Four Australians have been nominated for this evening’s Oscars – Rose Byrne for best actress, Jacob Elordi for best supporting actor, Nick Cave for best original song, and Fiona Crombie for best production design. Australians have always punched above their weight, over the years winning more than 60 Academy Awards from over 200 nominations.
Hardly anyone nowadays remembers the first Australian to take home an Oscar – Damien Parer, a cameraman who won the best documentary award in 1943 for the nine-minute Cinesound newsreel Kokoda Front Line! But arguably he was the most fascinating, and certainly the most inspiring of them all.
In 1942, it was impossible to predict which way the war would go. In New Guinea, Parer filmed the Diggers slogging their way along the Kokoda Track, up steep and muddy jungle slopes, exhausted and hungry, fighting an unseen enemy. Sometimes he perched with his heavy 35mm camera in trees.
Kokoda Front Line! is just a brief film, only nine minutes, but its message is visceral – Australia is in peril and only a few miles away our boys are dying for you! Parer, dressed for once in a perfectly turned out Army uniform, speaks to the camera.
“Don’t underestimate the Jap,” he says. “He’s a highly trained soldier, well-disciplined and brave, and although he’s had some success up to the present, he’s now got against him some of the finest and toughest troops in the world. Troops with a spirit amongst them that makes you intensely proud to be an Australian.”
The images that Parer captured have become iconic images of mateship in the Australian imagination – Papuan porters carrying the wounded through mud and across streams, Diggers sharing their meals, soldiers snaking in single file along muddy tracks up through the mists of the Owen Stanley range. In one brief sequence, framed like a Renaissance painting of Christ taken down from the Cross, a Salvation Army chaplain lights a cigarette for a wounded soldier.
After a lifetime of watching World War II movies, you might find something different about Parer’s images. They focus not on gore and horror but on mateship and solidarity. We’ve become used to spatter realism of Hollywood films – but there was no CGI in Parer’s film. He took his camera to the front line with bullets whizzing by him, mortars bursting next to him. His colleagues loved him but thought that he was mad in his reckless bravery.
Journalist John Hetherington wrote a memoir of Parer in his 1960 book Nine Australians. He said that Parer worked on the theory that “a battle could be effectively filmed only by a cameraman who had placed himself ahead of the infantry, so that they advanced into his lens.”
But amazingly, Hetherington, who was not a believer himself, believed that Parer was “a great, instead of merely a brilliantly effective, cameraman” because of “his unwavering devotion to the Roman Catholic faith”.
Parer was born in 1912 in Melbourne, the son of a Spanish migrant and an Australian mother. He went to school to St Stanislaus College in Bathurst and to St Kevin’s College in Melbourne. He was passionate about cinema and gradually worked his way into the budding Australian film industry. He worked with the legendary director Charles Chauvel on a number of films, including Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940), about the charge of the Australian Light Horse in World War I, which was filmed on the sand dunes of Kurnell, in Sydney.
When war came, he was a cameraman for the Commonwealth Department of Information, which sent him to the Middle East. He filmed in Libya, including the siege of Tobruk, Greece, and Syria. When war in the Pacific began, Parer rushed back to Australia. He filmed Kanga Force around Wau and Salamaua, New Guinea, and in 1942, he covered the Australian withdrawal along the Kokoda Track.
His dedication to his craft was extraordinary. To film the battle of the Bismarck Sea, he sat in the well of a Beaufighter aircraft. Every time the plane flew up over the Owen Stanley range, he passed out because he had no oxygen and revived only when the plane came closer to the ground. “It was a hell of an awkward way to get pictures,” he wrote.
Hetherington describes Parer as a joyous, exuberant man, who loved the thrill of gambling and the conviviality of drinking with his mates. He made friends easily with his booming laugh. His entry in Who’s Who in Australia listed his recreation as “talking to cobbers”.
“Parer had seen more real action than probably any other war correspondent,” wrote Osmar White, an Australian war correspondent who worked with him. “He was young, tough, keen and unshakably courageous. The more I saw of the man, the more I liked and admired him. He was long, stooped, blackheaded, sallow-faced, smiling. He had great piston-legs covered by a fuzz of black hair and ending in size twelve feet that looked as if they could crush the skull of a python. No one, however, could remain within earshot of the bubbling bass hoot that served him for a laugh without wanting to laugh too.”
Parer was a meticulous craftsman, completely dedicated to his art.
“The minute care he gave to such tasks as checking the calibration and focus of each lens, to the making of speed tests, to the servicing of each piece of photographic mechanism astonished the onlookers,” Hetherington recalled. “To Parer, such preparation was routine; to the others, it was a revelation of a master cameraman’s methods.”
He was more than a technician, though. His faith imbued everything he did. He did his best to attend daily Mass and had a great devotion to saying the Rosary. According to a biographer, one of his diary entries reads: “I had a feeling I might cop it today and repeated my trust in Our Lady’s protection; not only from death, but if I was to die to do it well.”
One of his close friends, the writer and producer Ron Maslyn Williams, said: “’When Damien did all that scrupulous work on his cameras, preparing them as a priest might the chalice, he wasn’t doing it for himself, but for God. His faith was limitless.”
Eventually Parer resigned from the Australian Department of Information because they wanted him to do routine work far from the front line. He joined an American production company, Paramount Films, to cover Americans in combat in the Pacific. However, before leaving he married 22-year-old Elizabeth Marie Cotter at St Mary’s Church, North Sydney, on 23 March 1944.
His last assignment with Paramount was to accompany US Marines invading Peleliu Island in the Palau group.
On 17 September 1944 he went to Mass and received Holy Communion. Then he accompanied American tanks rumbling through the jungle. Characteristically, Parer was walking beside the first tank. “A machine-gun opened fire from a Japanese pillbox, at about twenty yards’ range,” wrote Hetherington. “The bullets ripped through Parer’s chest, and he died at once.”
He was 32 years old.
Six months later his wife gave birth to their son Damien Robert. The younger Damien became a film and TV producer.
Such was the meteoric career of Australia’s first Oscar winner – professional, pious, patriotic, and mad as a cut snake. In short, a man, an Aussie for the ages.
