The Shark Net: articles


Innocence lost

A new ABC miniseries evokes an Australia that has passed and a case that scandalised a city. Debi Enker reports.

"The kernel of the story is a meditation on guilt," says screenwriter Ian David. "It stains the story, it's like spilt tea over the page." The writer of Blue Murder, the landmark 1995 series about police corruption and Sydney's criminal underworld, is discussing his latest work, a three-part, $5 million drama based on Robert Drewe's celebrated memoir, The Shark Net.

David has created all sorts of crime stories for television, from last year's deadpan comedy, Bad Cop, Bad Cop, to the docudramas of Police State (1989) and Joh's Jury (1993). But for this production, he was called upon by West Australian producer Sue Taylor to adapt Drewe's evocative reflection on growing up in Perth in the 1950s and early '60s.

Spanning 14 years, from the Drewe family's move west, when Robert was six, to his return to Melbourne as an adult with his wife and young son, the novel is imbued with a striking sense of time and place. Perth emerges from the book as a sun-burned city of sand and surf, a white, middle-class enclave presenting itself as a bastion of upstanding family values. But beneath the orderly facade, and the imperative of keeping up appearances, Drewe suggests simmering fears and frustrations, and all manner of lurking threats and dangers: sharks, lions, polio, "boiling brain" disease, and a killer on the loose.

Amid the rites-of-passage tale of a watchful boy moving to manhood, struggling to negotiate his way and dealing with guilt about disappointing his parents, The Shark Net reflects on a bygone era in the suburbs: white-bread days of beer and guilt-free cigarettes, Anglo precincts where uninvited visitors, like Argentinian ants or sparrows, were forcefully expunged.

Drewe's memoir entwines the tale of his family with the true-crime story of multiple murderer Eric Edgar Cooke. It is thought that Cooke committed 20 murders and attempted murders between 1948 and 1963. When he was eventually captured and brought to trial, many people in Perth found that his life had touched their own. Drewe's connection came initially as Cooke worked as a delivery man for Dunlop, the rubber-goods company for which his father, Roy, was a proud senior executive. In David's case, Cooke, who had a reputation as a charmer despite his cleft palate and harelip, once tried to chat up a friend of his mother's in a bowling alley.

Born in Perth, Ian David was in one sense on familiar turf as he shaped his script. He knew the landscape, although he and Drewe had lived on different sides of the tracks, Drewe in the affluent areas of Dalkeith, Peppermint Grove and Nedlands, David in the more working-class suburbs of Scarborough and Innaloo.

But still, the tales of blue skies, pounding surf and "sand people" resonated with David, as did the fascination with the serial killer who stalked the city. Yet even with that connection, the adaptation of The Shark Net was a challenge: it wasn't an easy work to translate from page to screen.

"The thing I like about Robert Drewe's writing is that he never really gives you an easy journey," observes David. "He lets you go back and ruminate and reflect a lot, and that's powerful. He knows what he's trying to do but he doesn't want to give it to you too easily; you find that there are six or seven wrappers on the lolly before you get to it. All of his books are like that."

In this one, though, there's also a pensive protagonist through whose eyes all events are filtered, and while this can make for a riveting read, it can be problematic for television.

"He's probably the hardest character that I've ever had to deal with in a dramatic sense because writers essentially are introspective people, the sorts of characters who will go to a party and sit in the corner and watch," says David. "He's no Indiana Jones: he's not going to go in and change things through action. He's going to change them by thinking about them, storing them up and converting it into his work. It's always easier to have characters like cowboys, people jumping off horses and shooting. Essentially, the book is an internal view of his thoughts and his feelings, and he's a fairly passive character. He doesn't initiate action a lot."

In terms of creating the impression of a thoughtful teenager and young man wrestling with his demons, David praises Tim Draxl, who plays Drewe from ages 15 to 21. "I think that Tim did a really good job of evoking what it is to be passive but a voracious thinker."

For Draxl, an accomplished jazz and cabaret performer who was tackling his first lead role as an actor, the surface passivity made the character more interesting to play. "A lot of characters that are written nowadays are very explosive and in-your-face," says Draxl. "It was nice to play something that was subtle and understated.

"He's quite unemotional. Robert says that himself, that all through his childhood and his early adult life, he felt very detached. He was never someone who showed his emotions in public. There are a few instances in the miniseries where he does buckle a bit, not in any melodramatic way. It's done very sensitively and in a minimalist way, but there are times when you do see that build-up of pressure slowly creeping to the surface."

In addition to contending with a quiet character at the heart of a drama, and trying to make that character seem substantial, both Draxl and David had to deal with the fact that this was a true story, that Drewe wasn't a fictitious creation who could be contorted to fit the needs of the narrative.

For Draxl, it's the second time he's played a real person: he appeared as John Fingleton in Swimming Upstream. But the 21-year-old says that, "For me, it's a character and it's no different from playing a fictional character.

