty theft to serial murder. Once caught, he confessed to everything and told the court that the shootings "were done under the influence of a power that made him feel he was God". Again and again, Drewe considered the contrasts that no writer could invent. "The judge who heard the case was Mr Justice Virtue. So you had Virtue on the bench and evil in the dock."

Drewe says he carried the memories of all this around for years. "It was on my mind, one way and another, for 30 years. I finally got going because other writers were moving in on it." Cloudstreet fans will recall Tim Winton's incidental reference to the Cooke story.

But what makes The Shark Net such a singular effort is Drewe's marriage of the ordinary and the positively gothic. In the heart of a Perth summer, as the morning paper hits the front lawn of a house that looks the very model of modernity and order, extreme violence is only a headline away. At the same time, the secure world that's designed to protect you, dad in his suit and mum in her apron, starts to crack in unpredictable ways. The net is constantly moving. Nothing is certain.

From the time he began devouring the best of American post-war literature (Saul Bellow, John Cheever, John Updike), Drewe knew what his own material would be. Just as importantly, he knew what he wanted to avoid. He says he was bewildered by a national literature that seemed to concentrate "on dusty bowyangs and all that pretend bunyip stuff". Drewe wanted to capture mainstream Australianness, and as far as he was concerned that meant giving a wide berth to romanticised fiction about bush-centred eccentrics.

"I'm interested in mid-century man. That has meant looking at the way we actually live. Most of us are middle class and live near the coast. But when I was growing up, Australian literature only really dealt with the margins, as if it was a fine egalitarian thing to only write about drovers or working people in Surry Hills."

So Drewe focused on what he calls "that whole generation of men who voted for Mr Mezies, who went to work every day, who didn't take holidays when they were due, who'd drive hours on Christmas Day just to get a fan belt to a dealer in Albany, things that head office never knew about. They spent their lives working for the great good of the company."

Men such as Roy Drewe (wonderfully played in the TV series by William McInnes), who had status and respect but who never quite made it to the very top. Always the branch manager, never CEO. It bred a particular kind of resentment. As Drewe says sadly: "It all went sour for them when the era of takeovers hit because it represented everything that was wrong with their lives."

It's a timely corrective to the asinine view that if only we could return to the seeming golden era of 1950s family and employment security, then all would be well. The Shark Net reminds us that, while dad didn't leave mum, it was immaterial. "I'm at pains to point out that my father in no way stood out from other fathers at the time. They were just never there for your sports day or to push you on a swing."

So did you ever have a late-life conversation about this? Drewe pushes his fish around and looks out onto a blue-as-blue Pacific. "Before he died, I went to a pub with him. It was one of those big awful drinking barns with lots of noise. He'd also invited one of his old air force mates along. I could almost see that he was trying to get at something but we ended up just sitting there in a semi-confused state." Wasn't he proud of his son, the celebrated author? "He never told me. I only every found out he was from [another sandgroper] Mike Willesee. At one stage, they ended up in a pub together and apparently he bored Willesee shitless about what I was doing."

Writing about it is one thing but Drewe (a youthful 60-something) will be for ever fixed in the minds of viewers as the cherubic Tim Draxl, who plays him as an adolescent. He's already anticipating a different response when he walks into his local newsagent and deli but at least he's over his initial shock. "After I had the first viewing, I walked around for a week feeling 18 all over again. There are parts of the series that are nothing like my life but, where they are, they're excruciatingly embarrassing. I feel young and stupid again."

What I haven't told you about is the extraordinary change that transforms Drewe's mother Dorothy: her over-the-top reaction when her son confronts her with news that doesn't fit the life plan she has mapped out for her first-born. "Almost unbearable to watch," Drewe says. Not for the rest of us. Tune in to Dickie Alston's favourite network and you'll see an ABC with a shocking bias for showing us who we are.

The Shark Net premiered on ABCV-TV on Sunday, August 10, 2003 at 8.30pm.