Guy Hendricks's Sketchbook

Guy Hendricks's Sketchbook is a record of the prisoner-of-war camps and a keepsake Dorrigo Evans carried in hiding for the rest of the war. Made by Guy Hendricks, a prisoner of war who died on the Death Railway, it later prompted Dorrigo to write a foreword for a book of Hendricks's sketches and illustrations. The object thus joins a public effort to explain the railway to Dorrigo's private, unresolved struggle to remember its dead.

Creation and Preservation

Hendricks made sketches and illustrations of the prisoner-of-war camps before dying on the Death Railway. Dorrigo kept Hendricks's Sketchbook hidden and carried it for the remainder of the war. Its survival gave Dorrigo a material link to its maker and to the camps, even as his later attempt to write about them showed that preserving an object was not the same as recovering everything it held in memory.

The Foreword

Years later, Dorrigo was asked to write a foreword for a book of Hendricks's illustrations. The task had remained unfinished for several months and was considerably overdue, so Dorrigo arranged three uninterrupted hours with his secretary in order to complete it. He regarded the foreword as an attempt to explain the Death Railway, but also as another failed attempt to understand what the experience meant.

In his draft, Dorrigo described Hendricks and outlined the day he died, including the story of Darky Gardiner. Yet he left out what he considered the day's most important detail: one name he could not write. The omission marks the limit of the foreword as a memorial. It could gather events and names on the page, but could not give form to the particular loss that remained beyond Dorrigo's words.

Memory and Its Limits

Dorrigo wrote the foreword in his customary green ink, hoping that something readable—and some felt truth—might exist in the gap between what he dreamed of writing and what he managed to produce. He judged his tone both too obvious and too personal, and felt that the questions unresolved throughout his life had crowded the page without being resolved there. The sketchbook's association with testimony therefore carries an irony: an illustrated record and a carefully prepared introduction cannot make Dorrigo's experience fully intelligible to him.

The object also returns to Dorrigo through his attempt to write about Darky Gardiner's beating. He had not thought of Darky for years until the previous day, when he tried to set down an account of the beating. As Lynette Maison talks about her work and private concerns, Dorrigo's attention moves back to the dirty, shifting sky he remembers from the Speedo. He wants to recall Darky's face, singing, and sly smile, but what comes to mind instead is the sky moving away from the horror. Hendricks's Sketchbook stands at the edge of this failed recovery: it preserves the work of a dead witness, while Dorrigo's effort to write beside it exposes how remembrance can remain incomplete.