"When I started working on the project, the producer asked me if I wanted to meet with Drewe. I'd just done two weeks of rehearsals and I'd started my character development. I'd pretty much pinpointed everything that I wanted to portray and all the characteristics that I wanted to get through and I thought that meeting him might unsettle that and make me change my mind, that those weeks would become pointless because I would've wanted to undo everything. So I didn't meet Robert until about two-thirds of the way through shooting. Once I'd settled into the role and I felt comfortable, then it was fine and I didn't feel intimidated or influenced by his presence."

For Ian David, dealing with Drewe produced different decisions. "I think that the most frustrating and fascinating thing about doing an adaptation, particularly when it's an adaptation of someone's life, is that you weren't there. You don't know if his mum was called by a particular nickname at a certain time, you don't know if the flavour of it is quite right. So all you've got to work on is the book, and if you're lucky you can talk to the writer.

"Robert and I had a couple of conversations about this and ultimately I had to defer, because his view of the world at that time is the one that must prevail. My recollections were like filling in the colours on tracing paper, but the picture that has to emerge is his view of the world. If it doesn't, then it's dishonest."

A key point where David and Drewe diverged was in their perspectives on Eric Cooke. "I was nine or 10 when Cooke was rampaging through Perth and Robert was working as a journalist by then," David recalls. "I remember quite clearly having dinner with my family and my uncle saying, 'Look, there's no worries, he won't come here. He doesn't come over to the working-class areas'. My uncle meant that the killer targeted places like the Double Bays or the Tooraks.

"Robert reacted really strongly against that: he said Cooke travelled everywhere. But I remember that there was a feeling in Perth at the time that he targeted those blueblood areas, and I wanted more of that, the sense that the upper classes were being stalked and punished. But that was an element that Robert didn't really want because he didn't see it that way: he didn't believe that there was a class issue."

One area where the author and the adaptor clearly concurred was in the depiction of the killer as a person, and a product of his upbringing, and not as some unknowable incarnation of evil. "It's a testament to Drewe's book and Ian David's adaptation that that's what it strives to do," says Daniel Wyllie, who creates a chilling portrait of Cooke in the miniseries. "The circumstances of Cooke's life are absolutely horrible and I guess that it's a reflection of Robert Drewe's character that that's what he saw."

Wyllie (Bad Cop, Bad Cop) says that he built his character from " a couple of photos of Cooke and a five-minute recording from a court interview where you could really hear the speech impediment". He also met Cooke's wife, Sally, during the rehearsal period in Perth. "The rest," he says, "you just make up." He sees Cooke as "someone completely outside of normal society and driven by a desire to fit in, a desire for some kind of power and position".

In the miniseries he's seen as someone who's both of the city and preying upon it. By night he exists in the shadows, a menacing presence on the dark periphery; by day he's deceptively benign. "It's good to do something that attacks a character from different angles," says Wyllie. "It's nice to be able to do the baddie with that edge, or do a goodie with a darker edge. It's in the same light that Robert Drewe paints the picture of his parents. It's really honest and well-rounded and it captures the time in their conservatism and their reactions."

Ian David says that what Shark Net captures so precisely is a time that's past. "It's poignant because I think that that family and the way that they interacted is something that's gone. The Drewe family represented values of morality and ethics and attitudes about how you could and you couldn't behave that were destined to go because they simply couldn't exist in the way that Australia was moving.

"Multiculturalism was never part of my family and didn't seem to be part of Robert's. Multiculturalism has changed Australia. The food changed, the housing styles changed. We've become a lot more complex and a lot faster and ethics and morality have become a lot less anal. There was a kind of constipation about the way that people thought about relationships then, and I don't think that it was particularly healthy.

"Looking at The Shark Net, you'd think that there's a kind of dishonesty about the way people act. There's certainly a hypocrisy within that family that's quite apparent all the way through the story. And there's a great sense of relief when Robert decides he's going to leave, to get on the train and go. You know that life's going to be healthier for him."

There are moments of levity, like Robert's mother, Dorothy (Angie Milliken), leaping with amazing grace from the high-diving board at the local pool, or cart-wheeling at the beach, in a throwback to the vivacity of her younger years. But there's not a lot of warmth in the Drewe household, which is presided over by Roy (William McInnes), a hubristic company man who will declare without a hint of embarrassment that he told his prospective wife when they were courting that she'd always come second in his devotions to the business that employed him.

"When people see that scene, where Roy says that she's Mrs Dunlop, I expect women all around Australia to be throwing things at the television," says Ian David. "Robert's dad came out of that quite English tradition: man is in his castle and everyone should listen to him when he speaks. There's very little tolerance, very little flexibility in him. He's not a particularly fluid thinker and he doesn't like being surprised. For Roy, life is a ladder: you just go straight up it. And if you can't get straight up it, then you're a failure."

As much as it is a meditation on guilt and a reflection on a place and a period, Shark Net is also very much a story of fathers and sons, with its view of Eric Cooke's murderous inclinations taking root as a result of his childhood with an abusive, alcoholic father and Robert's personality being forged by what he experienced in his own household. Fittingly, the final line of the miniseries, delivered by the protagonist as he moves away from Perth with his own young family, finds him mulling over questions of guilt, anger and the legacies that fathers bequeath to their sons.

The Shark Net premieres on Sunday at 8.30pm on the ABC.

By Debi Enker
August 07, 2003
The Age