Why was Eric Edgar Cooke such an important part of Robert Drewe’s story about growing up in Perth? Discuss.
Robert Drewe’s memoir is of a typical life shadowed by unforeseen events and indiscriminate tragedy. From the very outset, the quotation from Bing Crosby sets the mood: “Where the blue of the night/Meets the gold of the day/Someone waits for me”. What the young, impressionable Drewe learns growing up in Perth during the 1950s and early 1960s-the periods in which the notorious ‘Nedlands Monster’ stalked the suburbs is that life has one certainty-and that certainty is that there is ‘someone or something’ out there waiting to surprise us with the delights of the flesh or the carnage of sudden senseless death and murder. That ‘shark’ was Cooke, who brushed up against Robert amidst the personal dramas of Drewe and his family. These events are inevitably coloured by the incomprehensible violence being wreaked at this time in the community by Cooke.
From the memoir’s very outset, a picture is drawn of a fairly average middle-class family living according to the norms of 1950s Australia. However on the fringes of Perth’s apparently cosy, safe, close-knit city lurks a cold-blooded killer who randomly strikes over the next four years, viciously killing eight people. Bit by bit Drewe, his family and the killer become entwined through a series of connections. One of the victims is John Sturkey, a friend of Drewe’s; Drewe’s mother makes a late-night sighting of a peeping Tom and the killer himself turns out to be a former Dunlop employee who had paid monthly visits to the Drewe home in the course of his duties as a delivery man. This association would haunt Drewe later “felt like [he] was in the eye of the storm” as he drove away from the court where he had watched and reported on the proceedings of Eric’s committal. As Robert had struggled to resist a fellow feeling for the killer of his friend John Sturkey, Eric winked at him. This may well have been the complicit moment when he conceived the idea of creating the character of Eric as a dark alter ego because the storm Robert was trying to weather, was a storm of guilt over his own mother’s death.
Drewe’s feelings of guilt appear to have led him to identify with the killer, as the personal dramas of Drewe bite deeper into his young life. Robert felt like a murderer himself because he feared that Dorothy Drewe’s fatal stroke had been caused by stress arising from his rash marriage to Ruth and the birth of their infant son James. This guilt was exacerbated by Dr. Synott’s cold-blooded estimation that there was a ‘sixty-forty chance’ that this was the case. As a cub reporter for the West Australian, always alert for a front page story, but also trying to escape his own guilt brought about by his upbringing, Drewe muses on his “taste for the macabre” as he “liked the feeling” of being face to face with the murderer who had had such a profound impact on his childhood.
Through the ‘Shark Net’, Drewe criticises the hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness and the ways in which people were stifled under the weight of community opinion during the 1950s. His mother’s vitriolic reaction to his girlfriend Ruth’s pregnancy coupled with his father’s apathy were a particularly painful instance of how severely breaches of conventional morality were judged, and how they were not easily, if at all, forgiven. Certain parallels can be made with Eric’s story about his physically and mentally abusive father. Even so, Eric still visited his father who hated him every father’s day, possibly in a pathetic vain attempt to gain acceptance. Robert seems to empathise more with Eric than he does with his victims because of the parallels between himself and the killer. To a lesser extent Royce Drewe was an unloving father and partly responsible for the sexual repression in the household, which to an extent may have led to Robert’s girlfriend’s pregnancy. Thus Drewe’s portrait of a monster is attributed to a lifetime of feeling disgruntled and outcast, and it is through the parallels between Cooke that Drewe can recognise the same insecurities in himself and others.
Cooke, at the novel’s denouement becomes a sort of alter-ego for Drewe, the monster-within. Drewe’s memoir is framed by the accounts of Cooke’s committal and the trial and soon the parallel is undeniable. There is however, profound seriousness sand deep humanity in the portrayal of his parents, of his own agony, of Eric and of many characters and Drewe’s memoir becomes a means of confronting the past in order to gain release from its tyranny.
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